The term ‘Growth Hack’ is becoming increasingly popular. Anyone who reads marketing blogs and articles would have come across this term multiple times. The simplest definition of a growth hack is: strategies that are focused on rapid growth.
This article will give you a quick guide to 6 strategies that can be implemented to boost your E-commerce sales and quickly acquire new customers, and achieve those revenue targets.
#1 – Create Urgency to Purchase
Nobody wants to miss out on a good deal.
The fear of missing out has become a commonly used term among millennial buyers.
You can capitalize on this FOMO by developing interesting content strategies & offers to increase purchases within a specific period.
Amazon does this really well. Here are some examples from Amazon’s Great Indian Festival.
Another example can be seen on Cult.fit – a fitness startup.
#2 – Optimizing the Checkout Process
On average 75.6% shopping carts are abandoned online with an effective cart value of around 5 trillion dollars.
Optimizing the checkout process is an extremely important step towards improving the conversion rates of your website.
Each online retailer wants to build a website that’s easy to navigate with an optimized purchase process. But there are issues beyond comprehension that can lead to bad user experience and reduce the overall conversion rate.
These are the top reasons for cart abandonment:
- Shipping / Delivery Costs are too high
- No guest checkout / Had to create an account
- Long forms during checkout
- Can’t see the total amount to be paid
- Don’t trust the website.
Optimizing these aspects for the users is extremely important to boost your online sales. Each point can improve the conversion rate giving an overall improvement of multiple folds.
#3 – Use Exit Intent Pop-Ups
Even if a customer is abandoning the cart or is moving out of the product/category page, it is extremely important to try and retain them or at least understand the reason for their exit.
All this can be achieved very easily using an exit intent pop-up. Exit-intent is a very useful strategy that can be leveraged by online retailers to provide the last sales push to their customers.
#4 – Increase LTV of a customer
The entire game about today’s e-commerce is around the Lifetime value(LTV) of a customer.
LTV of a customer stands for the purchase(revenue) that the customer makes over a lifetime from our website.
Marketing spends and ROAs can be brutal when it comes to customer acquisition. The only breather is that the LTV of a customer can be made high at marginal costs. Hence it is extremely important to focus on increasing the customer LTV to achieve long term profits and margins. According to an article from Harvard Business School, a 5% increase in LTV can increase profits up to 95%
Here are some avenues to improve LTV:
- Amazing Customer Service
- Send a ‘Buy Again’ email
- Try building a subscription package
- Communicate regularly
#5 – Referral Program
An old but extremely effective technique to achieve quick online sales is a Referral program.
A referral program has proven to be instrumental in new customer acquisition and higher brand penetration.
But just creating a referral program isn’t enough. One also needs to promote the referral program effectively and incentivize the same to boost online sales.
#6 – Effective Retargeting
This is an avenue that everyone is aware of but is never used very well.
Every customer who comes to the website should be retargeted very effectively and the customers can be retargeted basis their interaction with the website.
Creative effective segments amongst visitors are extremely important to send out apt communication.
Different buckets for remarketing can be:
- Website Visitors – People who have just visited the website
- Product Page Visits – Users who have visited the product page indicating a higher intent
- Time on a website – People who have visited the website and stayed for more than 1.5 mins
- Cart Abandonments – Visitors who have added products to the cart but haven’t made a purchase
- Purchasers – People who have purchased the product. It can be used to cross-sell/upsell/lookalike audiences or can be used later to invoke a purchase again.
These buckets with an effective communication strategy can improve conversions to a great extent.
A lot of businesses focus too heavily on using growth hacks to increase their sales and reach their revenue targets. While this isn’t an exhaustive list of hacks that can be applied, these can definitely provide a start to the overall strategy.
Depending on the scale and model of your business a specific strategy may or may not work. Hence it is extremely important to pick a strategy and modify the same according to your business objectives.
And, if you want more growth hacks for your specific business you can reach out to me [at] [email protected]. (No strings attached!)
Also read: How to successfully generate sales for your e-commerce business using online advertising
