5 Ecommerce Tips for Your Business
(Episode 1 of 2 with Chloe Thomas)
Chloë Thomas is an e-commerce marketing problem solver. She is the author of several bestselling books, including eCommerce Marketing: How to Get Traffic that Buys to Your Website. She is a keynote speaker, and host of both the award-winning eCommerce MasterPlan Podcast, and the Keep Optimising Marketing Podcast. Today, we’re going to discuss Chloe’s books and five of her e-commerce tips for your business.
Key Takeaways
In today’s episode, we will cover the following key takeaways:
- eCommerce is it’s own business model.
- eCommerce requires a marketing plan.
- We should focus on improving each step of the customer journey.
- Customers have a desire for a real, emotional connection with the businesses they interact with.
- We can build our credibility in the online space through reviews and testimonials, user-generated content, social media posts, influencer marketing, etc.
- In B2B sales, the customer typically makes decisions based on what will protect their job.
5 Ecommerce Tips
As we mentioned earlier, Chloe is the author of several bestselling books on e-commerce marketing. She has written books such as eCommerce Masterplan, B2B eCommerce Masterplan, and her most recent book, eCommerce Marketing: How to Get Traffic that Buys to Your Website. Each book aims to help retailers, brands, and eCommerce businesses find success. Here are five tips she shared regarding e-commerce:
1. We should create a new business model.
eCommerce is it’s own business model. Selling products and services online requires a very different business model than selling our products and services in our stores. A big mistake many businesses make when moving towards e-commerce, is thinking the online and offline customer journey are the same. But, they aren’t. We should take the time to come up with a new business model if we choose to have e-commerce.
“If you’re selling online via your own, say Shopify site to consumers, that’s one business model. If you then open a physical store, that’s a totally different set of business rules and processes you’ve got to learn,” Chloe said.
2. We should create a new marketing plan.
eCommerce requires a marketing plan. A lot of people think you can just put up a website or put your products on Amazon, and you’ll sell, but this often isn’t the case. We have to do some marketing if we want to be successful. “You have to learn the marketing and spend the money on the marketing,” Chloe said. There isn’t a way around it.
3. We should focus on improving each step of the customer’s journey.
Chloe’s book, eCommerce Marketing: How to Get Traffic that Buys to Your Website, answers two questions: What marketing should I be doing that I am not already? And is the marketing I am doing the right marketing for me? She takes her readers through the master plan, which helps them make better marketing decisions.
The master plan starts with six circles, each related to the customer’s relationship with our business. From left to right, it starts with the world. That includes all consumers; those that know about our business and those that don’t. Next we have the visitors: the consumers that come to our website. From there, there is the inquirer who signs up to our email list, the first time buyer, the repeat buyer, and eventually the regular buyer.
The key thing is to get our customers to go from one circle to the next. “You’re trying to get the [customer] to jump across one side to the other side of the model, and the faster you can do that, the more money you’re going to make,” Chloe said.
We should think, “Where are we weakest right now? Let’s go and improve it.” The master plan is there to help us cover the entire customer journey and determine where we should put most of our effort.
4. We should create a real, emotional connection with our customers.
Chloe explained that one of the biggest tectonic shifts happening today is the customers’ desire for a real, emotional connection with the businesses they interact with. She has seen this trend grow especially in the e-commerce space.
When businesses move online, they remove that physical presence and connection with their customers. Instead of face-to-face interactions, the customer often ends up going through the customer’s journey alone. However, this has made the customer crave connection. Customers don’t just want a transaction, they want a connection.
Even though so many businesses have shifted online, it is still possible for us to form connections with our customers. We can focus on providing great customer service, host events, post video content, run live streams, respond to emails, etc.
“It’s that consumer desire for their purchases to mean something more or to buy from people like them and people they feel they’re connected to in some way,” Chloe said. “The brands which get it and which managed to put this through the full DNA of their business, every single element of their business, are just skyrocketing at the moment.”
5. We should build our online credibility.
Another business tectonic shift we are seeing in the e-commerce space is credibility marketing. Customers don’t necessarily trust advertisements in the same way they used to. They don’t trust us. They don’t want to hear us tell them how awesome we are; they want to hear it from others.
We can build our credibility in the online space through reviews and testimonials, user-generated content, social media posts, influencer marketing, etc. Amazon does a great job with building their credibility and trust because they have so many reviews. After a purchase, they will send their customers a reminder to leave a review as well.
With B2B sales, the customer often makes decisions based on what will help them protect their job. They don’t necessarily focus on what’s best for the company, but what’s going to help them in their individual career. We have to establish our credibility in the B2B space. People can’t afford to take risks on something that might hurt their career and if we don’t have credibility, they’re likely not going to work with us.
As we enter the e-commerce space, it is important to pay attention to the business tectonic shifts so we can help our customers all the way through their customer journey.
Connect with Chloe
Thank you so much Chloe for sharing your stories and insights with us today. To learn more about or connect with Chloe:
Next Steps
- Get a free ebook about passion marketing, and learn how to become a top priority of your ideal customers at PassionMarketing.com.
- Subscribe to Monetization Nation on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, our Facebook Group, and on your favorite podcast platform.
