Mobile360 Guest Post: 3 Steps You Can Take to Elevate Your E-Commerce Business

The pandemic has drastically accelerated the shift to e-commerce and brought huge sales increases to online retailers. Given the increased consumer appetite for online shopping, now more than ever, it is key for business owners to capture these gains. To do so, business owners need to perfect their e-commerce business processes. These processes are the lifeblood of every e-commerce business. They are also the key to achieving greater productivity and increased revenue. In this digital age, the way to streamline these business processes is by establishing a robust online presence: not just through a webpage and mobile app, but also through integrated digital tools to build customer relationships and increase sales. In this post, we discuss three ways to elevate your e-commerce business by leveraging digital tools to streamline your processes. 

Step 1: Embedding Customer Engagement Tools

To retain customers, you need to engage them. Customer retention is especially important because it can cost up to five more times to acquire a new customer than to retain a current customer. Embedding customer engagement tools in your e-commerce business is crucial to retaining your customers, whether old or new.

Customer engagement tools can include the following: 

• Customer loyalty program: One of the best ways to build customer engagement is rewards programs. These programs provide customers the incentives to continuously shop with your e-commerce business. To keep your customers constantly engaged, provide your loyal customers with exclusive, rotating offers, and deals through your e-commerce platform.  
• Push notifications: Use push notifications to remind your customers to engage with your e-commerce platform. Studies have shown that push notifications can increase app engagement up to 88% and these notifications can increase app retention up to ten-fold. 

Step 2: Leveraging Analytics

Effective data analytics of your sales is the key to your business’s growth. Data analytics is not only important for customer acquisition, but also customer retention. To cultivate these customer relationships, it is important to tap into what makes the customer tick. It is thus important to focus on what drives customer loyalty management, repeat business, and overall customer satisfaction. 

To optimize your e-commerce business with data-driven insights, it is important that your e-commerce business can track three categories of analytics: the audience, acquisition and retention, and behavior. 

First, you need to be able to track who your business’s audience is. This includes both demographics of your customers (where are they from and who are they) and what kind of products are attracting them.

Second, you need to understand what types of products acquire and retain customers. This includes exploring what products do customers end up buying, what marketing content do viewers click on, and what pages on your e-commerce platform do customers engage with. 

Lastly, and most importantly, you must understand the behavior of your customers. This includes tracking customer data such as purchasing behavior, subscription renewals, engagement on your e-commerce platforms (whether app or website), and demographics of returning visitors. 

Step 3: Seamlessly Integrating Workflows

Finally, to streamline your business operations and enhance the customer experience, it is important to have integrations in place that track your entire product lifecycle.  

In addition to selling your products directly through your e-commerce platform, make the customer experience easy by integrating easy payment and delivery options (such as Mobile360’s e-commerce platform). You can make your e-commerce platform more flexible by integrating with apps that allow greater visibility (think: platforms that offer online marketplaces) and facilitate the fulfillment process (think: Shippo).

With these digital tools in hand, we are confident that you will be able to elevate your e-commerce business to new heights.

This is a guest post by the Mobile360 team. Mobile360 is a San Francisco startup that helps small business launch their e-commerce presence in 30 minutes. Mobile360 is a one-stop shop for e-commerce businesses, providing business owners with a mobile applet, web storefront, loyalty programs, integrated shipping, customer management, sales analytics, all in one package. Business owners who use Mobile360 have seen a substantial increase in customer engagement and sales for their e-commerce businesses.