There’s no such thing as the Field of Dreams plan for business success.
Sure, you might build a new e-commerce platform, but that doesn’t mean that customers are going to show up out of the clear blue sky begging to give you their hard-earned money!
Instead, you have to be pretty smart, pretty savvy, and pretty strategic about how you grow e-commerce business. The five tips and tricks we highlight below will help you hit home run after home run from here on out.
Understand your market better than they understand themselves
The biggest advantage you’ll ever have over your competitors is the depth of knowledge you have about your market and your customers.
Most marketers today just aren’t willing to get down in the trenches and research their market as in-depth as they should. By learning everything you can about your target customer – and understanding them even better than they understand themselves – your e-commerce success becomes almost effortless.
Laser focus on niche products
Being the Walmart of the e-commerce – offering something for everyone – is the fastest way to put your new business under.
Instead, you want to laser focus on specific niche products for a very specific target customer the way the folks at Velvet Caviar do.
Instead of offering every phone accessory under the sun for every phone out there on the market today, Velvet Caviar instead offers custom, and fun phone case designs for a very specific market. They aren’t all over the place with who they are as a business and that’s why they are able to succeed where so many others fail.
Don’t forget to sell stuff to your current customers
Getting new customers is the most expensive thing any business can do.
You’re literally trying to convince complete and total strangers to trust you with their hard-earned money, and in today’s ultra-crowded marketplace – with plenty of hucksters and scam artists out there – it’s getting harder and harder to do.
Unbelievably, a lot of e-commerce businesses out there stop advertising to the people they’ve convinced to purchase their products in the past in an effort to continue chasing new money. Turn around and sell more things to your current customers that already like who you are and what you have to offer – and already trust you – and you find that the profits just come pouring in.
Partner with other e-commerce platforms
The internet has transformed the landscape of business in ways most people never could have expected or anticipated before.
There’s such a big pie available in every market that you don’t ever have to worry about getting a big enough piece, which is why you want to partner up with some of your competitors to market to the customers they weren’t able to convert (letting them market to customers you weren’t able to convert) in an effort to gain access to a bigger share of the market without a lot of expense or effort.
Joint-venture programs like this can set your financial success on fire in a way almost no other marketing approach can.
Look outside your industry for marketing home runs
At the end of the day, if you start to run your e-commerce business like everyone else in your market or your industry you’re going to find it’s almost impossible to succeed without slashing your prices to the lowest level possible.
In the end, these kinds of commoditized businesses cut their own throats with prices that they can’t sustain, chasing business that’s only going to jump to the competitor that will go a penny lower.
Instead, look to compete and dominate your market or niche by focusing on what other industries are doing when it comes to advertising and marketing. You’ll be able to bring these new ideas and these new campaigns into your industry and should notice almost overnight success without having to do a whole lot of heavy lifting.
