With over $240 Billion in revenue and 95 million Prime Users alone in the United States, Amazon is undoubtedly the leading e-commerce platform. Amazon’s success can be attributed to innovation, customer service, diversification, and execution. Started as a book store, today Amazon sells anything and everything.
Do you want to build an E-commerce marketplace or a standalone online store and reach millions of people? Do you aspire to start one of the top e-commerce companies in the world? Starting an e-commerce business is easy now; multiple shop builders offer free assistance, but creating a brand that everyone loves continues to be tough.
How will these growth hacks help e-commerce businesses?
E-commerce platforms can grow by implementing these growth hacks. Following are the results you can expect after implementing these hacks:
- Increased number of customers and order value.
- Improved customer experience
- Increased re-purchases
- Improved brand reputation
- A strong community of loyal customers
- Controlled cart abandonment rate
- Enhanced social sharing and online presence
E-commerce Growth Hacks to Help you grow Like Amazon
Use Ad-extensions to Increase Targeted Clicks
Facebook and Google Ads are perhaps the best and cheapest way out there to generate quality traffic for a nascent e-commerce platform. However, while Facebook ads need to be creative, appealing, and relevant, Google Ads are technical and need an expert for execution.
Google Ads experts have failed to help online stores receive traffic that converts. Instead, these experts failed simply because the competitor’s ads were specific and detailed.
Ask your Google Ads expert to start using ad extensions to increase traffic from the targeted audience. By using ad extensions, businesses can include the following in their ads and grab more attention:
- Third party-review of products to help customers make better decisions
- Call extension to help customers get in touch with you faster
- Callout extensions to help customers discover additional benefits you are offering like “Additional Cashback” and “instant refund.”
Make your Brand Visible with Your Best Selling Products
Many entrepreneurs shut shops after early success because they failed to scale it. Although scaling is tough and requires many resources, businesses can rely on their best-selling products to garner some traction.
Best-selling products are low-hanging fruits, and you must market them well to get noticed and acquire additional customers.
Here’s how to use best-selling products for growing exponentially:
Step 1: Discover your best-selling products by traversing your analytic and sales report
Step 2: Improve the product page. Add content if required, add video, and allow users to leave reviews.
Step 3: Create a landing page. Ensure the landing page have the following:
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- Intriguing headline
- High-quality images of your product
- Product description supported by videos
- Call to Action that generates a Fear of Missing Out
Step 4: Once the landing page is ready, it is time to promote it through varied channels
Step 5: While Facebook and Google Ads are necessary, you must push these products through Push Notifications and Email Newsletter.
Step 6: Run ads on Facebook and Instagram. Make sure you use the following tips to garner good results:
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- Create an interesting copy. Keep your ad copy short, on point, and must include CTA.
- Use Facebook’s drive traffic to the website marketing campaign. Include a link to the landing page.
- Target audience relevant to your product. Narrow down on age, location, and interests
- Use in-depth targeting like “show ads to iPhone users,” “show ads to users on Wi-Fi,” and “show ads to people with upcoming birthdays” to position your product well.
Use “Product Reviews” As a Growth Hack
A study by Spiegel found “businesses can increase conversions by 270% just by displaying product reviews”. So tell us, if this is not an actual growth hack, then what is? The study also discovered “95% of buyers read reviews and compare products before buying products online”.
Get more reviews and see your e-commerce business boom. You can use the following steps to increase genuine reviews on your products:
- Encourage genuine buyers to leave a review by offering a discount on future purchases.
- Allow affiliate marketers to make money out of your product. These bloggers will review your product on their site, blog, and YouTube, which will lead back to your products.
- Share free samples of your products with social-media Influencers. Ask them to use your product and share feedback on your site and social media accounts. This is one of the best ways of acquiring reviews and exposure during the initial days.
Put Your Product Pages through A/B Testing
Nascent businesses need to do A/B Testing because it exposes errors and highlights opportunities. Improving product discovery allows businesses to assist customers in finding what they are looking for. In addition, such suggestive improvements increase conversion, time spent on site, referrals, and cross-selling.
Managing and improving Product Discovery as a part of customer experience can establish businesses as industry leaders. Some of the changes you can make during A/B testing as a part of the hit and trial method are:
- Try replacing old photos with new and multiple high-quality product images
- Try changing the color of your CTA button. Internet is filled with articles like “How changing the color of Add Cart increases conversion?” Refer them to understand the psychology behind color selection
- Adding relevant tags to your product
- Optimizing your category selection based on research and expert input
Play on Customer’s “Fear of Missing Out” Instinct
The Generation X audience connects, interacts, and engages with a brand based on instinct. Amazon has been betting on the “FOMO” instinct of the millennials to drive sales. There “Order now, only a few left in stocks” and “10 other people are looking at the product you viewed, hurry now!” notifications have got Generation X into action.
Newbies should do it, too, when a top player like Amazon can rely on such instinctive CTAs because you have very little to lose and a lot to gain.
Best CTA ideas to invoke Fear of Missing Out
- Add Clearance Sale Tag to your products when offering discounts
- Add a timer denoting time left for the discount to end. Indian E-commerce giant Flipkart uses such a timer to improve conversions.
- “Limited Stock, Order Now.” The Amazon way of generating curiosity and driving sales.
Note: Such usage of CTAs has helped businesses garner good results, but companies cannot inspire users to shop by putting such CTAs on every product. Businesses must be using these CTAs smartly during the sales and festival season.
Simplify the Checkout Process
E-commerce businesses lose money when the cart abandonment rate increases. It takes a lot of advertising budget and resources to create an immaculate catalog, and it all goes waste when customers leave products in the cart.
Some of the reasons why customers leave the product in carts are:
- Hidden Cost: Few e-commerce players promote social media products with clickbait titles and lesser prices. When they add the product to the cart pisses customers, and they leave without making a purchase.
- Shipping Cost: Customers hate paying shipping charges. Today, businesses need to discover how they can get away with these shipping costs. One can either remove shipping costs and take less commission home or arbitrate their advertising budget to offer free shipping.
- Hectic Login: Well! With Amazon, it is possible to log in using your phone number instantly. At the same time, other e-commerce platforms put users through a hectic process of creating an account, where they require an email id and then email verification—simply the process by putting up a login through phone number and verifying customers through one-time passwords.
Use Social-Media Influencers for Positioning your Store
Influencer marketing has opened new doors of opportunities for both businesses and influencers. In Influencer marketing, companies contact influencers from the relevant industry to promote their products among their audience.
Social media influencers with 100K-10 Million followers charge businesses to promote, recommend and review their products. For the fashion industry, influencer marketing works better than any other medium. For example, Amazon India recently collaborated with multiple social media influencers to promote their festive sales.
Conclusion:
Amazon started as a book store, and today it runs a series of businesses like Amazon Web Series, which is the largest system business in the world. Amazon built a successful e-commerce business from scratch with no social media, no online marketing budget, and no growth hack opportunities.
If Amazon did it during the 90s with so few resources, you could make it happen in the 21st century with all the technology and support from industry leaders.
Linda Taylor
Linda Taylor is an experienced business and marketing consultant with MattsenKumar LLC. Linda’s vast exposure in growing B2B SMEs, E-commerce, and improving Customer Experience enables her to create quality content in the form of Articles and Infographics. With a focus on benefiting the masses, Linda creates content that adds value and routes companies towards success.
7 Incredible Growth Hacks for Your eCommerce Business
