Growth Hacking for ecommerce: 9 simple yet effective tools

Friday 25th September, 2020

Growth Hacking for ecommerce: 9 simple yet effective tools

The term Growth Hacking has gone from being an industry buzzword to one of the most effective ways to grow an online business at scale. By definition, Growth Hacking means that every strategy you develop and execute should be centred around growth. And, if you’re in the ecommerce business, you should already have a relentless focus on growth. Growth Hacking will simply give you the tools to develop (and test) a number of campaigns to drive more growth.

Gone are the days of spray and pray marketing tactics. Growth Hacking is innately agile and has an important role to play throughout the buyer’s journey, giving you the power to grow your business consistently through many different touch points. 

Here are our favourite 9 Growth Hacking tips that you should try:

Share Word of Mouth

Social proof is a psychological phenomenon of people assuming the actions and beliefs of others are correct and true. People buy from people they trust. By adding reviews and testimonials to various parts of your website, there’s a higher chance new customers will convert.

Enhance the shopping experience

There are endless ways that you can make your customer’s experience memorable. Handwritten thank you cards in their delivery, random and unexpected coupons for returning customers, buy-again communication with info on similar products they might like and a personalised homepage based on their buying habits are all powerful ways you can make each individual customer feel more special.

A/B test everything

You might assume that a certain way of communicating or your favourite picture will convert customers, but you can never really know. By A/B testing, you will be able to see (in real time) what messaging is resonating with your audiences. This reduces a lot of wasted time and ad spend. Assumption should never be your go to marketing tactic.

Use a referral program

Give customers the opportunity to receive value in the form of either discounts or early access but getting them to share your business and/or products with their friends. By doing so, you effortlessly grow your database by again using social proof to get more potential customers to visit your site.

Make buying easy

It becomes annoying for anyone to have to fill in a large amount of personal information everytime you shop on a new site. By making the purchase process easier (only ask for the most important information) and showing where the customer is in the step-by-step process you should start to see a drop in cart abandonment. The reason people choose to buy online is because it’s easier, so make it as simple as possible for them to buy from you.

Retarget, cross and upsell

Use technology to your advantage by using retargeting software to remind your customers what products you have or what is still in their cart no matter where they are on the internet. Also give them the opportunity to upgrade their purchase or show them another appropriate product based on their history. This works well with returning customers who have been proven to be more valuable in the long run than newly acquired customers.

Adopt ad extensions

If you’re going to be spending money through the likes of AdWords, then adopting ad extension technology (https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/5-adwords-extensions/) will go a long way in helping you convert more sales. It gives you the ability to expand the scale of your ad within a search framework, showing more detailed information to a user and hopefully giving them more of an incentive to click on your ad instead of another.

Fuel sales with data

There are two ways you can fuel sales using the data from your ecommerce platform. The first is to create a sense of urgency by showing that there is only one more available stock item for a product a user is looking at. This should help to speed up their path to purchase. The second is to make noise about your businesses best selling products. Best sellers are low hanging fruit and again goes to show the power of social proof. Your customers will subconsciously get a sense of missing out if they don’t purchase a product so many people have already done before.

Show trust badges

There’s an innate element of distrust from online consumers, especially when trying out a new ecommerce business. By clearly showing trust badges on your site from the payment gateways and security technology you’re using to keep their data safe, it will position you as a professional business and not another fly by night one. You can even A/B test placement of these badges to see where they work best at converting sales.

Despite what you might think, there’s no fast track to ecommerce success. However, there are proven, time-tested ecommerce growth hacks that can definitely make it feel like your business is on the fast track. They’re easy to implement and should be considered if you want your ecommerce business to continue to grow. Growth Hacking gives you the tools to gain the traction you need to sell more products and increase revenue.