E-commerce accounts for over 14% of all retail sales worldwide. By 2023, e-commerce sales are forecasted to account for 23%.
With so much saturation in the market, it can be difficult to develop a financial plan for e-commerce that sets you ahead of your competitors.
With the right financial strategies, however, you’ll see significant improvement in the financial success of your company.
Keep reading to learn 7 financial strategies for e-commerce.
1. Offer Subscriptions to Your Customers
The e-commerce subscription space provides an excellent opportunity to grow your business and generate recurring revenue.
What’s great about recurring revenue is that it’s predictable. When you can rest assured that a specific number of customers are on a recurring plan, you can grow your business more confidently.
You can spend money and hire without having to worry as much about making accurate revenue predictions.
Whether it’s the Dollar Shave Club, a monthly makeup subscription, or a monthly specialty food subscription, e-commerce subscriptions are becoming increasingly popular.
2. Encourage Action With Urgency
When customers worry they have a short period of time to take advantage of a sale, it’s not uncommon for sales to boom.
Every year, Amazon offers a 36-hour Amazon Prime Day Sale in July. During the limited sale, they offer limited-stock items for sale for a short duration of time.
In 2018, they sold more than 100 million products. Their sales exceeded $1 billion.
You don’t have to limit your business to one yearly event, though. You can use scarcity as a tactic to sell throughout the entire year.
3. Provide Reviews and Ratings
If you’re offering higher-priced products, having product reviews on your site can help you sell. Better reviews make it easier for consumers to part with their hard-earned money.
They want to know they can trust a product and trust the brand before they spend. Reviews are one of the best ways to build trust and establish brand consistency.
When customers face 2 or more products that seem identical, they’ll typically choose the option with the best reviews.
4. Use Content Marketing
Content marketing should play an integral role in every company’s business plan. The content on your site should be clean and concise, with backlinks to free and usable information.
If you sell fitness gear, you should have a blog that covers a myriad of subjects related to fitness, such as:
- Nutrition and diet
- Exercise and stretching
- Fashion in Fitness
Offer tips and tricks your customers can use daily. Keep your voice consistent and concise.
Incorporate backlinks into your blogs to increase site traffic and build brand identity. When you offer great content, you’ll rank for keywords with buying intent and help boost your domain’s authority.
Remember that it’s the indirect benefits of content marketing that can drive results. With SEO, you’ll drive your rankings, which brings in more qualified visitors. The more qualified visitors you get, the more likely they are to convert.
5. Offer Multiple Payment Options
When you provide multiple payment options to consumers, you’re inevitably appealing to a larger audience. The more options you have, the easier it is for all different customers to buy from you.
Plus, doing so can help you increase your conversions and reduce your cart abandonment rate. Before you decide which payment options to offer, think about your customer base.
Younger customers are much more comfortable paying through digital wallets like PayPal. Older customers typically prefer using credit or debit cards.
Think about your customers’ preferences when you choose which payment options to add to your store.
Make sure any payment gateways you use have security controls that comply with essential regulations. It’s important to show your customers that you care about their information and want to protect their purchases.
6. Manage Your Assets
What is asset management? The concept of asset management applies to every industry. For e-commerce, the focus is called digital asset management (DAM).
DAM refers to the procedures, software, and methods used to control, organize, retrieve store, and transform digital and media assets.
Engaging content and high-quality product images are vital for e-commerce businesses when they want to build trust around their brands and drive customer purchase-ready behavior.
As distribution channels and product lines expand, though, it can become suddenly challenging to manage all of that product-related content.
Try using digital asset management software to manage and distribute your product and brand material across all channels. You’ll save time, increase your brand identity and trust, and inevitably improve your financials. Plus, you’ll create better connections between your buyers and your products.
7. Offer Exclusive Sales and Loyalty Programs
More often than not, companies become too focused on gaining new customers and forget to give care and attention to their existing ones. Keeping a customer is less expensive than acquiring a new one.
Plus, when your existing customers feel special, they’re more likely to help you acquire new customers by bragging about your brand.
It’s important to keep enticing your prior customers to return to your e-commerce store. This is easy to do because you already have data on those existing customers.
Use personalized sales, offers, and product recommendations. Offer sales exclusive to existing customers and loyalty programs. Your existing customers are the ones who’ll generate consistent income for your business.
Take Advantage of Financial Strategies to Increase Revenue
E-commerce is an ever-expanding sector of retail, which is why it’s an excellent space to grow your business.
However, it’s essential to use the best financial strategies so that you can continue to increase your revenue, and both retain and gain customers.
It’s important to establish brand identity and trust and to make exclusive offers to your existing customers and potential ones.
Offer reviews and ratings to set your product or service apart from the rest, and use content marketing to boost the authority of your domain.
If you enjoyed this article, check back daily for more tips and tricks to grow your business!
