As the dust settles from the holiday shopping blitz, it’s a great time for ecommerce businesses to assess what worked and what didn’t. As attention turns to planning for a new year of ecommerce success, merchants stand to benefit by focusing their plans around these key priorities.
1. Enhance Customer Experience
Refining your website’s user experience to make it more relevant, more efficient, more personalized, and above all, faster, can significantly boost customer satisfaction and conversions. The most important areas of the shopping experience to make “user-friendly” are intuitive navigation, fast page loading times, and a seamless checkout process.
Optimize for Mobile
With 56% of all ecommerce traffic originating on mobile, optimizing your site for mobile devices is no longer optional. Consider moving toward a mobile-first design approach, ensuring that your site is fully responsive no matter which page is being viewed on which device.
2. Let Data Increasingly Drive Your Marketing Plan
Going “by the gut” with your marketing strategy is a great way to get an emotional handle on what approach will work best, but without actual data to back up your hypothesis, you are at risk of wasting ad dollars and not reaching the right audience.
Harnessing analytics data before you create any ads can significantly refine your marketing strategies, allowing for much more personalized and effective campaigns. Build a complete “information warehouse” of relevant audience data, from buying trends to demographics. You can acquire this information from Google Analytics, SEO software platforms, and integrated reporting data from ecommerce systems like your CRM, OMS, and ERP.
Segment Your Audience
Dividing your customer base into distinct segments allows for more targeted and relevant marketing efforts, fostering enhanced engagement and conversion. We wrote more about audience segmentation here. Identify different customer segments based on purchasing behavior, demographics, and preferences, and specifically tailor your communication strategies for each.
3. Develop More Content Marketing
Create Valuable Content
Generating informative, engaging, and valuable content is an evergreen technique for enhancing your brand’s online presence while driving organic traffic. Take a look at your current content library, including any resource a user might find on your site, such as videos, how-tos, or longer-form blogs and case studies. Assess which topics you haven’t covered yet but that are relevant to your audience, and start filling in those gaps. You might even develop a formal content calendar for the year that aligns with your product plans and current industry context.
Don’t Forget About SEO
Optimizing your content for search engines is crucial for increasing your site’s visibility and attracting a larger audience. Conduct keyword research and incorporate relevant keywords naturally within your content—we demonstrate how to select the right keywords here.
4. Strengthen Your Social Media Presence
Engage with Your Audience
Posting on social regularly is a great first step, but if you don’t also actively engage with your followers’ content, you’ll find it difficult to grow the reach of your account. Actively engaging with your audience on social media can help to build a strong community around your brand. Always respond promptly to comments, re-post relevant user content regularly, and ask for more user-generated content at every opportunity.
Implement Social Commerce
Leverage the selling capabilities of social media platforms to facilitate direct purchases, simplifying the buying process for your shoppers, and opening one more channel that can add to sales and revenue.
New year, new business priorities.
Equipping your ecommerce business with a robust strategy as you step into the new year is essential for fostering growth and achieving success. By focusing on enhancing the customer experience, leveraging data-driven marketing, investing in content, and strengthening your social media presence, you'll be setting the stage for a lucrative year ahead.
About The Author
Katy Ellquist
Katy Ellquist, Miva’s Digital Marketing Strategist, is an accomplished writer, marketer, and social media analyst who has created sophisticated content campaigns for a broad range of professional clients. She brings to Miva a complex understanding of ecommerce trends and techniques, building upon extensive digital agency experience and a prior role as direct liaison to Miva’s top accounts. Katy is a regular contributor to the Miva blog, covering essential ecommerce topics like design & development strategy, site optimization, and omnichannel selling, with the goal of increasing the actionable knowledgebase of the entire Miva community.
