It’s no secret that eCommerce has had a substantial growth spurt in the last few months thanks to COVID-19 limiting consumers’ ability to shop in-store. In fact, eCommerce in the United States grew over 90% year-over-year between April 5 and June 21. While eCommerce will continue its explosive growth for the foreseeable future, more and more retailers will continue to revamp their eCommerce operations to meet the growing demand. Competition for your consumer’s dollar will exponentially increase in the next few months, and growth will require new ways of thinking about both your business and consumers.
Don’t Rely On Your eCommerce First-Mover Advantage
That means the “first-mover advantage” that many DTC and retail companies are enjoying now will soon start to give way to an even playing field. To make sure that your growth doesn’t become stagnant, or worse, start declining, here are three (3) ways to help ensure your eCommerce continues to climb to new heights:
1. Reinvest in Knowing Your Consumers
Both retail and the economy are currently moving toward recovery, albeit slowly, which means that consumers’ preferences and needs in eCommerce will continue to shift until the country and the world finds the “new normal.” Brands need to start understanding that their consumers’ new needs, preferences and journeys are changing – from understanding new search behaviors around their category, product, or service – to re-mapping customer journey touchpoints. This reinvestment and rediscovery will allow you to create new campaigns to target consumers across channels that speak to their needs and drive to conversion.
2. Reexamine Foundational eCommerce Components
To feed growth in a sustainable, scalable way, brands need to ensure that their foundational elements are solid. If you’re a DTC brand, it’s essential to ensure your findability is maximized through both technical SEO (i.e., page speed, indexation and canonicalization) and on-site SEO (i.e., information architecture, metadata, and content), and product pages are benefit-driven and optimized. If you’re selling at marketplaces like Amazon or retailers like Walmart, Target or Kroger, ensure that your products are categorized correctly, product content is optimized for search, and your product is in stock and has a high percentage of winning the buy box. Without these fundamentals in place, it is the equivalent of building a mansion on a cracked foundation.
3. Data-Driven Optimization
After you’ve rediscovered your consumers and put your foundational eCommerce elements in place, it’s time to start the process of optimizing everything that can be optimized. Using a data-driven process, examine your content, campaigns, traffic sources and conversion paths and funnels to optimize “conversion choke points” to create a more frictionless experience that accelerates and drives conversion.
Utilizing these three techniques to optimize your eCommerce should help ensure continued growth for your brand as your eCommerce capitalizes on your first-mover growth.
Submitted by: Tony Verre, VP of eCommerce, Integer Dallas
Image Source: Unsplash
