2015 eCommerce New Year’s Resolutions
By John Sanchez
Sunday, December 28, 2014
The New Year always brings new life, new hope, new possibilities and new opportunities. For business owners, it’s always good to look back and reflect on all your achievements as well as the lessons learned for the past year. Afterwards, look towards the future and set your business plans and goals for the coming year. Here are 5 New Year’s resolutions for eCommerce businesses in 2015:
Prioritize Engagement
Get up close and personal with customers – not in a romantic sense, of course, but as personal and professional as you can get via cyberspace – by engaging them via social media or through email. Designate a specific person or two (preferably someone with savvy social media and customer service skills) who will focus on this particular task at hand. Then gather all feedback, comments and suggestions from customers and use the information or data gathered to make improvements to your products and/or services when necessary.
Engagement will make customers feel that: 1) there are actual real live people working behind the scenes of your eCommerce site; and 2) customers will feel that you care enough to listen to feedback and you find time to respond to their posts, tweets and emails online. So try to be a little more personal in your approach when engaging customers – always be polite, address them by their names (if possible), show your appreciation or throw in a compliment or two along their way.
Map Out Your Marketing Calendar in Advance
It’s always best to plan things ahead of time, especially in the field of business. If last year you only made plans just one month in advance, then make it your resolution this year to plan 2 to 3 months ahead of time (at least). If you can map out your entire marketing calendar for the whole year, then that would even be better! Anyway, you can always make changes to your plans as the days and months go by.
Early preparation will help to avoid cramming and help avoid undue stress on everyone, especially for business owners like you.
Get Creative with Marketing Campaigns & Online Content
In relation to the previous New Year’s resolutions above, all your planning will be for naught if your marketing campaigns are not enticing enough for customers. So get your creative juices flowing, make use of the feedback you gathered from customers and try to come up with marketing strategies that are well-thought of and executed.
Also, spruce up content and visuals on your eCommerce site as well. As they say, content is king in this digital day and age. So post content that will attract and prompt your customers to click, read, like or even share the content uploaded on your site. Be sure to accompany your content with high-quality images – because that will instantly be your hook to reel in customers to consume content on your eCommerce site.
Go Mobile!
Almost everyone has a mobile device these days. Everywhere you go you see people swiping tablets or tapping their smart phones here and there. Some kids or teenagers even have better smart phones than most adults (this author included)! Maybe they were on Santa’s list and that’s their reward for being good last year.
Anyway, business owners should take heed. Mobile is the way to go moving forward. Therefore, include a mobile marketing strategy to your business plans. Consider developing a mobile version of your eCommerce site. At VP-ASP, part of our hosted mobile solution is to provide customers with a mobile compatible version of their store. And real soon, we will be pumping out a new mobile store that will work on any server. Watch out for this special feature when VPCart Version 8.0 is released.
How about you, have you listed down your eCommerce New Year’s resolutions yet? We would be glad to know what they are, so kindly share them with us on the comments below.
Happy selling and HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!
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