To scale your business, as an entrepreneur, you need to know how to market your products and services effectively.
There might be challenges down the road, but growth is possible as long as you use the best growth hacking tactics.
To reach a massive audience, you need to adopt various growth hacking strategies. Although most of these tactics have been there for a few years now, they still play a crucial role in helping a modern-day business scale.
Most entrepreneurs look for various growth hacks and scale quickly by garnering thousands of customers that would eventually help them boost their revenue and sales.
For instance ecommerce email marketing is often used to grow the conversion rates, win back abandoned carts and nurture leads.
What is Growth Hacking?
Before we start, let us first define what growth hacking is. In a nutshell, it is an experiment-driven technique that determines the most effective ways to scale your business.
The process itself is a mix of development, design, marketing, data, analytics, and engineering.
The primary reason why this process is called growth hacking is that when you find a solution or a hack, it is a cost-effective and innovative method to achieve growth instead of following traditional practices.
Who is a Growth Hacker?
A growth hacker is someone creative and original. The primary goal is to implement innovative and creative strategies that would see to it that businesses can get and retain their customers.
Additionally, a growth hacker could utilize a variety of methods to achieve his goals like SEO, email marketing, content marketing, reverse engineering, and viral marketing. Growth hackers could be growth marketers, as well. But take note that growth hackers could never be defined simply as marketers.
A particular formula that growth hackers follow is Growth + Product = Impact.
Powerful Growth Hacking Strategies to Try
To help you reach your full potential, you could leverage the following growth hacking strategies that could help you expand and increase your profits sharply.
Build a brand
Your customers should feel different each time they visit your ecommerce store. If you can accomplish that, then you have a brand.
Remember that e-commerce is not just all about your startup’s name, logo, or design. It is also about the impression you make.
Branding is crucial when it comes to selling products online, and branded products will always tend to sell better than non-branded products.
Not branding your products means that there is absolutely no way for people to distinguish you from the rest of the competition. Not being distinguished means that you lack long-term profitability.
Always be on the lookout for fresh branding ideas. There are lots of companies and startups that are working on building their brand right now. If you could be inspired by their ideas and turn them into your own, the better.
Remember that most consumers do not have relationships with products. Instead, they are loyal to brands. So, it is time to hack growth via branding.
Design a Conversion-Driven Homepage
Your e-commerce site’s homepage is one of the most important parts of your site, so you should design it carefully and wisely.
Apart from that, the message found on your homepage should also detail why customers should want to do business with you.
The design of your homepage should be able to grab your audience’s attention, inform them about the products and services that you offer, and contain the most compelling call-to-action.
Additionally, your home-page should also have the following:
- A compelling and highly powerful marketing message.
- A user-friendly layout and design.
- Highly informative copy.
- Highly relevant and attractive images.
Also, placing pictures of people on the homepage can have a positive impact on your overall conversion rates.
Create More Quality Content
Most ecommerce businesses focus on creating content for their social media accounts.
However, social media only cover a small part of the sales funnel.
More and more businesses are creating content. But that also means that fewer and fewer people would actually get to see your content. So, how do you stand out with the help of content marketing then?
Create more content. But not just any kind of content. You must focus on creating quality content.
What does that mean, exactly?
Well, it simply means that your content has managed to achieve more views than average. For instance, your typical blog post would receive a thousand views. Any content that falls within the 2,000-5,000 bracket falls to what they call “quality” content.
Users also get to decide what type of content is valuable to them. If it is valuable to them, then it means that the content is high-quality. So, study all your top-performing content. What are the elements that made it stand out? Then, apply the things you learned in your new content.
Also, remember that your content should also help you achieve your business goals. Maybe you want to collect more emails or more sales in your online store. Your content should be focused on achieving this goal.
A lot of people fail to realize this, but creating quality content is one of the most powerful e-commerce hacks. People are more likely to pay attention to your brand if you are creating quality content.
Reduce Your Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate
If customers keep adding products to your cart, that means they are interested. But if they refuse to proceed with the purchase, then there might be something wrong.
You have to identify what the problem is and then fix it.
Abandoned carts have always been a major issue with e-commerce stores. So, to reduce your abandoned cart rate, you have to go with a growth hack.
Also, keep in mind that there are three kinds of visitors.
- Water. These people need your product and want to buy from you. Those are the types of people that you need.
- Stone. Web visitors who will never complete an action. They’re the ones who are not quite sure what they want.
- Clay. These are people who want your product. The main difference between them and Water is that they still have unanswered questions. They’re not entirely convinced whether or not they should make a purchase.
Therefore, achieving 100 percent conversion rates is completely impossible because various kinds of buyers visit your store.
Offer Free Shipment
To extend a hand to your customers, what do you need to do? Well, you could consider taking off the shipping charges of your products. Over time, your website traffic will increase, leading to higher conversion rates in your store.
Also, instead of trying to do everything on your own, you could also partner with a reputable order fulfillment services company that will help you streamline the order fulfillment process much more effectively.
Use Exit-Intent Popups
Being an online seller, you’ve probably spent a lot of your waking hours on how to drive more people (and traffic) to your online store. But are you doing your part to catch them before they completely disappear from your site?
The trick here is to use exit-intent popups — these help capture website visitors who try to leave your site without buying anything.
The main goal here is to make them at least change their minds by offering a tempting discount to your products and services or at least try to capture their emails that you could nurture later on in your sales funnel.
Send a “Buy Again” Email
While a lot of businesses are hyped up about getting new customers, your previous customers are as valuable. They are twice as likely to place items in their carts, decrease your bounce rates, and convert twice as much as your regular customers.
A great retention strategy is to send them a “buy again” email 10-15 days after they made a purchase. You could send them another email that would invite them again to make another purchase.
You could also put a link to the product they bought last time, or other links to related products.
Improve Your Website Speed
On a website, speed is everything. The average customer will leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. That’s the main reason why Facebook and Google are both to fixated about speed.
Your website’s speed and its user experience are some of the primary factors that determine your online store’s ability to sell. No one wants to be stuck waiting for a site to load or trying to navigate a poorly designed site.
A/B Test Your Product Pages
One of the most common growth hacks is running A/B tests on your product pages. Through trial and error, you could quickly know what’s growing your business and what’s hurting it.
So, A/B test your product pages because this is where the sales happen. Make a couple of tweaks in the text, design, and images of your pages, then make the necessary adjustments to improve your sales.
Summary
Growth hacking is not easy. It certainly is not easier than conventional methods. But what’s great about it is that it is more effective.
In today’s highly digital landscape, it is one of the best ways to help you rise to the top and succeed. So, do not hesitate to practice these new growth hacking strategies.