Making sure you’re hitting the right notes with your customers is the most important thing you can do. Grabbing the attention, and hopefully loyalty, of new customers is vital to growing your business. They’ll spread the word for you, and your customer base will grow seemingly on its own. However, there are a lot of reasons this doesn’t happen.
If you feel like your sales are lagging behind where they should be and you don’t know why — after all, you’re running ad campaigns, utilizing keywords, and regularly publishing on your blog — read on to see where you might be falling short.
Your organic search keywords are being outperformed
Nowadays, there are tons of tools to keep you on top of your keywords, and not utilizing them is a big mistake. You may think your keywords are good, but you need to track them and figure out which ones are actually helping you, and which ones you’re being beaten at.
Work with an SEO tool that lets you easily see how your keywords are doing compared to those of your competitors. It’s a well-known fact that people rarely scroll down the results page on Google (much less click on to page 2), so if they’re ranking above you, that’s where your potential customers are going. You need to revamp your keywords and see where you can outrank your competition.
Your pricing isn’t competitive enough
In some way, your potential customers see you as more expensive than your competition. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to lower prices to compete. It can also mean experimenting with different ways to appeal to potential customers.
Try having a sale, and reach out to people on your email list to let them know. Do a targeted ad campaign on social media to advertise a limited-time sale that creates urgency to drive purchases. Free shipping is another popular tactic, either by raising the minimum order rate or negotiating a low-cost ground shipping option with a carrier.
Your blog content needs help
Yeah, you have a blog, but is it doing anything for you? Your blog should be a platform that helps you educate, lends authority, and helps you engage better with your potential customers. If you’re not providing well-written, relevant, and useful information to your potential customers, why are you doing it?
There are quite a few ways you can make your blog more appealing to your readers. An easy one is visuals — do you have any? Are your readers looking at a huge chunk of text, and that’s it? Make sure you have lots of high-quality images to make for a better reading experience. The biggest thing, of course, is the content. Put simply: Why will your readers care about what you’re writing about? Aside from being interesting and useful, make it creative and unique to you, instead of just copying the competition.
Your ad budget is going to waste
If you’re spending money on ads and seeing mediocre results, it’s time to take a second look. Are you targeting your demographic properly? Go over your Facebook ads with a fine-toothed comb and see if you can tighten up who you’re targeting, what their interests are, etc. Zeroing in on who is engaging with your brand will help you find better potential customers.
If you’re already using influencers on Instagram, see what you can do about improving results. Are you doing simple promotion, or are you offering an influencer-specific coupon code? Are you being too restrictive with what you’re allowing the influencer to say? Consider what they’re offering their audience, and how your brand is coming across.
If you’re not using influencer marketing, and you have a target demographic that’s responsive to it, what are you waiting for?
Your fulfillment process is costing you
You’ll get hit with bad reviews from customers for things that have nothing to do with the product itself — like late deliveries and mismatched products. Not only does this hurt your online presence, but it also hurts your bottom line.
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A great way to save money and make your future customers a lot happier is to make sure you have your fulfillment process at 100%. When your fulfillment process delivers, you’ll get happy customers and build a better reputation.
You’re wasting opportunities to collaborate
Collaboration goes beyond just reaching out to influencers. Do some research on companies in adjacent or complementary verticals that aren’t competitors, but have a common audience. Forming a symbiotic relationship is easy when you both get exposure to a similar type of audience, but that could be filled with potential customers who haven’t heard of the other company. The added bonus to this is that they may not only need your product but they likely already trust the brand that you’ve partnered with.
Your mobile experience isn’t what it should be
Ask yourself: What do your mobile customers want? Even better, ask your customers. Maybe you have an app that your mobile customers find pointless, and they just want you to improve the responsiveness of your website (making it easy to navigate on mobile, making sure the buttons aren’t a weird size, etc.). On the other end, they could really hate going to your site no matter how responsive it is, and just want a simple app to use instead.
The bottom line is to make sure you’re delivering a mobile experience that reflects what your customers want. Potential customers will appreciate it, and your existing customers will appreciate you even more.
You haven’t incentivized loyalty
Sure, you’re targeting new customers with sign-up sales, first-time purchase rewards, and all the social media ads. But what are you doing to create engagement and exclusivity around your brand?
Pick out a specific kind of program — points, digital punchcards, social media shares in exchange for discounts — to incentivize repeat business. Rewards programs are critical, because you’re encouraging and rewarding your customers for coming back time and time again, and the more they come back, the more rewards they reap. The more you do, too! Make sure you’re sending out promotions to people who are subscribed to your newsletter — anything to keep people coming back.
You’re failing at multichannel
The more channels you’re using, the more you have to make sure you’re consistent across all of them. It’s complicated but so important. This means a unified voice across all social media, email, website, and anywhere else you are online. It also means uniform branding — will your customers recognize you everywhere? Is there a consistent look and feel that they will associate with your brand?
Another thing to keep in mind is the UX on mobile and desktop — make sure it’s top-quality on both. In the end, managing your channels inconsistently will mean your customers will feel like you’re second-rate, and they may go elsewhere.
You’re not taking advantage of AI
AI software is the next big thing — in fact, it kind of already is a big thing — and if you’re not using it, you’re missing out. Whether it’s email, CRM, warehouse management, or content creation, AI brings so much potential to improve workflow.
With all the time you’ll save by using AI software, you can execute a winning ad campaign, brainstorm a viral piece of content for your blog, or meaningfully interact with customers. In the end, the more time you spend doing something manually (instead of delegating to software), the less time you have to do all that stuff that really matters.
When you run an eCommerce business, your product is your most valuable asset — so think about how you can alter other variables related to your business to increase ROI without having to change the bedrock of your business.