A Hubspot research recently revealed that within the last five years the cost of acquiring new customers has more than doubled, with companies spending more on their marketing campaigns than ever before.
Additionally, it is no longer news that the proliferation of businesses across different industries has nearly made brand loyalty a thing of the past, with potential customers spoilt for choice when they’re ready to buy.
In the middle of these hoaxes, however, the best brands have found a way to sharpen their customer acquisition strategy, while at the same time making the most out of their existing customers.
In this article, we’ll go over ways that your business can enhance your customer acquisition and retention strategy.
What Is Customer Acquisition?
The definition of the term “customer acquisition” is as simple as it sounds. It is the process of getting new customers for your business or turning once potential prospects into paying customers.
These potential prospects are usually of two types.
The first category includes those who are interested in the products you offer but are not aware of the existence of your business. The second category also includes customers from the same category, but this time, coming to your business from competitors.
Either way, the motive behind implementing a customer acquisition process is to get new customers and increase revenue for your business either in the short or long-term.
Customer acquisition is a vital step for every business owner, hence the need to understand exactly how it works.
Why Do You Need A Clear Customer Acquisition Process?
While businesses may struggle to come up with a streamlined process for acquiring customers, there is no doubt that defining such a process is necessary.
For one thing, a clear customer acquisition process allows you to identify exactly what methods you’ll be adopting as well as potential obstacles that you might encounter along the way.
Additionally, defining a clear customer acquisition process leaves you with an effective blueprint that you can implement at any time and even sell to other businesses in your industry.
Benefits Of Customer Acquisition
You may not have wondered why it is vital to expend a lot of energy and resources towards acquiring new customers. But reminding yourself of the reasons behind going down that lane could make you more determined to achieve the right results.
Beyond the obvious, here are two primary benefits of customer acquisition:
Increased revenue generation to spend on employee salaries, marketing costs, and growth strategies.
It provides a roadmap for business scalability and traction, information that comes really handy when a company is looking to onboard investors, influencers and partners.
Now that we’ve stated the benefits, let’s go over how you can achieve customer acquisition even if you’re a newbie to the world of marketing.
The Ideal Customer Acquisition Process
1. Hiring Customer Acquisition Personnel
First things need to be done first …, right?
If you agree, then you probably understand why it is important to hire the right person or assemble the right team to handle your customer acquisition process.
The whole task requires a lot of dedication and hard work, making it a necessity that your business brings on board only persons who understand what it involves, and what moves the thread in customer acquisition.
Additionally, each member of the team, for instance, the social lead manager needs to understand exactly what their role is, and the right time for them to feature in the overall sales funnel. Click here for more info
Facebook Marketplace is the latest trend in Commerce-essential channels or can deliberate as more than a Garage store due to its continuously enhancing selling tactics since its time of the inception year of 2016.
Isn’t it sounds Fascinating that Facebook offers a Facebook Commerce platform where anybody would list numbers of products, interact with their group or community or targeted audiences in their business domain for catering sales without paying a single penny?
One of the crucial facts is more than 1.62 billion people on average log onto Facebook on a regular or daily basis, also considers an active set of Facebook DAU is increased by 9% year by year. The Stats asserts the hidden versatility of Facebook.
In the recent survey; seventy-four percent of high-income earners are currently referring to Facebook as a preferred social network. Apart from this, YouTube has higher reach (at 83%), after which Facebook became most popular social network (at 74%) and LinkedIn comes third with college graduates group (at 51%)
If you are planning to own an online presence with a cost-effective solution, then creating a seller profile on Facebook Marketplace is soup to the nuts mixture that you are gazing for a while.
Facebook is a genre of a platform; where socializing and user interactions take place effortlessly.
“Person revert back greatly with multiple-choice things or even with better-aligned options will proffer you better revenue generation chain”.
Connecting with the right audiences, spreading awareness for the recently posted items, building brand reputation, and maintaining followers became fairly straightforward through Facebook.
Seamless search, effective one on one conversation through Messenger, boosting reach with adequate marketing strategies with profitable money-making tactics is how we know Facebook commerce.
What else you need for kicking-off your Global reach?
Have you ever wondered about Facebook Marketplace?
Facebook Marketplace is a global digital platform where buyers and sellers can come to buy, sell, and trade products in their area with pretty less hassle.
Upselling and cross-selling products have no doubt been one of the most proven marketing strategies for eCommerce merchants in the last decade. However, it is also common to see people use these words interchangeably either while writing or speaking.
But what is really the difference?
What is Cross-selling?
The right cross-selling definition is the tactic of encouraging customers to purchase related or complementary items, perhaps for a lesser fee than the original price tag.
For instance, Alice visits a fashion store to buy a $100 dress but ended up buying the dress plus a fashionable shoe, because the latter was sold as a complementary product and for a lesser price.
What is Up-selling?
The right Up-selling definition is the practice of subtly encouraging a shopper to buy a higher-priced product that matches their primary item but offers more benefits.
A perfect example will be if Alice, with an original budget of $100, ends up buying a $200 dress because it was advertised to her in a manner that swayed.
In both cases, we notice that the merchant generates more revenue than was initially possible, a benefit that makes upselling and cross-selling products a hot strategy for salespersons.
If you regularly shop online, there’s a significant chance that you’ve purchased an item because it was displayed as one of the many cross-selling or upselling techniques that exist. Also, if you sell online, then there’s an even higher chance that you’ve tried to increase sales by adopting any of the strategies.
Bundling too is another slightly different method to increase eCommerce sales whereby customers are presented with similar or complementary products with the option to get the listed items at a discounted price if they buy all the items.
Having discussed so far what is upselling and what is cross-selling, we will from this point consider why upselling and cross-selling products are important ways to boost eCommerce revenue.
Why are Cross-selling and Up-selling Techniques Really Important for your business?
1. Improve Customer Retention
Up-selling and Cross-selling is undoubtedly an excellent way to reduce the number of customers that you lose to competitors. It gives you a chance to present to customers a product or service that they may not know you have but could meet their needs.
Using the cross-selling example we mentioned earlier, we notice that Alice could have ended up buying shoes from another fashion store if she did not receive an offer that she could afford. For the upsell, she may as well have spent the extra $150 at another store, perhaps for another dress that the first merchant had in stock.
Interestingly too, upselling and cross-selling products also represent a cost-effective customer retention strategy when compared to other tactics such as loyalty rewards, discounted offers, and any offline campaign you can come up with.
In the end, you’ll save some money from your marketing budget to invest in other core areas of your eCommerce business. Click here for more info
Are you beating around the bush for which E-commerce platform will sound right for you and will meet your demand as an option are many in the arena, well a right E-commerce platform can meet your expectations? All you need to look for is which pair of shoes fits you and comfortably help you meet your desires.
Before floating into the world of E-commerce platform lets have a glimpse of what is the E-commerce platform.
Now, the question arises which E-commerce platform will meet your desires and land your business into a perfect paradise for you, so here is the list of 15 E-commerce platform which you can look for.
Are you preparing a checklist for launching your Magento eCommerce store?
Then there is a big chance that you’ve considered how your dream eCommerce store on Magento will appear to users. Well, at the heart of every Magento store’s visual appearance is a well crafted Magento theme that often represents the brand using it.
However, thousands of these themes are available for free or on sale in online marketplaces and could leave you confused regarding which one you should use for your eCommerce store. Another source of concern could be picking from a large pool of providers, the most trusted Magento theme providers that offer the best templates for Magento stores.
Well, this article will help you solve these concerns but begin by highlighting what you can expect from a good Magento theme.
What Makes A Good Magento Theme
Good Visuals And Intuitive Designs
Unless you’re building from scratch, it is recommended that any Magento theme you choose for your eCommerce store will feature colors and designs that align with your brand. Other features such as fonts, images, and position of tabs must combine to give that unique visual appeal that your shoppers deserve.
Nearly all Magento themes providers allow prospective customers to view a demo version of the template before installing it. Take your time when reviewing the demo version since some marketplaces do not offer a money-back guarantee on your purchase or make you go through a lengthy process if they eventually initiate a refund.
Customizable
Although most Magento themes providers promise users that they could customize its features and functionalities to fit their website, the reality is that this is not always the case.
Therefore, before you settle for a Magento theme, consult a best magento developer to know whether there is a chance that it could be customized to reflect the core features you expect to have on your eCommerce website.
Another vital factor is that most ready-made Magento themes are specifically designed to serve eCommerce merchants in a particular niche. Trying to customize a Fashion Theme to suit an Electronic Store will likely be more hard work than customizing an Electronics Theme to suit your website.
Mobile Appeal
It is no longer news that online shoppers now spend more time on mobile devices instead of desktop. For this reason, the ideal Magento theme must not only appeal to desktop users but also mobile shoppers.
In fact, it should be compatible with the majority if not all popular mobile devices. You can check mobile compatibility while previewing the demo version of your theme.
Easy Checkout
A lengthy checkout process or misrepresentation of information on the purchase page could increase the rate of cart abandonment and low sales.
A good Magento theme either features a simple checkout page or include extensions that allow you to set it up quickly. Your profit numbers depend on it.
The Magento eCommerce software remains one of the most widely used because of the amazing functionalities that it offers to merchants. That status is also likely not to end in 2019, especially following the release of the Magento 2.2.8 in March.
However, any successful Magento eCommerce owner will readily tell you that the software is like a car engine and body while extensions are the other parts of the car that you need if you are ever to ride it.
Well, let’s quickly go over what a Magento extension is and also some things that they can help you do on your eCommerce store.
What is a Magento Extension?
A Magento extension is a block of PHP code embedding additional functions that are not provided by the Magento eCommerce software. If the last sentence line is difficult for you to grasp, then you may be better off with our car illustration mentioned earlier.
What a Magento extension does for your eCommerce store is what you car tires, brakes, mirror and every other thing you can think of aside from the engine and body.
Magento extensions allow you to add extended functionalities to your store’s front-end and backend without you needed a developer to alter your site’s code. They allow you to maintain your stores the way you want and make changes with more flexibility than usually should be possible.
What Are Some Things You Can Do With A Magento Extension?
Well, there are so many functionalities embedded within Magento extensions, meaning that there are also so many things you can do with them. Precisely, here are some of the most common things people need a Magento Extension for:
Tax Calculation
Since eCommerce stores are fast turning in higher revenue than brick and mortar stores, calculating taxes can be a headache for merchants especially if sales run into thousands daily. Happily, though, some Magento extensions offer to take this load off the merchant by calculating taxes using sales figures generated by the store.
Some popular Magento tax calculation extensions included AvaTax and Sovox Sales Tax Calculator.
Within the last decade, Magento has become one of the most popular eCommerce systems used by online merchants. Regardless of the product they want to offer on sale or the eCommerce business model they’re implementing, Magento always has an answer.
In this article, we’ll review ☛ What to look out for when choosing a Magento Hosting Provider ☛ Recommended Magento Hosting Providers ☛ Magento’s top features
1. What To Look Out For When Choosing A Magento Hosting Provider
Security
Hackers are real, and you should be wary of doing what you can to keep your store safe. However, your hosting provider is responsible for ensuring server security every time.
It is not a wrong idea to ask a potential Magento hosting provider if they use a server-side virus scanner and also what forms of DDoS or firewall systems are available on their service.
Since PHP modules are susceptible to attack, you may also want to find out whether the hosting provider offers an application for turning the modules on and off any time you want.
Up-Time
For one thing, you never want your Magento eCommerce store to go offline now and then because of hosting related issues.
Since the internet is always online and customers can come around at any time, it is vital to match their consistency by choosing the right hosting provider.
While it is true that nearly all Magento hosting providers will attach a “99.99% uptime” tag to their package, the reality is that some of them cannot guarantee it in the long run.
Compatibility
It is also vital to ensure that Magento’s hosting requirements are in line with what is offered by the provider.
For instance, newer versions of Magento recommends PHP 7.0 or higher, and although most providers have implemented the necessary upgrades, some may still lack the compatible features to support the deployment.
Find out from them whether all their current features are compatible with Magento’s.
Speed
How long do you expect a web page to load, especially when you’re in the middle of shopping?
The reality is that online buyers are impatient and don’t have all the time in the world to wait for your overloaded system to show them the items they’re searching.
Once you determine the size of your eCommerce store, choose a hosting plan that guarantees the maximum speed and verify with the provider that there will be no numerous cases of server overload.
Technical Support
Let’s face it. No matter how hard you try always to keep your eCommerce store online, downtime issues related to hosting providers are almost inevitable.
When that happens, you should have a trusted channel to get in touch with the hosting provider even if its a holiday!
Not offering a 24/7 support can be a red flag that a particular Magento hosting provider is not the best option for you.
Pricing
Since there are many recommended Magento hosting providers, it is never a wrong idea to compare pricing and choose which one suits your budget.
There are still some other things you have to spend on before your store can go live. Therefore, hosting should not dig a hole in your pocket!
Customer Reviews
Conclusively, the best Magento Hosting providers include a review page on their website to allow satisfied and unsatisfied customers share their thoughts about the service.
If you can’t find this page on their website, then you can do a Google search containing the company’s name.
For instance: (Magento Hosting Company name) + negative reviews
Since you already expect a top hosting company to offer at least an average service, searching for negative reviews can help you to find out what loopholes exist easily. Recommended Magento Hosting Providers
Aside from hiring an expert Magento eCommerce developer to work on your new online store, successful merchants will tell you that the next thing that decides the success of your business is the Magento hosting provider that you choose.
A couple of years ago, there were only a few e-commerce businesses with a small pool of consumers still struggling to understand the benefits of buying things online rather than in-store.
Fast forward to our time, there are millions of e-commerce businesses representing different models and serving a global audience.
Now, people would rather shop all day on their smartphones and track their orders easily, instead of driving several miles to get to a brick and mortar shop with limited product inventory.
Even the latest eCommerce websites allow visitors to either shop or browse through their gallery of different products in several niches ranging from electronics, home decor, wears, books and just anything you could think.
Did eCommerce improve or did people begin to understand its usefulness?
The answer to both sides of the question would be YES.
eCommerce has evolved through the years with improved payment options, automatic order processing, faster shipping, more developed UIs, and different innovative models as we’ll learn shortly.
These significant improvements are the reasons why people started to understand the usefulness of eCommerce and embraced it to the current levels.
However, given the millions of e-commerce businesses in existence, there could be confusion about what form of practice to classify as an e-commerce business model.
The confusion could even become a significant challenge for individuals or organizations who want to join the eCommerce industry.
Well, in this article, we dive into the types of e-commerce business models and afterward, discuss the pros and cons of running an e-commerce venture using any of them.
Before we get to that, let’s define what a business model is.
A business model refers to a plan for the successful operation of a business and how it relates to existing products or services in the industry. It also encompasses the revenue sources as well as the potential customer base.
Now that we got that let’s get to the core business models that exist in the eCommerce industry.
Types of eCommerce Business Models
There are primarily six eCommerce business models :
You’ve probably heard that dropshipping is an excellent way to kick off your journey as an e-commerce merchant especially when you have no plans to stock an inventory.
Well, that is the whole truth about this branch of e-commerce.
Dropshipping practically allows you to source hot selling product(s) from your favorite merchants and list them for sale on your website without having to worry about how to deliver the product when a customer places an order.
The dropshipping company takes care of all that, while you make a huge commission on the sales.
But wait, that sounded all too easy.
The good news is that it can be that easy when you partner with the best dropshipping companies out there and also hire a top e-commerce solutions developer.
From this point onwards, we’ll reveal the 15 best dropshipping companies for your e-commerce business in 2019.
For More Info: https://magnetoitsolutions.com/blog/best-drop-shipping-companies
So you’ve always had this dream of building an e-commerce website, but have not turned it into a reality because of the same reason why most people have not done so too.
They don’t know how to get started, but they understand that they need at least some basic knowledge before hiring a website developer to build the e-commerce site or trying anything ambitious.
Well, this post tries to solve that problem by outlining 15 steps to build an e-commerce website. So whether you are building by yourself or hiring someone to help you, you’ll have all the knowledge you need to turn your e-commerce dream to reality at the end of this article.
1. Pick a Domain Name and Brand
The first step to building your e-commerce website is searching for the domain that you want to use for it. Completing this search will help you confirm the availability of the domain and the cost of making it yours.
One thing to bear in mind, though, is that the name you choose for your domain has a significant impact on how much traffic you can send to your site directly and from search engines.
So keep the domain name short (so that customers can easily remember it) and related to the niche you want to join (so that you can rank for the right keywords in the long run). Domain names that fall within five-ten characters, plus the .com, .shop or what extension you choose can easily stick with your potential visitors.
Do you know that you can make more money by selling the same products on your Magento store? How? It’s simple. Offering quality products and giving your customers the power to personalize the items the way they like it will generate more money for your business.
This is a strategy you should implement as an e-tailer. Your customers will always patronize you when you sell quality products, but they’re willing to pay more if they can customize the product according to their preference.
Imagine selling a quality Chelsea T-shirt for $30, your customer, who is a Chelsea fan, will likely be ready to pay a little extra if he can imprint his name at the back of the shirt right there on your online store. Another instance is a customer who will pay a few extra dollars when they can customize a coffee mug with a logo according to their specification.
The good news is that you can actually make that possible by using a product designer tool or software, which you can install on your Magento store. However, since there are many different product designer extensions out there in the market, it’s quite challenging to choose the right tool that will do a perfect job. So to make things easier for you, we have come up with a list of the top 9 Magento product designer tools for your e-tailing business.
Dropshipping is the business model which allows companies to take a step towards a new way to operate things without manufacturing or maintaining their own inventory. It is a way of selling products that provide business owners to have their customer orders to get fulfilled directly through a wholesaler and manufacturer.
What really happens here is that the product is sold through the third party from the seller (wholesaler or manufacturer) directly shipped to the customers. In this process, the seller never actually sees or touches the products.
In short, you can say that Dropshipping is a business that allows you to sell and ship products that you don’t own and don’t stock.
Process flow:-
You receive an order
Forward those orders to your suppliers or Dropshipping partner
Supplier or partner fulfills the order and delivers to your customers
