Growth hacking is more than a buzzword. It’s a focused method of gearing all of your business strategies towards driving growth and, ultimately, revenue.
If you’re intrigued, read on. Here are ten ways to growth hack Ecommerce that you can try right now.
1. Endorse your business with social proof and trust
There’s comfort in knowing other customers have made the same decision as you, and there are various ways you can incorporate social proof in your business. These include littering your site with customer reviews, including business ratings and testimonials, at different levels of your marketing and sales funnel e.g., in ads and newsletters.
Another way to incorporate social proof is to demonstrate how other people are shopping. Highlighting live purchasing decisions, for instance, indicate the site is active, successful, and useful.
As trust should never be undervalued, trust badges are one way of establishing it, which is a relatively easy and visual method of eliciting confidence. Logos can be inserted easily within site footers or checkout pages and can show, for instance, that your site is secure and customers’ payment details will be safe.
You can reaffirm that trust by assuring your customer that a human is available to address any concerns. Set up a chat service on your site or through Facebook or other social media channels to do this.
2. Find new customers on similar sites
Increasing sales revolves around getting customers. One method businesses are proactively integrating into their marketing strategies is including a regular blog to their website that gives potential customers value through information or industry knowledge, tips, or life hacks. You don’t have to restrict yourself to only writing on your company blog, however. Guest posts are also a highly effective method of attracting customers.
Find a similar brand, not in direct competition but one that offers a complimentary product or service, and write non-promotional guest blogs with your bio or company information in the byline and a link to your site. Google Analytics can help you track which websites send the most traffic back to you.
3. Encourage customers to share the love
You may well have a database of happy customers already, which makes them the perfect audience to tap to share their satisfaction. You can actively encourage consumers to share their experiences on social media through smart and innovative new ways.
For instance, remind them to tell their followers what they’ve purchased at checkout or promise them a discount on their next purchase if they post and mention the brand. Social mention requests are so common many customers are desensitized to them, but there are ways you can still stand out. Beautiful hand-written cards with deliveries, for instance, could encourage customers to snap the card with their purchase and post it on social media.
Products that are less visually appealing but necessary in the relevant industry, like shipping labels or shipping packing supplies, for instance, are likely to be more incentivized through discounts or promo codes for social mentions.
4. A/B Test Everything
There are hundreds of strategies you could employ to grow your business, but not everything will necessarily work. The key is identifying what works and what doesn’t, and A/B testing is how you determine that.
You can A/B test everything, from the size of your photos to social media text, whether to include images in the posts or which promo codes work. Trust badges, color schemes, or using messages and notification such as limited supply warnings can also be tested.
A/B testing should be done methodically, and you can also use tools to set this up.
5. Target incomplete purchases and return custom
You don’t have to confine growth strategies to find new customers; you can also target the audience you’ve already captured.
You can do this by targeting visitors to your site who viewed items without buying or have incomplete purchases. Exit-intent pop-ups are messages that offer a discount before visitors leave the site and can help push through a sale. Re-targeting ads are another method, which tracks customers to other sites and displays ads highlighting items they’re interested in.
According to Incify (a global marketing agency that studies human behaviors online), Google Shopping ads have a higher CTR than Amazon’s Sponsored Product and Sponsored Brand ads.
Then, getting existing customers to buy again can be even more valuable than new customers, as they have already invested some in your brand and are more likely to return. Pushing this behavior through is a growth strategy that should be at the heart of sales and marketing campaigns, including through email marketing and tiered incentives, such as free shipping, promotional codes, and value-added content or gifts.
And an additional hacking tip for you is to use shipping labels compatible with Zebra, Dymo or Avery (the most common type of label printers), you can find affordable choices from enKo Products, their prices are low and they offer free shipping where many other shipping labels providers charges for the shipping (when you order in bulks, beware of the shipping costs)
