When you think about e-commerce growth hacks, you need to understand the importance of experimenting instead of guessing.
‘Growth hackers don’t guess, they make hypotheses based on data and then experiment to prove those hypotheses right or wrong.‘ – Sean Ellis
Through this quote, we focus on the e-commerce growth hacks that we usually do with our clients’ stores. We brought 2 examples in the acquisition part, 2 for the conversion optimization and 2 retention hacks.
6 E-commerce growth hacks
2 Aquisition hacks
When we talk about acquisition, it is critical to know that it is followed by 5 other levels, which are usually forgotten. These 6 levels together make up the Pirate Metrics that was invented by Dave McClure, the leader of 500startups.
#Get massive follower base on Twitter
What if we were to tell you that you can easily turn Twitter followers into customers, using a simple tool called Tweepi?
Tweepi is a tool to find users on Twitter who are interested in a specific topic and/or tweet about particular things. Let’s assume that you have a cosmetics webshop; your first step using Tweepi would be to find people who tweet about cosmetics. How about a search for #cosmetics or #facecream
You’ll get endless tweets and a list of people who tweeted about cosmetics. Before you start to follow them, make sure that you speak their language. Send some tweets from your profile using the same hashtag or keyword that you searched on. When they get notified that they’ve got a new follower, they’ll click on your profile and check your tweets and voila, the first tweet they see from you will be super relevant. You can also favorite, retweet and comment their tweets in order to show more engagement and awareness.
Just make sure that you don’t follow too many profiles at once because Twitter has some rules regarding how fast you follow users.
#Make your content shareable
To always find outstanding topics and write content about them is hard and painful. But what if you could tell which topics are trending on the internet? Dear visitor meet Buzzsumo, the ultimate source of knowing the hottest trends.
With it, you will be able to create the next e-commerce growth hack that will improve your SEO. After you have found the best converting topics and content, all you have to do is format it in whatever way you want.
Let’s say you’re writing about face creams and you’re doing a quick search on Buzzsumo. This is how it looks like:
The top articles got a couple of thousands of shares each. If people are interested in “face cream against wrinkles“, find a way to create similar content that goes above and beyond the initially shared item. You can create a more detailed content, an infographic or a video, that gives people a more rich experience around a topic they care about.
It is called the “skyscraper method” because after you improved the original content you can reach out to these blogs and sites and alert them that you have an updated piece of content. In many cases, they are likely to share your content on their channels or replace the “old” links with your new ones.
2 Conversion hacks
After the acquisition of your potential customers, it’s time to convert them into real customers. To do that, you have to serve the best user experience in order to attract your users and make them buy and trust in your e-commerce store.
Before these e-commerce growth hacks, I would recommend you 2 software which you can check easily what your users are doing on your site and why. One of them is Qualaroo, which is an in-page pop up survey (why), the other one is CrazyEgg that is a heatmap (what).
#Reduce shopping cart abandonment
To be honest, the most annoying thing is when a user has already put some items into their cart and when it’s time to checkout, instead of buying the products, they leave without taking action.
One way to prevent this phenomenon is by using exit intent pop-ups, like Optimonk. Though many sites use these solutions, in reality, they do not use it properly. Most sites usually put the pop-ups in front of every existing user, and that’s why they are not effective. With Optimonk, you can create several settings; for example, a setting can be like this: if a potential buyer put at least 2 items in their cart and they want to leave without buying them, 20% discount coupon immediately pops up on the screen.
The other way is to get exiting users to fill out a short exit survey. For that, you can use Qualaroo. Make the survey multiple choice to increase the response rate. A customer might respond that they are leaving because delivery costs are too high. That’s a valuable feedback but also a good opportunity to save the transaction right there.
Respond to their answer with a free delivery in real time. With it, you can save a big chunk of abandoned visitors and make them buy from you instead.
#Dramatically increase your conversion rate
This e-commerce growth hack is very simple, but it works. It is called the “foot in the door technique“, which means that you try to get a small commitment from a user in order to get a bigger one in the future. So, instead of trying to push the user to buy something the first time, you simply ask for their email address and leave the rest to email marketing, for example.
You can get it with a simple pop up with a clever text on it. Please don’t use the common phrases like “subscribe to our newsletter“, because in that case, nobody will subscribe. Try to be funny or different and you’ll get a much higher conversion rate. Here is a good article from experts in this field.
2 Retention hacks
There is an adage which says that “it is cheaper to keep a customer than it is to acquire a new one“. When you are running an e-commerce store you need 2 main numbers, the CAC (customer acquisition cost) and the CLTV (customer lifetime value). In this section, you will read about two e-commerce growth hacks that talk about the longer lifetime value of your customers and the increase in your ROI.
#Increase your customers’ loyalty
Take your retention to the next stage by making your customers the star of your webshop. You can do this by user-generated content to build long-term loyalty and accelerate the word-of-mouth (WOM).
The first step is to encourage your customers to show off their purchased items on their social media channels, like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.
Give them a unique differentiator, like a hashtag that they can use when they upload e.g. a picture of themselves and your product. Now, you can easily find these photos by searching for your special hashtag.
On the other hand, this move allows you to nurture enthusiastic fans to your site by showing them off, on the other hand, they’ll represent the “social proof” to other visitors on your website.
#Reverse engineering your very best customers
People tend to focus on new acquisitions instead of polishing the existing customers who have already purchased. Usually, a very few percents of your customers purchase in the biggest quantity.
First, what you should do first is to calculate the average amount of purchases and then take those customers whose spendings are in the top 1%.
Now, you have a smaller group that you can reverse engineer. Look into the analytics and look for similarities between them.
- How frequently do your best customers purchase from your online store?
- What items do your best customers purchase?
- Where do these customers live?
- Are they in the same age group?
If you don’t know these answers at all, try the old but working method and call them. Offer a discount in return for their answers. You’ll see that they will help you with their insights.
If you learned some new hacks today, please share this article! Thank you 🙂
