How to Plan for Ecommerce Success in the New Year

Whether you want to earn more revenue or raise brand awareness, the New Year is the perfect time to set new resolutions in your ecommerce business. Ring in the year with a focus on your goals & the tools to do it right. Here’s what to do & how to empower your ecommerce success for the new year.

Improve Your Order Fulfillment Process

Order fulfillment takes up valuable time & resources, but getting it right could boost your ecommerce store’s revenue. Research shows that 69% of online shoppers are less likely to shop with a business that delivers a product two days late. When you refine your order fulfillment & meet customers’ expectations, everyone wins.

Fortunately, you don’t need to hire a fulfillment team or work overtime to get your orders out on time. Instead, you can partner with CustomCat to sell more & reduce your overhead at the same time. 

CustomCat supercharges your ecommerce store by producing, fulfilling, & taking care of all the details before shipping out orders on your behalf. Just upload your designs to our library & apply them to a variety of products, including mugs, hoodies, housewares, & more. We’ll even add a custom shipping label from your business, so your customers always see your branding & logo. 

Learn how to get started with CustomCat here.

Automate Everything You Can in Your Online Business

Automation saves time, money, & stress in your ecommerce business. You also free yourself from busy work & can focus on building your business & keeping your customers happy. There are hundreds of online tools for ecommerce stores to automate everything from:

• Product design
• Products & mock-ups
• Social media
• Project management
• Reporting 

Learn more about what you can automate in your online store here.

Expand Your Reach

Building an efficient, SEO-powered ecommerce store is crucial to your success, but it’s not the only way to grow your business. Expanding your reach to platforms helps you sell more & reach a broader audience.

Fortunately, expansion doesn’t always mean more time & resources. CustomCat’s plugin easily integrates with Etsy, Shopify, Woo Commerce, Big Commerce, & more to simplify the selling process. We also offer an API so your developer can integrate our system with yours. Once you’re connected, you can upload & apply your designs to our products. We quickly fulfill & send out everything on your behalf, so you’re empire-building your way to ecommerce growth.

Create a Loyalty Program

A loyalty program helps activate your current customers & turn them into repeat buyers. Apps like Smile.io entices customers to make more purchases, follow your store on social media, & refer friends. You can also set up your program to offer points, perks, & VIP exclusives to different customer tiers on your list.

Schedule Your Ecommerce Sales Around Annual Events

Take the guesswork out of ecommerce sales & promotions by scheduling around annual events & holidays.

Make sure to schedule your promotions in advance using tools like Planoly or Hootsuite, or pre-schedule your email marketing newsletters with Mailchimp. You can set up all your marketing messages in advance to reduce the last-minute rush to push out a sale or promo.

Ramp Up Your Self-Promotion

The New Year is the time to ramp up your self-promotion & get the word out about your business. Whether you pitch yourself to local magazines or large websites, embrace your success & goals & spread the word. Online ads are one place to start, but you can also score free press through sites like Help a Reporter Out (HARO), which regularly solicits feedback from business owners & entrepreneurs.

Invest in Organic Growth

Beyond self-promotion, organic growth is key to a successful online business. Invest more time & resources into SEO to earn the organic traffic you need to scale. Some apps can help simplify the process, like Plugin SEO. It simplifies the process & keeps you on track by focusing on the keywords & steps you need to spur more traffic.

Not sure where to start? Learn more about ecommerce writing for SEO here.

Check-Out What Your Competitors Are Doing

Why reinvent the wheel for marketing to product research when you can look to see what your competitors are doing? The goal isn’t to copy their success but to see what they do well (& where they’re lacking) to fill in the gaps & create a better customer experience.

Solicit Feedback from Your Customers

The best way to please your customers is by asking them directly what they want. From the customer experience to ongoing sales & promotions, sending surveys & polls can skyrocket your growth. Here are a few things to ask:

• What products do you want to buy more of this year?
• What do you like about our store?
• What would you do to improve our store?
• Where are your favorite places to shop (& why)?

The more you can drill down to what motivates customers to buy (& what doesn’t), the more you can refine their experience for a rewarding shopping experience.

Scour Your Analytics

In order to avoid your ecommerce mistakes from this year, you need to know what went wrong–& what you did right. Dig into your analytics to see which sales were the most successful, which content resonated the most with your customers, & which products sold the best. Make sure to study the flops in your business to avoid them for the new year.

 

What are your end-of-year essentials for your ecommerce store? Let us know by leaving a comment below!