Insider tips on how to make more money through e-commerce
E-commerce entrepreneurs are driven by passion, and results. When you’ve found your perfect product niche(s), built an amazing Shopify website, and worked on your content strategy, the next step is… to conquer your sales and profit margins.
Like every other step in running a successful business, you can’t do anything until you have a plan. Traffic to your website is great (but not if they don’t buy anything), and sales are exciting when you’ve worked the system with AliExpress, Shopify, and Drops tools.
Now, though, you want more. So, when all the pieces for an e-commerce business are in place, where do they start? How do you make a good marketing plan that affects the three most important metrics that lead to more money coming in?
Here are the three most important metrics you should pay attention to if you want your e-commerce sales to grow:
- The number of deals.
- The total amount of money spent.
- Converting visits to a website into hard sales (lots of them).
- As the top e-commerce dropship SaaS, it’s part of our job to share not only advice but also the secrets behind the thousands of stores that are growing by leaps and bounds thanks to AliExpress and Dropship Corporation.
So, let’s talk about how some of the most successful stores in our member network do their marketing so that you can do the same.
How E-commerce Sales Make Money and Sense
First, let’s talk about the basics. Every metric between you, the business owner, and your sales process should be looked at all the time. There are four important things you can use to track your progress and figure out what isn’t working (as well as it could) to improve your bottom line.
- Cost of Getting a New Customer (CAC) and Profit Variables
- Costs of running the business
- Gross Income
Your CAC is found by dividing all of the costs you spent to get more customers (like marketing, website and software costs, shipping, and advertising) by the number of customers who bought something from you during the same tracked period.
When you first start your e-commerce business, your CAC will be higher than average because you have to pay for things like building a website, getting training, and buying supplies. When you give good customer service and good value to your buyers, they are more likely to buy from you again, which means you don’t have to pay as much to get new customers.
Building a base of loyal customers is a good way to increase not only sales but also profits. There are always ways to do more with less, and entrepreneurs who start with a lean model know exactly where to cut costs. Your profit factors start with the things you need to outsource as a business owner, like customer service, marketing, web development, and your own time.
This is always the most interesting number in your sales database, because it’s the most important financial metric for your business. But gross revenues are not the same as net profit, which is your cost after expenses and taxes. However, e-commerce owners should use gross revenues as a quick check to see how sales are going and how many new customers they are getting each month and year.
If you sold things online and made $3,000 in your first month, but you worked more than 500 hours on your business, you aren’t making any money. Your time is one of the operational costs that can change. You should figure out how well you are doing and what your real net revenue is.
Other costs that can be fixed or changeable include software, staff, hosting, pay-per-click advertising, content creation, and more.
Always look for better and more efficient ways to cut operational costs and work smarter, not harder, to make more money. This is the number you should keep an eye on as your Dropship Corporation e-commerce business grows. It includes taxes and all fixed and variable costs.
When this value goes up every month, that’s when you really start to get excited. And if it stays the same, you need to do some research to see where you can be more strategic with your time, money, or research on products.
Who really takes time out of their day to look at these numbers? Every e-commerce business owner we know makes at least $60,000 a year from their retail site (s).
Not only should you know what your metrics are, but you should also keep an eye out for changes to them. Supplier price increases, shipping costs, and other things you can’t really control can affect them. E-commerce is a fast-paced industry that is always changing, so if you want to win, you have to keep an eye on your profit centre at all times.
Content marketing is a triple threat.
PipeCandy’s e-commerce research team collects data about retail e-commerce from all over the world. They think that there are up to 1.3 million retailers who can sell directly to online customers and are still in business.
They also think that there are up to 3 million domains connected to e-commerce platforms, based on data from 2017. People who got started but didn’t know how to use their time well with tried-and-true strategies for growth. One of the best ways to get more customers is to invest in strategic content marketing.
Your customers are out there and ready to buy online. All you have to do is find them and, more importantly, help them find your products.
You can blog on your site.
If your products are grouped by a consumer theme, like fashion, camping, personal technology, or home products, give advice and write about the lifestyle that your customers are trying to create.
HubSpot did a study that showed that businesses that blogged 16 times a month got 3.5 times more website traffic than those that blogged once a week. For the best results, your blog should be anywhere from 350 words (to please search engines) to 1,500 words.
From what we’ve seen, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are the best ways to grow sales. Most businesses post on social media Monday through Friday during business hours, but you can change when you post to catch evening traffic and online shopping peaks around the holidays.
Pay by the click
Google AdWords might be the big star of e-commerce advertising, but it can get expensive depending on your niche and how competitive your keywords are. If you’re just starting out, use boosted posts on Facebook and look into low-cost pay-per-click courses that can help you get the most out of your advertising budget.
Distribution of content
If you have some blogs that get a lot of traffic (you can check this with Google Analytics), you can use that content to your advantage by giving it a PPC push with services like Taboola or Outbrain. Content syndication puts your flashy content on high-traffic media sites that are related to the niche of the product you are selling.
And if you don’t like to write? Hire someone else to do your blogging and social media. Seriously, check out sites like Upwork and Freelancer to find virtual assistants and other cheap help.
You should hire someone or a team locally or overseas that you can trust. It’s easy to work with remote content and social media service providers who will give you great results at (sometimes) a fraction of the cost of working with marketing service providers in your own country.
Big brands do it for a reason, and so can you.
Check out the e-commerce resource library and blog on Dropship Corporation to learn more useful information.
