Ecommerce businesses are always looking for ways to grow their business, but it can be challenging to know where to start considering their individual goals. Depending on the industry, some online stores are focused on sales volume, and others have to emphasize average order value (AOV) over conversion due to a long sales cycle.

No matter what kind of business one is looking to grow, there are tried-and-true growth strategies that have proven to be effective consistently over time. Some are new, some are more traditional, but all are significant growth drivers.

The best ecommerce growth strategies we recommend are:

• Optimize your website and social media for customer service
• Create a long-term SEO strategy
• Automate time-consuming tasks
• Improve customer retention
• Offer and promote Installment financing

Let’s dive into each of these strategies and see how they contribute to growth.

Optimize Your Website and Social Media for Customer Service

Online presence is vital for modern businesses. By creating an online persona, businesses become more accessible to their consumers and can offer better customer service. This should be the main goal of any website or social media presence, as it develops a clear and public image of respect and care for customers. This not only draws more leads in but also helps retain existing customers.

Businesses can do this by having associates handle their social media accounts, responding to consumer concerns, and reaching out to those who complain or commend the business for its service. This online presence can also be used to pre-empt consumer concerns with helpful tips or video how-tos on how to use a product or fix common problems with it. All of these go a long way in growing a base of loyal customers.

Create a Long-Term SEO Strategy

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a sort of an “open secret” among sales-driven businesses. Most businesses understand the value of showing up on the first page of Google, but not many know exactly how to accomplish this goal. Learning how to do so and crafting a long-term plan to consistently appear high on search engines is key to bringing in customers who are searching terms related to a specific product or service.

There are two ways to do this:

1. Craft one in-house 
2. Contract a third party. 

Either way, the goal will be to create articles, landing pages, and optimized web pages focused around high-volume search terms. Tools like Ahrefs and Google Trends can make these terms easier to identify, and Google Ads can help by allowing businesses to buy a decent level of exposure while businesses work on their natural search engine placement.

Improve Customer Retention

Conversion is often the foremost goal for those looking to grow their business. While bringing in more sales is always positive, retaining those customers can be even more lucrative. After all, acquiring a new customer is 5-25x more expensive than retaining an existing one. 

Increasing customer retention is mainly about improving customer service. There are a few proven ways to do so:

• Invest in better customer service training
• Adopt a Customer Service Management (CSM) platform
• Hire more associates

By taking an all-hands-on-deck approach and ensuring that associates are trained and equipped to do their jobs the best they can, businesses can retain customers longer and extract more value out of each individual business relationship.

Automate Time-Consuming Tasks

In order to grow, a business must operate in a way that is scalable. Scalability depends largely on efficiency and automating tasks that don’t necessarily need a “human touch.”

This can be done by adopting new software tools for vital business operations. These tools include:

• CSM software
• Payment processing tools
• Consumer financing platforms

These software platforms automate many of the logistics involved in a business, making it easier to grow without worrying about having the ability to fill new and larger orders. Not only that but the benefits these tools offer can act as growth multipliers themselves, even without the efficiency and scalability. That brings us to the last of our ecommerce growth strategies.

Offer and Promote Installment Financing

Installment financing options are the most proven growth vehicle for sales-driven businesses on this list. In fact, companies that offer some sort of consumer financing see an average 20-30% increase in conversion and a 30-50% increase in average ticket size. This meets the needs of every variety of sales-driven business, regardless of the length of their business cycle.

The best and quickest way to adopt the last of the ecommerce growth strategies, and offer flexible payment options, is to partner with a fintech firm that specializes in connecting lenders with merchants to give consumers the widest variety of options available.

Luckily, Skeps can do just that.

Adopt the Best of the Ecommerce Growth Strategies With Skeps 

Skeps offers a comprehensive, end-to-end consumer financing platform that helps businesses modernize their entire payment process. We go above and beyond one-click payment, also offering a one-click application process for several different types of consumer financing, including:

• Installment financing
• Store credit cards
• Consumer loans and leases

If you’re looking to partner with a forward-thinking fintech company that will keep consumers' eyes on the purchase while offering best-in-class financing, Skeps is the perfect fit.