In this blog, we will discuss 7 steps to do cross-border trading and conduct smooth global operations. But before that, we have discussed the benefits of going global.

Table of Contents

• Benefits of Going Global
  – Access to Niche Markets
  – Increase in Customer Retention
  – Increase in Brand Reputation
• Simple Steps to Expand your eCommerce Business Globally
  – Create a Business Plan
  – Develop a Cohesive Marketing Strategy
  – Localize your Online Store
  – Outsource your workforce
  – Select Shipping Partners
  – Provide Robust Payments Options
  – Collect Feedback
• Marketplace Solutions for Business Expansion
• Conclusion

Benefits of Going Global

1. Access to Niche Markets

Industries having multiple niches and microsegments can benefit from global operations by increasing their accessibility to foreign audiences. For example, an eCommerce business specializing in Peer-to-Peer furniture rental can expand its target market by providing the same furniture rental services in multiple countries.

2.  Increase in Customer Retention

Businesses with diverse audiences, including consumers from middle to upper class can reduce the customer churn rate by launching multinational branches. This will happen in use cases where the loyal customers of an eCommerce business move abroad and become immigrants. Similar is the case with customers living abroad on work or study visas. Thus, along with getting access to foregin customers, global operations can also assist eCommerce brands in retaining their existing customers widely.

3. Increase in Brand Reputation

Expanding business across the borders will boost the brand reputation of eCommerce businesses. After expansion, they will be considered under the global players list, which can have a positive effect on the consumer mindset. Moreover, global operations also improve a company’s brand status in their native land, making them highly potential assets for funding.

Simple Steps to Expand your eCommerce Business Globally

Step #1: Create a Business Plan

Each market is unique, and it has a well-established ground set of rules to enter the market and establish a retail business. To satisfy that, eCommerce businesses require strategic planning.

Start with what you know and move ahead from there:

• Define short, medium, and long-term goals 
• Define the business model
• Map out your supply chain
• Create projects and allocate funds
• Conduct appropriate market research for deployment

Step #2: Develop a Cohesive Marketing Strategy

Decide the name of your global venture, i.e., whether you will be promoting your business under the same brand name or adding an extension. Similarly, register trademarks for your business and maintain consistency across all marketing channels. Secondly, you will need to define all marketing channels and touchpoints for effective campaigning. As your business will be new in a well-established market, it is best to explain your Unique Selling Points (USPs) very clearly through your marketing channels. 

Step #3: Localize your Online Store

Global business expansion will also require business owners to localize their online stores with the targeted region. This includes using a different festive calendar for introducing discount promos and other marketing campaigns. eCommerce businesses will also need to hire local customer support who can speak in the native language of customers and understand their various concerns. 

Also, the localization will be required for each targeted region. For this reason, it is wise to opt for multilingual and multi-currency eCommerce marketplace platforms that are scalable for conducting multinational operations. 

Another efficient way to localize is to hire polyglot customer support and sales personnel who can converse in multiple languages and resolve customer queries. 

Step #4: Outsource your workforce

Entrepreneurs can outsource various tasks such as content marketing, social media marketing, customer support, logistics, human resources and also hire a virtual assistant. Outsourced professionals will be well-versed in the native language of the target audience and aware about their culture. Thus, they would be able to do a better job than your in-house team.

Another benefit of outsourcing some work is the lower cost of services when compared to monthly salaries, plus additional savings on hardware resources and utility bills. Moreover, outsourcing a professional team is time saving. While business owners just need to find suitable outsourcing services to get started, hiring each talent manually will consume too much time and resources. 

Step #5: Select Shipping Partners

Shipping is a challenging aspect of conducting eCommerce businesses. It is also the last stage of many satisfying eCommerce operations. However, shipping rates and shipping speed are equally useful to begin the operation. To elaborate, it has been proven on several accounts that customers consider shipping price an important deciding factor. eCommerce stores with cheap or free shipping policies receive a competitive edge and attract more customers. 

The challenge that new entrants in the global eCommerce industry face is finding reliable shipping partners with reasonable shipping costs. Furthermore, to do some savings, eCommerce businesses are recommended to inform the customer about the payment of customs and other taxes (if any) during the checkout process. This will also prevent consumer disputes at a later stage. 

Some shipping options for global eCommerce businesses are: 

• Shipping directly from the headquarter country, which will be inclusive of international carrier charges and other trade regulations.
• Establishing warehouses in the target country and finding local inventory resources to cut down costs on international deliveries.
• Partnership with local shipment services to handle all shipments remotely. 
• Businesses based in the UK can sell on OnBuy for easy international shipping.  

Make sure to choose a sustainable shipping plan which provides ROI in the long run. Estimate yearly shipping and handling costs before jumping into the business to ensure steady profits.

Step #6: Provide Robust Payments Options

Consumers across the globe prefer to make payment through their trusted gateway platforms. For this reason, it is important to provide reliable payment gateways on your online store. Also note that every gateway services provider can charge you or your customers a small percentage of the transaction as service charge or transaction fees. Fof best value, look for the options that levy minimum service charges. 

Also, global and cross-border eCommerce transactions require your payment gateway to support multiple currencies. A multilingual setup will also streamline the payment experience for your customers. If entering into western markets, you can accept crypto currencies to attract high-income customers to your business. 

An important integration for global eCommerce stores is exchange rate converter that will eliminate the task of manually specifying pricing in various currencies and improve operational excellence. 

Step #7: Collect Feedback 

Consumer feedback is important for business growth. It helps entrepreneurs identify the shortcomings of their business and improve the value proposition. Consumer feedback can be collected from your first customers and used to improve international stores.

The different approaches to collecting consumer feedback are:

• Cold calling
• Emails
• Reviews and ratings page
• Feedback surveys

Marketplace Solutions for Business Expansion

Global expansion looks challenging on the first sight but is efficiently achievable with strategic planning. Following the aforementioned list, interested entrepreneurs can not only expand their business globally but also carry out smooth global operations. If warehousing and inventory seems to be the primary challenge, then our top recommendation for such entrepreneurs would be to expand to a marketplace business.

An online marketplace follows the asset light business model in which multiple vendors sign up on the platform and sell their products. This way, the business owner is only responsible for connecting the vendor with the customer whereas the vendor manages the inventory. The marketplace owner earns money through several revenue streams such as commission, featured listing, display advertising, subscription packages and more. 

Below is the list of renowned eCommerce software to help you expand your business globally:

Yo!Kart: Yo!Kart is a multi-vendor eCommerce platform with advanced capabilities to streamline eCommerce operations. It is also fully customizable and supports unlimited product listings and user profiles so that you can grow your business without worrying about the scalability of your software technology. Along with this, Yo!Kart also comes with one-year of free technical support. 

CedCommerce: CedCommerce is a Magento powered marketplace solution that supports both B2B and B2C operations. Like Yo!Kart, it also comes with unlimited listings and user-profiles. As the solution is developed on Magento, it comes with an open-source code, which is easy to edit for customization and feature expansion.

Arcadier: Arcadier is another feature-rich marketplace solution that simplifies eCommerce  operations for various kinds of businesses. It is a fully-hosted solution that  comes with monthly recurring prices. Although it has all essential features required to start an asset-light business, it comes with a limited number of transactions. 

Contact the respective sales teams of these solutions to understand how they can help you grow and promote your business overseas. Interested entrepreneurs can also book a personal one-on-one demo for Yo!Kart and CedCommerce. 

Conclusion 

All entrepreneurs with or without a local offline store can launch a global eCommerce store that can help them acquire more customers and gain an international presence. A global brand image will also give them a competitive advantage and open up various opportunities for partnerships, funding and conducting business. Lastly, the choice of the eCommerce solution would be crucial in streamlining the global business operations. For that reason, we advise you to do a careful selection of the solution.

The post Launching a Global Store: 7 Simple Steps to Sell Across Borders & Expand Your Business appeared first on Diggiecorp Blog.

Weeks before the next holiday, eCommerce stores make preparations to see sales numbers increase with the spike of traffic that accompanies holiday cheer. However, said businesses often fail to account for weak infrastructure. And this often causes websites to crash with the increased load.

That means you need to ensure your website hosting doesn’t let you down.

Picking the Right Ecommerce Hosting Platform

Choosing the right ecommerce hosting platform decides the kind of infrastructure your website will have.

According to eMarketer, total holiday retail spending in 2018 increased by 5.4%, reaching $998.32 billion. While traditional brick-and-mortar retail saw a 3.9% rise going up to $874.42 billion, the ecommerce industry grew by 16.7%, reaching up to $123.90 billion during the holiday season. Additionally, Statista predicts a whopping increase in worldwide ecommerce sales, up to $4.5 trillion by the year 2021.

What’s more, enterprises have been increasing their spending on cloud computing ever since COVID-19 necessitated radical changes. Though the current shift to the public cloud initially caused organizations to exceed their budget by 23%, it is now expected cloud spending will increase by 47% by next year. This raises some concerns about handling cost optimization and forecasting.

Source: Flexera Blog

Given the impressive sales forecast and the shift towards cloud spending, online stores need to ensure a smooth customer experience to make the best of the holiday season. But this is not without its hefty share of challenges.

Read on to find out just how you can prepare your online store for a successful holiday season.

Web Hosting Challenges for Online Stores During the Holiday Season

Business owners, agency owners, and freelancers face no shortage of challenges. You have to handle so many aspects of your business, from operations and product delivery logistics to customer relationship building and marketing. The last thing you would want to deal with is having your website go down because the hosting server couldn’t handle the traffic load.

Scalability

I can’t stress the significance of this factor strong enough, which is why I’ve mentioned it in the very beginning. You should be able to scale your server resources when needed, such as during a predictable traffic spike. If you’re using a dedicated or shared server, there’s a good chance your website will suffer from downtime following the high traffic volumes, rendering all your marketing and promotional efforts useless.

Security

Whether you sell watches on your eCommerce store or own a ticket booking website to book tickets, sensitive customer data security is your top priority. Sensitive data may include credit card details, residential addresses, mobile phone numbers, emails, and more. These need to be safe from malicious attacks.

Website Speed and Performance

Your website needs to perform seamlessly to retain your target audience. With a managed cloud hosting platform, you can use the user interface to monitor the server and web application alongside the support of a reliable team to work with. According to Kissmetrics, about 40% of mobile users complain that eCommerce stores don’t load at all on their mobile phones, while about 70% of them complain that the store loads too slowly.

If your website takes too long to load, you’ll face issues like a high bounce rate, cart abandonment, and lower positioning in search results. This isn’t solely related to optimizing the website, but also includes the server location, assigned bandwidth, and the server stack being used.

The Answer to Your Woes: A Reliable Managed Cloud Hosting Platform

A reliable cloud hosting platform can go a long way in growing your business. You’ll have more time to build relationships with your customers, act on feedback on your products/services, and work on strategies to expand your business.

Here’s how a managed cloud hosting platform eases your work:

• A cloud hosting service is not limited to a single server like traditional hosting providers.
• Cloud hosting offers unparalleled online business scalability.
• Shared hosting will only offer two to three different domains at one time. However, a cloud server can offer unlimited domains that you can point to a single server.
• You can virtually manage your server.
• You get data backup and recovery solutions that other web hosting companies do not offer.
• You only pay for the resources you consume.

A managed cloud hosting platform is the ideal solution for business owners and entrepreneurs lacking much-needed technical skills to manage a server effectively. The platform facilitates these users by managing all server-related technicalities.

Some Noteworthy Features to Look Out For

Scalability

Ecommerce websites need to be scalable so they don’t run out of server bandwidth when an important promotional event occurs. That’s where managed cloud hosting platforms assist greatly. They offer easy scaling solutions for server memory, bandwidth, and storage capacity.

Security

Your eCommerce website security relies on your team and the hosting service you choose. Some of these hosting companies provide free SSL certificates for website data encryption, along with 24/7 server monitoring and dedicated support teams.

You should always follow the latest security SOPs and guidelines to protect your customers. Regularly run security checks and server maintenance checks on your website to avoid any trouble.

Performance

Regardless of the web application you use, your hosting provider’s server stack should optimize your online store bringing the loading time to under a second. Whether your online business is on Prestashop, WooCommerce, or Magento, you should see excellent results every time.

Uptime

While many web hosting companies claim to have 99% uptime, they often fail to keep this promise. Consider looking for reviews where developers test-out servers and their performance metrics. Most web hosting companies roll out reviews and blog posts about how their servers have been performing lately.

Access to Support

It’s important to identify the different methods of accessing the support team of your hosting provider. If the support team has multiple channels and access points it would be easier for you to reach out to them.

In light of recent competition, most hosting providers work towards constantly improving their customer support response time. One of the methods they’ve adopted is using ChatBots.

ChatBots help automated processes and help you achieve objectives with ease. They can be assigned specific tasks and can notify the user accordingly. For instance, they can set reminders so the user knows that the next automated backup is nearing. You can also set certain actions, like notifying the user when server resources are being consumed at a certain level.

Automated & Managed Backups

Most hosting services don’t allow users to set their frequencies when creating website backups. In contrast, managed cloud hosting platforms offer the convenience of setting your own frequencies of automatic website backups so your data is always safe.

Cloudways – A Perfect Managed Ecommerce Cloud Hosting Platform

Cloudways is amongst the leading managed cloud hosting platforms that offer hassle-free cloud management services. This top eCommerce hosting platform is fast, secure, and scalable. Plus, while most reliable web hosting services charge around $20 to $25 per month, Cloudways lets you host multiple websites on the Cloudways platform for as low as $10 per month. And you only have to pay for the resources you consume.

Cloudways provides cloud hosting of the following infrastructures.

• Digital Ocean
• Vultr
• Linode
• Amazon Web Services
• Google Compute Engine

Bonus Tip: Earn Recurring Income with an Affiliate Program

You can supplement your main income with a passive income through the Cloudways Affiliate Program. While you promote your eCommerce website, Cloudways gives you the opportunity to earn via three payment models: Slab, Hybrid, and Custom.

There are no lock-ins in the flexible payment cycles and you can consistently earn a passive income. This affiliate program is the best fit for performance marketers, bloggers, media publishers – and it now extends to you, business owners.

There’s an extensive article on how you can join the Cloudways Affiliate Program, in case you want to see more details.

In a Nutshell

The hosting platform for your eCommerce store plays a crucial role in your business’s success. Hosting features directly affect your business bottom line and the privacy of your customer data, among other things. The real benefit of planning and working alongside a reliable eCommerce hosting solution is that it grows your online business while reducing any hassle.

The post How to Prepare Your Online Store for the Holiday Season Traffic Spike appeared first on Diggiecorp Blog.

When you set out to market your eCommerce store, it’s not enough to just say you want to be big. There are many successful stores out there. You should have some particular goals in mind.

Goals help you gauge the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. They also make it easier for you to create and adjust your long-term plan.

As you build an eCommerce store in 2024, here are ten key goal-oriented marketing strategies to try out:

1. Draw In Desired Traffic

With your store up and running, a lot of your first visitors will be a random bunch. Try to get more people from a particular group to visit the site. Your store may be largely into selling customized uniforms to other businesses in bulk.

Or it could be offering mainly women’s wear. In either case, if the majority of your traffic is teenage boys, you need to switch up. Use Google Analytics to find out certain qualities about your traffic like age, gender, devices used, location etc.

Revise your strategy to get your store the right attention. Mention it in business forums. Be present in social media groups dedicated to subjects relating to what you sell.

2. Expand Your Email List

Once you start getting traffic to your store, sales may not immediately shoot up. Establish relationships with these people. Go through your website data to find out their behavior, like what they are looking at.

Figure out other attributes like their location and age. Place CTAs in the right places, requesting them to sign up for a newsletter. Give them good reasons.

This could be updates on latest offers and product availability. It can also be a discount on their next purchase.

With an email list, you can set a number of people you want to add each month. You can also set a target for how many return visits and sales you want to get from your list.

This helps you learn what you need to do for different groups of people to get them to buy.

3. Rank Higher In Searches

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a good way to get a lot of organic attention for your site. It mainly involves getting your site more likely to appear when people search for products you sell.

Use tools like Ahrefs to find out which words shoppers type the most into search engines when looking for products you have. Perform a search and see whether your store makes it to the first page.

Revisit your store and change your titles and other phrases to be more similar to the keywords. Work on the linking between pages and other sites too. Conduct these search tests until you appear higher up.

You can set your goals to be about a position on the first page. Additionally, try singling out particular keywords and become the most common search result for those.

4. Enhance Your Website

This largely caters to people who shop on the go. To attract more of these shoppers, make your site smooth on mobile devices. Run speed tests using tools like Pingdom or Google PageSpeed.

Find out the areas in which you’re getting bad grades and make changes. Perform the thumb zone test. This will let you know how easy it is for someone to navigate your store on mobile.

Use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) if available for your platform. Set targets for metrics like number of mobile users, and study how page speed and size affect them.

Resize CTA buttons and reposition other features to limit scrolling and zooming. This may require changing your entire ecommerce store theme.

5. Put Out Targeted Ads

The benefit of these ads is that you can pinpoint a specific group of people you want to reach. Set up social media pages for your store. Create ads on platforms like Facebook.

Apply certain settings to target people based on their interests, education etc. Check to see how many people the ad reaches and how many click on it. Compare these numbers with how much you spend and how long you run the ads.

This information will help you come up with a good budget for getting a particular number of store visitors. Play around with the variables until you find the right mix. Store those presets for future use.

6. Boost Sales

This is usually more of an end goal but in many cases, it fits into your marketing. For example, with Google and Instagram shopping, you can advertise and sell in one go. It’s basically turning your would-be ad space into a storefront.

Open business accounts/pages on different social media sites like Facebook and Instagram. Share photos of your products with tags embedded. These will show price information with the option to buy when clicked on.

Do the same on Pinterest by setting up buyable pins. Monitor the amount of sales you get from different platforms. Use this data to set goals for how much content to share, and where to share more.

7. Promote Products And Categories

A common and effective goal-oriented strategy in ecommerce marketing is product promotions. Study the data from your store about performance of product listings.

Don’t focus on sales alone. See how many shoppers manually search for a product. How many read its description. How many add it to the cart, etc. Rearrange site areas like categories to give struggling products more visibility.

Attach offers like free shipping, slashed price periods or bonus goods to these listings. Create attractive landing pages placing focus on these promotions. Design artwork about the promotions and share it on social media.

Come up with milestones for product page visits and purchases. Adjust their presentation on the site and elsewhere until you hit those milestones.

8. Get Rated

A lot of people shop according to ratings and reviews of products. Some even look for products directly from review sites. Send out free samples of your products to different review communities.

Put CTAs on your store asking people to rate your products and the shopping experience. Gather this information from external sources like TrustPilot and also from your site.

Display it in the right places. This could be star ratings next to product names, testimonials on your homepage, and other ratings at the checkout. Aim for a higher number of reviews to make the information more credible.

Keep reaching for more stars. Improve your service to get glowing testimonials.

9. Seek Referrals

People take their friends’ and relatives’ words seriously. Try to use the visitors you receive to get more visitors. Start a referral program. When someone creates an account, views products or purchases give them a referral code.

They can share this with friends. If those people use it, you award that initial visitor points redeemable on the next purchase, or some other type of reward. This also helps you get some free advertising from the person you gave a code.

Track the number of referrals you get per code given out. Figure out the number of sales you want to get through these codes. Adjust how many you give and the awards attached to ensure that you still get a decent markup.

You can also give codes that are restricted to one account opening. There are apps like ReferralCandy that can help with all this. Make sure you create awareness for the referral program both on your site and on social media.

10. Create And Share Videos

These help a lot with information that is harder to offer easily in text. They are also good for when you want to host/interview a big personality. Pick a type of video you want to produce. It could be a demo, a facility tour, post-purchase etc.

Choose your mode of distribution. Live videos are getting more popular. The live-stream can also be available for re-watching. List all the relevant metrics. These include watch rate, view count, click-through and conversions.

Place CTAs within the videos or in the video post captions. Point people towards the store, a particular product or discount. Check how many people watch. Find out for how long they watched before stopping. How many took action.

Alter the CTAs, video lengths, intros, guests, number of avenues of distribution. All these will help you realize varying results and guide you in setting new goals.

In Conclusion

When it comes to goal-oriented strategies for eCommerce marketing, here are some things to always remember.

First, they must have measurable variables. There should be numbers that can be counted. View counts, page speed, email subscribers, etc. All these can be represented as numbers.

Secondly, you should have targets in mind. Set a number you want to hit within a given time. Keep increasing the target whenever you hit the one you set.

Third, learn how to track. Educate yourself on the different analytical tools out there for each piece of data you’re seeking. Always compare all numbers that are related, to find out whether your actions are the ones actually producing changes.

The post 10 Goal-Oriented Strategies To Market Your Ecommerce Store In 2024 appeared first on Diggiecorp Blog.

There’s a hesitation to share anything about your business with anyone — what if they steal your idea? There can be a reluctance to read about what others have done, for fear of either adopting bad advice or losing faith in your thoughts. If you talk to an eCommerce entrepreneur, they’ll tell you the biggest mistake one can make is not reading best eCommerce blogs. 

Well, I’m here to tell you to let go of that attitude and become a sponge. Starting a successful eCommerce business is challenging, and countless companies have come before you and made mistakes you can learn from without repeating them yourself. There are tons of incredible blogs dedicated to giving you free advice on ecommerce inspiration, marketing strategies, statistics on trends, and so much more. Pop your entrepreneurship bubble and absorb it all.

Best Ecommerce Blogs For 2025

1. Shopify

Let’s start in the big leagues. You’ve undoubtedly heard of Shopify, the ecommerce platform giant that you can sell your goods on — but did you know it also has an incredible blog dedicated to eCommerce marketing and running your own eCommerce business? It offers everything from practical tips and guides to features of other companies. Maybe you could be featured there one day.

2. Merchant Maverick

You want an excellent blog for small eCommerce business; Merchant Maverick has you covered. While a lot of larger companies have blogs that are focused on issues that other large companies are facing, Merchant Maverick gets down into all the nitty-gritty details of everyday challenges faced by small businesses. From an in-depth analysis of small payment processing apps to saving money on shipping costs, this blog is an excellent resource and is considered as one of the top eCommerce blogs.

3. Diggiecorp Insights

Diggiecorp Insights aims to be the one-stop-shop for entrepreneurs and is among one of the best eCommerce blogs, whether you’re just starting and need advice on eCommerce marketplace platforms, or you’re in the thick of it and need some marketing inspiration or web design ideas. The blog goes beyond eCommerce and enables an eCommerce entrepreneur to understand different aspects of running an online business.

4.  A Better Lemonade Stand

Where are you in your eCommerce business journey: Are you still creating it, are you ready to launch, or are you trying to grow? Lucky for you, A Better Lemonade Stand has content for whatever phase you’re in. It’s an excellent resource for guides, advice, and inspirational stories to help entrepreneurs all over.

5. Yo!Kart Blog

Yo!Kart’s blogs are true inspiration and a one-stop destination for Entrepreneurs, startups and businesses of all sizes who want to be a part of this growing eCommerce landscape. Here you gain valuable insights on multi-vendor marketplace platforms, updates on eCommerce trends, explore growth strategies, learn about eCommerce niches, business models, revenue streams and more from the industry’s top experts.

5. Ecommerce Platforms

Running an ecommerce site is a lot of work. Not only do you have to handle marketing and operations, you also have to manage the infrastructure that makes your business work. Fortunately, there are a lot of ecommerce platforms out there that can help you manage everything from inventory management to shipping and logistics. Ecommerce Platforms aims to compare the most popular ones and give you an unbiased opinion to help you choose the best one for your needs.

6. 3dcart

What better resource is there for eCommerce expertise than the blog of one of the longest-running eCommerce platforms? 3dcart has been helping people build their own online stores for more than two decades, and their writers regularly release excellent articles with in-depth guidance based on the latest knowledge. Their archive is extensive, meaning there is a blog post to answer just about any question that merchants could have.

7. Get Elastic

On the technology side of things, Get Elastic has you covered and is considered as one of the best eCommerce blogs. It focuses on the latest and most significant breakthroughs and news in the tech sphere, from eCommerce trends to how new technology can (and will) impact your business in the future. Its latest articles focus on everything from cryptocurrency to the Internet of Things, but the most important reason to read it is to keep an eye on the future.

8. Ryan Robinson

For a more personal look at one entrepreneur’s journey, enter Ryan Robinson. He features other entrepreneurs on his Side Hustle podcast, along with guides to making money blogging, and he frequently writes long-form articles with everything you need to know about vital online marketing topics like keyword research and email marketing.

9. Printful

Printful: a custom, on-demand printing and fulfillment service, and excellent blog resource? Believe it or not, Printful has an incredible blog filled with a massive variety of unique content. They feature marketing advice (including a full Instagram hashtag guide), an eCommerce platform guide (SEO, Amazon, Shopify, Etsy), and even style and trend articles ranging from interior design tips to choosing the best heather grey shirt. They’re a goldmine of advice for businesses at every stage and in any industry.

10. Red Stag Fulfillment

While Red Stag Fulfillment is a third-party logistics company and frequently features 3PL topics, we also provide guides, resources, and infographics on just about anything eCommerce-related. We’re big on data-driven tips and practical guides you can apply to your own business.

11. TechCrunch ECommerce

TechCrunch is a little different than many of the other companies on this list, as it is solely a publishing company and not another business with a blog. Its sole job is to publish news, analysis, and articles about technology, and of course, it has an eCommerce section. For the latest tech news and profiles of up-and-coming tech-focused companies, stop by TechCrunch’s blog.

12. Multichannel Merchant

No-nonsense Multichannel Merchant is one of the top eCommerce blogs which offers a wealth of articles in three categories: eCommerce, Marketing, and Operations & Fulfillment. Taking more of a broad view, they publish everything you ever wanted to know in each space, including news, commentary, and guides.

13. Bootstrapping ECommerce

You’re on a budget, and you’re tired of reading articles advising you to spend thousands of dollars on platforms, software, and advertising. Bootstrapping eCommerce gets it. It gives excellent advice in its blogs, which are all focused on how to get started as an entrepreneur with the smallest investment possible.

Learn From the Best Ecommerce Experts

The most significant favor one can do for your burgeoning eCommerce business is to collect all the information you can from others who have been there and done that and use it to your advantage to do it better than you ever could have dreamed. What blog is your go-to for eCommerce tips and guides? Whom did we leave out? Let us know in the comments.

The post List Of Best eCommerce Blogs For Retailers and Marketplace Owners appeared first on Diggiecorp Blog.

Conducting successful eCommerce business operations requires the business owner to pace up with the modern trends. The world witnessed several eCommerce marketing trends last year, like shoppable posts, omnichannel support and contact delivery. Several of these trends made it to the year 2024 and capitalizing on them can assist eCommerce business owners maintain and increase their turnover.

Top Ecommerce Trends to follow in 2024

The following list will enable you to:

• Identify successful trends 
• Keep up with those trends
• Avoid unsuccessful eCommerce strategies
• Analyze the effects of trends on your business

Without further ado, let’s begin.

1. SMS Campaigns Bringing Better Returns than Email

A short message service (SMS) informs consumers about upcoming deals or other special offers of your store. It helps them keep track of shopping opportunities and the time to close the right deals.

Some may question the effectiveness of text messages, but eCommerce marketers discovered that text messages convert 6 times more than emails. Due to direct reminders, instead of encrypted emails, SMS increases the odds of your customers seeing the message you send.

With the aforementioned facts, you should consider adding SMS to your business so you can reach out to more customers. This will keep them directly informed and continue to help you grow.

2. Customer Data Guiding eCommerce

Legitimate customer data collection has become an unobjectionable source of information for eCommerce businesses. It imparts the knowledge of consumer interests and shopping behavior. This includes purchases, click rates on emails, cart abandonment rates, etc. To simplify, customer data lets businesses know how customers act and how they make purchases so that the business can make adjustments in their sales funnel accordingly.

After conducting an in-depth analysis on customer data, eCommerce brands can provide the desired deals and products to consumers. If you don’t look at data, then you can’t learn about your customers. Customer data will always be considered as important because of its effectiveness.

3. Customizable Products Riding the Personalization Wave

Consumers like options and to adjust things according to their needs. Providing a customizable service meets those needs while giving them more choices. While some businesses may worry about the extra costs of customizable products, those costs are justifiable considering the benefits.

Think of it like this: some people may not want everything in a product. Maybe you sell wrist watches and the customer likes the dial and strap of two different watches. With customization, the customer can put the different dial and strap into a single watch.

The main reason behind the popularity of customizable products is that people like choices. In comparison to an eCommerce website that restricts consumer choices, the ones that increase them leverage the benefit of providing options. Product customization is a tactic that enables you to provide more options at less costs.

4. Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL)

Buy Now Pay Later is a payment option that gained immense popularity in the second half of the previous decade. According to LitExtension “In the plight of Covid-19 trauma, changing the way customers purchase products takes center stage in the conversion generating process. And, it looks like “Buy now, pay later” eCommerce is here to say.” It allows consumers with low cash reserves and high-credit scores to purchase their favorite items and pay at a later date when suitable. Klarna bank, Affirm and Afterpay are some financial institutions that widely support BNPL and have standardized it in the US.

According to intelligence collected by eMarketer, more than 20% of US consumers used Buy Now Pay Later in the year 2020. The top benefits of using the BNPL are:

• It helps people avoid using credit cards
• Is an interest-free payment option
• Ensures a speedy checkout process
• Has easier terms and conditions than finance

Buy Now Pay Later is also useful for eCommerce businesses as:

• It increases conversions in sales
• Reduces the cart abandonment rate
• Streamlines customer experience
• Builds brand loyalty

To install a BNPL method on your eCommerce store, you are required to sign up with Klarna, Affirm or any other BNPL service provider. After signing up, you can add their API to your eCommerce store.

5. Payment Options Attracting Customers

Along with Buy Now Pay Later, consumers are demanding various payment options. This could be due to the various benefits that banks and other financial institutions provide on their payment methods. However, for a business that provides a diverse range of products with some of them categorizing as quite “expensive,” it is required for them to provide various payment options.

When it comes to payment options, the correct approach to handpick them for your store is to consider consumer preferences and their location. You should also think about different channels that customers may want to use to make payments.

• Do they want to buy it through their credit card or a PayPal account?
• Can we work with checks or any other physical payments?
• What software can we use to handle different payment options?

When you expand the payment options, you allow more people to make payment on your store.

6. Subscription eCommerce Gaining Speed

Monthly or yearly subscriptions remove the recurring payment process for consumers. They also eliminate the repetitive ordering process and visits to supermarts. Due to this reason, many eCommerce sites use subscription business models as a way to get guaranteed money from their customers while consistently providing them their services and products.

Before creating a subscription package for your products, ask yourself the following questions:

• Can my customers afford a monthly subscription?
• What does my service provide that encourages people to pay monthly?
• If I start a subscription model now, how will my customers react?

If all the answers rest in favor, integrate a subscription management module on your platform and ensure timely delivery of the products.

7. Visual Commerce Using AR Tools

Visual commerce facilitated growth in various aspects of the eCommerce industry, such as customer experience, customer support, product demos, marketing and more. With the help of Augmented Reality, consumers can preview a product virtually before purchasing it.

Visual commerce using AR tools has been applied differently by the following businesses:

1. Virtual Makeup Try-Ons by Sephora : The world-famous beauty products firm, Sephora, launched an augmented reality app that allowed consumers to try makeup virtually without even without purchasing. The process also eliminated the company’s expenditure on manufacturing product samples.

The post Top 7 Ecommerce Trends for 2024 appeared first on Diggiecorp Blog.

Customers look for frictionless shopping experience through various devices at their disposal and the promise of personalization of shopping cycle has become ever truer. We have the technology and the price for it has been improving with time.

However, although the technology provides us with new ways of solving them, the challenges we meet even today in the e-commerce industry are the same. Let’s elaborate.

Market Analysis – Product Sourcing and Placement

This is a continuous endeavor and challenge to tackle when running an ecommerce marketplace.

At any point in your ecommerce marketplace website development, you should have a steady source of products whether it comes from partnerships with retailers and manufacturers or third-party ecommerce platforms and drop shippers.

For the prelaunch of an ecommerce marketplace, you need to have a solid product base ready. You may well decide the product base based on market niche, partnerships or third party resources.

Over time, you will be working on your product inventory optimization and product base adaptation as you gather insight from your in-depth ecommerce marketplace analytics. This data can be layered in from different dimensions and sources and should give you the answer to these questions:

• What product is in demand?
• Why is it in demand?
• Where should I place it and how?

The key takeaway here is that you don’t limit yourself to the same products over and over again.

Common Problems with Product Placing

Product information import and maintenance are possibly the single largest problem faced by enterprise-level ecommerce today. It’s not uncommon that retailer’s product base changes at least once every year.

When shopping in a brick-n-mortar store, the customer can see the product, feel it, ask for information right there and read its packaging.

In order to provide the same experience online for the customer, the retailer must provide at least one photo, short product description, its variants in shape, color and size and a list of product specifications.

Now, let’s imagine a perfect scenario where it takes you no more than 5 minutes to get all of this ready. If your store has a product base with over 10000 products it would take you around 800+ hours just to get your catalog up and running.

At 100000 products, you’d need three people working the full year, no holidays, eight hours straight a day. Now add the annual mix by the retailer and your head will definitely spin.

The Solution

You need to choose an enterprise level ecommerce platform that comes with its own import/export feature and an application programming interface (API). With the import/export feature, you can use an excel or csv file to upload product information to save time.

Furthermore, the API can be integrated with your PIM system and/or ERP so it can continuously feed product information right into your ecommerce platform without the need of any manual data input.

Buyer Personas – Segmentation and Development

Running a huge ecommerce marketplace requires a lot of customer segmentation and persona development. A buyer persona is a fictionalized representation of your ideal customer. It helps you tailor a better experience for the users, product placing and synchronize messaging across different channels.

Common Problems with Persona Segmentation

Customer segmentation and persona development is no simple task for an ecommerce marketplace. Having a huge product base split in a significant number of categories with additional filtering available to the user won’t ensure a profit.

Some marketplaces go beyond twenty different buyer personas, which is hard to scale, optimize and maintain. But, these are huge marketplaces with vast logistics that handle big data and are able to make predictions about customer and market behavior.

The Solution

Keep in mind that it’s always better to choose up to four buyer personas, max. Else, you may burn your marketing and acquisition budget. Use your website and ecommerce analytics to track down patterns in users’ demography, behavior, and interests.

Create audience segments based on these patterns and validate your assumptions. You can refine your segmentation with specific type surveys with targeted groups and feed this info into your CRM.

This will greatly benefit your customer engagement with those specific audience segments and will allow you to build more personalized experiences, ensuring lower bounce and cart abandonment rate.

Acquisition Channels – Choice and Optimization

It’s most often that customers engage with your marketplace via more than one marketing channel and you may no longer rely on a single acquisition channel to drive sales and conversions.

It takes from seven to thirteen touches before you turn your lead (potential customer) to “sales ready”. In his journey from first awareness of your marketed product to the point of closed sale and beyond, the customer will go through different channels on different device types.

With buyer personas defined and set, you now have an insight on audience behavior and their channel interactions. You should be able to determine channels that give most last hit interaction conversions on your ecommerce store and define the most promising ones.

You should start out with no more than two acquisition channels to optimize for because it’s easy for you to spill out your budget by creating leaky funnels.

Common Pitfalls with the Acquisition

It’s not uncommon that businesses burn their acquisition budget by investing in non-optimized funnels on various acquisition channels. This mainly happens because the decision is driven by the volume of potential traffic that can be acquired without previously confirming that the target audience is there in the first place.

And after a while, the budget invested reaches a scope when it becomes impossible to cut the losses – you came this far, you can’t stop now and lose money.

The Solution

The key takeaway here is that each acquisition channel works in correlation with others you employ but it requires individual optimization in order to market your product efficiently and effectively.

Before opting for a specific acquisition channel, you need to be at least somewhat sure that your target audience is there. Create a channel-specific marketing campaign that targets a specific customer persona, run it with a small budget and track CTR and CR via your ecommerce and website analytics.

You can further reduce customer acquisition cost and try to refine your channel testing by running several campaigns and A/B/n and multivariate tests to confirm the effect and ROI of the same.

Sales Cycle and Conversion Optimization

As already discussed, your users go through several touches before closing a sale. They engage through different channels via various device types. This creates friction in their customer journey and can cause confusion and extend their user journey.

You need to set triggers to measure interactions and visualize their behavior flow throughout the sales cycle. By setting a universal key performance indicator (KPI) on each checkpoint of the cycle, you can isolate specific paths that may cause confusion and cause them to drop-off.

If you can identify and isolate a specific part of their journey and tie it to a step, page, web element or requirement for its competition, you can make specific changes to personalize their experience. With A/B/n and multivariate testing, you can test your assumptions and tailor better experiences to ensure optimal sales cycle.

Common Problems with the Sales Cycle

Possibly the biggest problem with the sales cycle in ecommerce is the non-existing human connection with the customer at the point of making a sales decision. When shopping in brick-n-mortar stores, a customer may seek an advice from a salesman, ask for some product and/or retailer-specific question there and then that the customer may not find online or doesn’t have internet access to look it up.

This is a critical moment of making a sale and if the customer is left cold, it may take a while before he comes close to making a purchase decision again.

The Solution

You can choose from a number of customer touch points to improve user interaction such as Chatbots, ticketing systems, VOIP customer support systems, etc., that can all be merged and fed into your CRM. This will enable you to be in the ‘here and now’ with the customer and provide additional, real-time support when required.

You can never optimize with a one-size-fits-all funnel and expect that customers will land on the same starting point. By enabling additional support, you will create shortcuts to the user journey and engage your potential customers.

This opens up new potential sales funnels as you can personalize your offer and/or offer a more suitable product to the potential customer.

Keep in mind that all of the above require investment in infrastructure, technology stacks and a huge amount of testing to be implemented properly – as it is with everything that requires integration in an enterprise level ecommerce.

A simple thing as an FAQ page can provide significant results and shorten the customer’s sales cycle so you should definitely start out with that first.

Customer Retention

Your ecommerce marketplace cannot rely on the constant acquisition of new customers. Although it’s always fun to find and convert new customers, it costs far more than to retain an existing one.

You need to continuously build trust and earn loyalty with your customers and that requires a shift of focus from acquiring new customers to personalizing experiences and solving problems of your existing customer base.

There are ways in which you can calculate your customer retention and provide insight into further optimization of customer lifetime value (CLV).

Common Problems with Customer Retention

It’s not uncommon that large ecommerce has problems with retaining customers. When working with thousands of products and vast traffic, it becomes hard to scale and optimize.

A vast majority of customers are probably there for a single visit only – whether they make a purchase or not. Customer retention usually plummets because of trust issues, delays in communication or simply lack of continuous customer engagement.

It’s difficult to build trust when the only type of communication between you and them happens behind the screen, oftentimes automated. Customers enjoy assistance not only before but both during and after the sale is completed.

The Solution

The key takeaway here is that your sales cycle doesn’t end with conversion or product purchase. Your customer continues to engage with the product purchased. Not only you may engage him/her in making more purchases later on, but may as well become a future referral point or be given an opportunity to advocate your products online.

A good practice for ensuring customer retention comes from email marketing – offer mail subscriptions to your monthly or semi-monthly newsletters and engage both your existing and potential customers with new deals, discounts and updates to your product base.

Allow referral program and reward systems to build long-term relationships with customers and improve their engagement.

Partnership, Technologies, and Growth

When running a full-scale ecommerce marketplace and are aiming for growth, one of the biggest problems is predicting the future. With booming tech and promising developments in AI and NLP, markets are ever more subjected to disruption and change.

To ensure continuous growth and stable development, you need to seek out long-term partnerships with agencies that can follow through your development cycle and organization needs.

Common Problems when Aiming for Growth

We live in the age of constant acquisitions and mergers where department coherency is disrupted by poor documentation or differences in framework and methodology. In an enterprise-level ecommerce, scalability is often a problem.

Most small sized online ecommerce marketplaces don’t have a clear goal and a KPI aimed for enterprise-level growth. They battle with the ‘here and now’ and work on situational problems that emerge.

When they break the first market filter and traffic comes pouring in, tons of problems emerge. The volume of the analytics sample increases and issues that impact scalability and efficiency become visible from that point on.

In an enterprise-level ecommerce, these problems may be too expensive or nearly impossible to fix at that stage of growth. Establishing a new partnership or making a switch to a new technology stack and infrastructure will leave a significant scar on your budget and may cause distrust with your existing customer base.

The Solution

It’s always advisable to go with a steady partnership with agencies that can cover most acquisition, sales, and development processes from the start and grow with your organization and marketplace.

So for any serious ecommerce platform to evolve, adapt and overcome in their target market, you should make a thorough research and look for a web company that will follow your web project through every stage of its development.

Just keep in mind that a portfolio won’t suffice. Many web agencies list their portfolio items even if they did a single action/campaign for the client. The best indicator of a successful web agency is their methodology and work processes – you should always look for one that has their displayed and open-sourced online.

Here you can see the ins and outs of the project and agency works displayed and decide whether or not it would be a fit for you.

Final words

The biggest challenges we see today in the ecommerce platform development don’t differ much from what we had a decade ago. However, by taking on a customer-centered approach and visualizing their shopping cycle (whilst keeping in mind that it doesn’t end with a purchase) and making a shift in focus on its retention will help you tackle any challenge you might face in your ecommerce platform development and growth.

With a well-developed methodology to analyze, isolate and solve parts of their journey while placing the customer in focus, you would be able to quickly develop, test and launch any new feature or functionality to shorten the sales cycle and ensure continuous retention and revenue growth.

The post 6 Challenges To Tackle When Creating an Ecommerce Marketplace appeared first on Diggiecorp Blog.

But the real reason why memes are so effective is because they’re almost impossibly straightforward. The meme format is perfect for taking a single idea and expressing it in a clear, clever way in a format that is perfect for sharing on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and more.

All of which, by the way, happens to be exactly what you’re already trying to do with the types of visual content that you’re creating as marketing collateral.

What’s In a Meme? Turns Out, Quite a Bit

But just how popular are memes as a format? In a word, very. In October of 2016, Google Trends reported that earlier in the year searches for “memes” had literally outpaced searches for “Jesus” – which itself had been the most widely used search term consistently since 2011.

Take a look at some of the following meme-related statistics and see how many of them overlap with the results you’re already trying to generate with your marketing collateral:

• According to one study, 87% of page interactions on Facebook happen on posts that have photos. Not one of the other types of content receives more than 4% of post interactions.
• Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest drive most traffic to external websites like your own domain. What they all have in common is the fact that their users value visual content among all other types.
• YouTube has become a particularly powerful avenue for meme propagation, particularly when it comes to viral videos.

Memes are nothing if not simple, clever, catchy and shareable – basically, all of the boxes you’re already trying to check when you create a piece of content and send it out into the world.

So from that perspective, yes – memes absolutely have a place in your visual communication and marketing efforts. They’re a tool, the same as anything else. It would be a shame not to at least attempt to make use of every last tool in your proverbial tool belt at some point during your day.

Memes are also inherently tricky, however, which is why they also require you to keep a few key things in mind.

The Art of Memes

Many people look at memes as a purely innocent or creative endeavor, which can make the act of actually using them for something as “business-centric” as marketing somewhat difficult if you don’t approach it from the right situation.

People are willing to put up with a meme being co-opted for marketing purposes provided that you’re using the meme correctly. There is no better, more efficient way to find a large group of people laughing at you and not with you than to use a meme in a way that is completely oblivious to its original intention.

Use sites like KnowYourMeme.com to research memes that you’re thinking about using from a few different angles. Not only can this be a quick way to make sure that you “get the joke,” but it’s also a perfect way to see which memes are hot right now and which are far past their expiration date.

Meme culture evolves incredibly quickly, so an image that is popular today may be totally forgotten by the end of the week.

If you’re going to attempt to create a meme and use it as part of your marketing efforts, make sure that A) your intention matches the original joke at the heart of the meme, and B) make sure that you see it as more than just a tool to sell your product or service.

The same is true with the types of Infographics that you create with a tool like Visme (which I founded), but people tend to view Infographics from a bit more of a cynical angle than they do memes.

You would never use something like an Infographic to just visualize your product’s spec sheet and call it a day. You would use it to tell a larger story or to hit at a larger point, creating an emotional response within your audience along the way.

The same is true with the types of presentations that you’re designing – they’re less sales tools, more educational and informational tools.

You need to look at memes from the same perspective. You’re making your own comment about a larger trend and idea not to create a sale, but to provoke a feeling or to start a conversation. Once that conversation has begun, then you can worry about that eventual sale.

Luckily, tools like Visme are also great for creating social media graphics, memes and other types of visual content.

Because memes are just another extension of your visual marketing efforts, you also don’t need to be a graphic designer in order to make the best impression in this format. Take a look at this free eBook that we designed about how non-designers can create compelling presentations and other types of visual collateral for more information.

The Once and Future Meme

The thing that Infographics, presentations and memes all have in common is that they’re a way to make your brand much more approachable to a modern audience. It’s not the equivalent of a cold call or a face-to-face interaction at a trade show and viewing it that way is a recipe for disaster.

It’s a way to tag someone’s joke, or to show people that there are real humans with real sense of humor behind the brand that you’re representing. It’s not the type of thing that is appropriate for every last situation, certainly – but when you do have an idea that would be best expressed in the meme format and you have selected the right meme, it would be a shame not to take advantage of it.

The post Do Memes Have a Place in Your Visual Communication and Marketing Efforts appeared first on Diggiecorp Blog.

Knowledge management is crucial in:

• Helping employees understand the processes in their work environment, and
• Effectively dealing with customers’ doubts and issues

One of the ways of sharing knowledge with almost no effort is through cloud-based knowledge base software, combined with effective social media strategies – a practice that has gained significant adoption lately.

Read on and find out more about some of the best ways of sharing knowledge using social media.

#1 Share Relevant Knowledge

Social networks can be a great way of sharing knowledge but only if you have clear idea on what information you should share and with whom should you share it. First of all, you should make a difference between:

• Internal knowledge base, which is relevant to your employees, and
• External knowledge base that should provide relevant information to the public

These bases are usually written and formatted in different ways. On one hand, public knowledge base should rely on simple and understandable language without technical terms or professional jargons. On the other hand, internal knowledge should be quite the opposite – its primary goal should be to help employees to perform their duties effectively and not run from pillar to post, searching for relevant information.

This is why it’s so important to make a difference and realize where you should share what type of information. If you share the internal knowledge base with the public, you won’t see any results – or at least not the positive ones. Same goes for sharing external knowledge-base with your employees.

#2 Inform Customers about New/Upcoming Products

Social media nowadays represent a crowded arena of numerous businesses promoting their products and services. Not all of them manage to do it efficiently, but those who do, are definitely aware that this promotion is actually an important part of their knowledge base.

This means that you should make some effort and create thorough, informative, and engaging content explaining your new products.

Email campaign management services act as a strategic communication tool to create awareness, generate excitement, personalize outreach, and drive conversions for new or upcoming products.

This way, you will attract a lot of attention since customers tend to pay attention to brands that offer valuable information and proactive support. Some engaging ideas that you can include in this external product knowledge base may actually be the crucial parts of your internal knowledge base, as well. For instance, you can:

• Let the public know if your product design and production process are ecologically safe
• Share the video of production process, if you find that it could be interesting
• Create an amusing audio or visual guide to the new product, or even the history of the idea turning into a real product

It’s important for you to realize that knowledge base, especially the external one, does not always have to come in the form of articles or wiki solutions. It can also appear as any content that actually provides the educational value both to your potential customers and the loyal ones. Evenyourreplies to customers’queries/feedback on social media can be the part of your knowledge base if your answers are detailed, thorough, and helpful.

#3 Improve Employees’ Skills through Internal Knowledge Base

Apart from being a great means of reaching out to customers and sharing the external knowledge base with them, social media can also be an awesome way of presenting the internal knowledge base (or at least the most important information in it) to the employees.

Sometimes, the conventional solutions for sharing knowledge can seem uninteresting to your employees, which means that they’ll avoid it rather than learn from it. This is precisely when you should use the social networks to create a bridge between the employees and the information they need to know.

You can use social networks to create closed and private groups of different sectors of your business and let the employees interact by asking questions, exchanging information, uploading files with the necessary information, and so on. This way, you will make them adopt the information from the knowledge base in a more interesting and definitely practical way, making them proactive and willing to learn more.

The Best Way of Sharing Knowledge on Social Media

One of the best solutions when it comes to sharing a knowledge base on social media is the usage of Cloud-based knowledge base management software. This type of software has become one of the most attractive knowledge management options lately since it both positively influences the problem-solving skills and increases the amount of relevant data that employees and public process. In addition to this, it’s a time-saving solution, and it lets you organize the information in a simple, easily understandable way.

The post 3 Smart Ways to Use Social Media for Knowledge Sharing appeared first on Diggiecorp Blog.

If, however, you grow your business the right way, you will find that when the time comes you are in a strong position to embark upon a serious expansion. Below are some words of advice from experienced entrepreneurs on how you can effectively grow your business.

1. Expand Your Business by Opening in another Location

This is usually the ultimate goal when a business expands upon a rapid growth program. Opening in another location means you will gain access to entirely new markets and clientele. This can have a number of knock on effects for your business. For example, this can drive a sustained rise in sales and sometimes tapping into a new market also brings you funds for your next expansion venture.

Apart from these, opening in a new location also makes you more resistant to unforeseeable events. For instance, if your entire business is tied up in a single location, then, should anything happen to that building, you could end up in a pretty dire situation. Multiple locations means your brand can continue to operate during such times.

Suggested Read: Asset-light Business Model to Consider for Your Ecommerce Startup

2. Diversify Your Products and Services

Diversifying means broadening your range. Just as opening in a new physical location will give you access to new markets by virtue of geography, diversifying the range of products and services you offer can give you access to new markets that were previously wouldn’t have had any interest in your business. Diversifying also gives your existing customers more to choose from and more reasons to spread the word about your business.

3. Study the Competition

This is a vital consideration for businesses at all times, regardless of their expansion plans. If you don’t have a firm understanding of what your competition is doing then you will naturally find it much harder to compete with them effectively.

The information you should look for: what demographics your competition is appealing to and whether these demographics overlap with your own customer base, and how the competition is allocating its marketing resources. It is valuable to know what markets your rivals are attempting to penetrate as well as how successful they’ve been.

4. Track Your Results

All of your efforts will be for nothing if you don’t know how successful they are. Even the very best entrepreneurs rarely hit on perfect strategies every time, so it is important to know when it is useful to analyse and assess the effectiveness of your own work.

There are different strategies you can use to analyse your performance and to draw up appropriate plans of action in response. In order to do this, you will need to identify exactly what variables should be measured in order to make an assessment as to how successful you have been, as well as to determine the best way to measure them.

There are two forms of data collection; passive, and active. Passive data collection means that data is collected automatically and with no specific action required on the part of either the collector or the source of data. By contrast, active data collection requires both the consent and the knowledge of the person or people supplying the data. Consequently, sources of active data collection know that they are being measured or observed in some way and this can lead to something referred to as observer bias. For this reason, passive data collection techniques are generally preferred, these are also usually easier to gather and, providing they are gathered properly, are generally more accurate and representative of real world situations.

Once you have gathered the necessary data, and then begin the complex process of interpreting it in order to make it useful. The science of performing these analyses is that of data analytics. Data analytics is a relatively new branch of mathematics and a sub branch of statistical analysis. It is algorithm-based, meaning, because the mathematical processes required are so complex they are prohibitively difficult for a human to perform. Therefore, powerful computers are needed to take, what are often very large, data sets and analyse them in order to identify patterns and relationships between different variables. There are now companies that can perform this service for you.

5. Promote Your Business Online

A professional online offering is essential for any business hoping to compete in the modern landscape. The internet represents, by a considerable margin, the greatest potential in terms of the number of people you can reach. You should prioritize online forms of marketing above all others.

6. Offer Your Business for Franchising

If you believe that you have a winning formula for success in your field, you might also want to consider franchising.  Franchising means that you will essentially sell the essence of your business to interested buyers who will operate their own outlets based on your formula. Offering your business for franchising is an excellent way to make money while you expand. Every franchise you sell will pay a periodic fee to you in order to keep using your setup.

By and large, growing your business the right way is important in order to ensure that you can sustain and maintain the benefits.

The post 6 Proven Business Growth Strategies for Startups appeared first on Diggiecorp Blog.

Discounts and offers are the most prominent ways for promotion. This is the reason why daily deals websites, which primarily list discounted products in a given market, have been so successful in recent years. So, if you’re an online retailer or a brand owner then you might be well-versed with the power of discounts!

Discount coupons & other offers, not only affect your overall sales, but also help create the buzz around brand in the long term. Therefore, as an online retailer, you should opt for various interesting ways to offer discounts and attract more and more customers. The ways that can help you improve the coupons and discounts’ positioning are as follows:

1. The Exciting Loyalty Reward Programs

The fact of the matter is that bonus discount offers or the loyalty reward programs lead to retention and return of the customers. So, you can incorporate that within your business and win the interest of a lot of buyers.

By rewarding customers who make a given amount of purchase will ensure an increase in average order value of your store. Additionally, you can also give special discounts to customers in the form of cash-back points.

2. Let them save while introducing a friend    

Offering discounts with a condition – such as customers get a certain percentages of discount or a lucrative coupon, if the ask their friends to shop from your brand or store – works really well.

So, go for a ‘Refer a Friend’ option in your website. It will tempt your buyers more and more to advertise about your website, and thus, you’ll gain popularity and ultimately a hike in your sales.

3. Offer Coupons to Customers for their Reviews

Okay, if you’re selling any kind of products or services then you should know very well that how important your customers’ feedbacks are for you. Then why don’t you make the whole episode more interesting? Just offer a coupon to them for providing their valuable reviews which will lead them to respond to you more and more.

As a result, you will come to know about what people love and what they do not love about your store & offerings. This will help you make more informed decisions and improve your brand’s image.

4. Offer Exciting Coupons on Sign-ups

There is yet another exciting way to offer coupons – discount offers exclusively for newsletter sign-ups and for email alerts. I mean, don’t you think people will obviously sign up to your email service if they get a $5 coupon or a 10% off on their next purchase just for subscribing?

Updating your customers regularly about the deals, new arrivals and other interesting facts about your brand, tempts them to buy more. So, you’ll earn a lot of prosperity in terms of your business and finance surely.

Conclusion

So, what are you waiting for? Just make your discount coupon strategy versatile and smart by following the above mentioned ways and watch your sales skyrocket! I am sure you’ll feel the difference within a small period of time. Good Luck.

The post 4 Ways Discount Coupons Can Boost Engagement, Sales, & Brand Awareness appeared first on Diggiecorp Blog.