6 Ways To Dominate Ecommerce Sales With A Brand New Store

Getting the ball rolling with a new online store can be a challenge. Yet the sooner you can start generating sales, the faster your business can grow, and the better you will be able to cater to the needs of your target market.

Automation and processes will be key to mastering your online store sales. First, start with a solid strategy that takes your niche into account. Once you have prioritized your marketing tasks, you can pass them onto relevant team members. 
 
Here are some tips to help you build those all-important sales processes for your new online store so that it can become as self-sufficient as possible.

Nail Your Niche

Niche down in order to beat the competition.

Successful marketing is all about identifying a need, and ultimately, fulfilling it. The reason niches are so important is that they aim to cater to a narrower market, directly answering to their very specific needs.
You should form your niche around a viable gap in the market, and commit to it wholeheartedly. When you streamline your audience, those remaining are the most committed to your brand, and the most likely to notice if something is amiss.

As your business grows, try not to forget your original purpose. So how do you nail a niche?

Start with niche keyword research. Set up keyword tools and research tools in the cloud, or outsource this step to a marketer or SEO. The key to niche domination is not having a narrow search term focus, but looking at auxiliary content on sites like Amazon, Quora, reddit etc. The more you know about your niche, the more likely you are going to be able to create content that will rank and engage.

A niche store is one that covers a topic from all angles. Affiliate sites like Runner’s World are great examples of niche businesses — they rely on content and rankings to survive, so they take it seriously.

 

Whether it’s reviews, guides, or inspirational content — Runner’s World is a great example of a brand publisher.

Dominating your niche keywords will bring you both repeat sales and credibility. This should be the first place you start looking when it comes to building ýour loyal customer base.

Know Your Audience

A good knowledge of your audience goes hand in hand with nailing your niche. Once you have settled on a product or service that people need, your job is to make them want it. 

The better you know your audience’s interests, hobbies, and habits, the easier it will be to to engage with them.

• Be aware of their preferred forms of content to consume.
• Understand their questions and concerns and be prepared to answer them in detail.
• Know your product inside-out. The more transparent and positive you can be, the more willing potential customers will be to trust you in the future.

A great understanding of these key points is more than simply having a broad idea of what works for your audience. Instead, you should be able to pinpoint the specific issues that are most important to them, identify the problems and questions facing your audience, and come up with ways to resolve those matters.

When it comes to succeeding at audience-led sales, you absolutely have to build out customer avatars. These profiles will allow you to scale and outsource; and eventually automate your sales funnel with segmentation and personalization. If you are low on budget as a starter store, opt for a competitively priced marketing automation tool like Moosend.com (perfect for small ecommerce brands) that can handle sending out your store’s first automated drip campaigns. 

In fact, there will be plenty of cheap customer data at your fingertips in the form of early customer feedback. Spending time collating, reviewing, and responding to customer reviews should be a key customer service task given to a virtual assistant or team member. You can’t afford to fall behind with this. The more engaged you are with your first customers, the more data you will have about your audience to help launch phase two.

Keep Creating Content

The best way to resolve customer pain points is to continuously respond to these points with fresh, up-to-date, actionable content. This sort of content is inherently shareable, as it provides immediate value to its audience, and aims to be the first solution they find to their question at that point in time.
The benefit of this is that it increases your brand’s visibility, builds familiarity and trust, and ultimately funnels more traffic to your website. This is especially important if you created a brand new store — you will need to build customer trust in the brand.  

 
Create content processes like editorial calendars that copywriters can follow — take yourself out of the production line as much as you can. Depending on the content, you might want to lend the final editorial flourish or tweak, but don’t take on the burden of managing the whole content tracking process. 

A simple templated calendar is good enough for any credible starter store, and will help you track the different forms of content needed — from product guides to landing page freebies.

Leverage Intangible Assets

Online sales are about more than just shifting physical products, or selling a service. In fact, for many digital businesses, a large percentage of your value lies within intangible assets. 

In simpler terms, this largely refers to your branding. What is it that separates what you sell from the equivalent competition?

Intangible assets are calculated as the difference in value between your product or service as sold unbranded. For example, a customer may only be prepared to pay a limited amount for woollen gloves, but if they are buying “mohair gloves handmade to size” from a specialist in that product, the price-tag can be increased significantly.

Weigh up the needs of your customers against the limitations of your budget and the capabilities of your team. The more you can develop your brand’s reach and reputation, the greater the ROI you can secure, not only for your marketing efforts, but for your products themselves.

• Digital products are an awesome investment for a young ecommerce brand, because they are relatively cheap to produce. If you embrace the SaaS model, you can also make a killing when it comes to repeat revenue every month. Think outside the narrow remit of your products to see what else you could offer your customers.
• Influencer marketing is another must-have for anyone seeking to develop their ecommerce operation into a lifestyle brand. By forming a few key partnerships with up and coming names, you’ll have a great launchpad for your products. It was one of the core strategies for new ecommerce brand Panacea — who made $16,000 in just 30 days when they launched. If you seed yourself in the right community, you could also have equivalent success.
• Videos are not just for marketing. They can be used for internal training and in order to bolster brand consideration. Explore video as a core channel for branded content — you will see a return in engagement and retention levels. 

Know the Numbers That Matter

Analytics aren’t a nice-to-have, they’re an essential tool in the success of your brand new store. However, if you want to get the most out of the insights provided by these handy approximations, you’ll need to have an idea of which metrics are most relevant to your needs, and how they can be interpreted with regards to your query.

Most businesses identify a number of KPIs, or key performance indicators, which answer critical questions about the performance of the business and the behavior of its customers. These KPIs can then be extrapolated to infer more detailed information about the state of the business as a whole.

Compile a list of the types of information you would like to know about your business and explore how you can collect that data. For example, if you are operating via an ecommerce CMS, the platform itself is likely to include a range of useful tools which enable you to gather invaluable insights about your brand.

Dynamic personalization and pricing are easy to automate using website apps and tools — don’t try to reinvent the wheel and build everything yourself.

Make your site react to the user, not the other way round, and you will be building a lean mean sales machine from day one. Here are some things to get you started:

1. Cross-selling and up-selling apps
2. Referral programs
3. Localized and urgent deals
4. Abandoned cart and website remarketing.

Always Be Optimizing

Answering pain points is undeniably important, yet this isn’t simply a one-time fix. To keep your business and its content seeming relevant and up to date, you need to continuously monitor the needs and opinions of your audience.

Streamline your ad campaigns and marketing tactics by testing and retesting everything. Experiment with variations to your approach, and split test elements wherever possible, so you can learn exactly what makes your readers tick.

No marketing strategy is perfect, nor is it timeless, so be prepared to change things up and approach from a different angle if you find your current approach is proving less successful than you had hoped.

One way that you may want to change tact as a new store is focus your efforts around a few tentpole activities and seasonal events. A seasonal business can be hugely lucrative and easier to scale from a time management perspective.

These tips may not promise overnight success, but by incorporating them into your ecommerce strategy, you can give your brand new business a significant boost, and pave the way to a prosperous and profitable future.