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If you’re interested in starting as an entrepreneur, e-commerce provides one of the easiest access points today.
What’s more, e-commerce is both a low point of entry to get started and accessible for anyone with an Internet connection and a device like a phone, tablet, or computer.
Launching an e-commerce business as a new entrepreneur provides great flexibility and independence, as well as the opportunity to reach a global audience from the comfort of your home.
Like all businesses, though, to be successful in e-commerce, you’ll need a plan, effort, and a strategy to stand out and above the competition.
You’ll want to identify areas where you can create products that solve your target audience’s pain points, help nurture them with a sales funnel (more on that), and refine your strategy with data and analytics for the best performance.
This guide will share invaluable tips and outline the essential steps to creating a strategy for success in a crowded marketplace.
How to Start an E-Commerce Business
When you set out to create your e-commerce business, you must first research what type of business you want to start.
Your research should focus on a few factors, such as your potential target audience and the potential market. It should also study what types of businesses are successful, where potential holes exist in those businesses, and how you can fill those gaps.
When you’re researching your business, you’ll want to use the following checklist:
- Define your market
- Analyze competitors
- Identify the potential demand
- Research the ideal price points
- Evaluate any potential challenges to your e-commerce business
For example, if your competitors sell info products for small businesses, consider the type of audience that may need to be addressed.
If there is a gap in your competitors’ solutions, can you include something specific to help a different group or audience in your info product?
The key here is to research what is already being offered, identify your potential target market, and determine who could benefit from your products.
You’ll gain insights into what your competitors are doing well, validate your ideas with your competitors’ successes, and possibly discover what gaps in the market exist that you could offer solutions.
With the data and insights you gain, you are better positioned to develop a comprehensive business plan based on your competitors’ successes, price points, and market dynamics.
These insights will allow you to position yourself and your products more effectively and develop a competitive edge when starting.
After validating a concept and developing a business plan, the next step is to begin thinking about your target customers and where best to find them.
Conduct Market Research
As a new entrepreneur, you may have ideas about what to sell, but what you don’t understand about the validity of your ideas could end up becoming a costly mistake.
Conducting market research is crucial to determining what type of offerings you may bring to market and also understanding whether they’re valid ideas in the first place.
To better understand the market, examine competitors and consider who may benefit from your product offerings.
Is there a demand for such products? Are they in high demand and in a highly competitive marketplace? If so, you may want to reconsider what you’re thinking about offering.
One way to examine the market is to explore different e-commerce businesses already in existence. What are they doing to drum up business?
You’ll want to look at marketing strategies, price points, and who they’re trying to serve (ideal customer) to understand whether your idea is sellable.
Once you see proof that the idea can be sold, dive into SEO page results and social media platforms to gather more evidence of success and how people reach their audience.
This research will help you position your product and find an audience interested in purchasing from you. It can also help you avoid spending a lot of money without getting a good return on your investment.
Define Your Target Audience and Potential Customer
To be successful as an entrepreneur, you need to understand the market landscape.
Most importantly, you need to know who your target audience is and where to find your potential customers.
Otherwise, it won’t matter if you have the best business strategy ever – it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. You need to be able to find people who want your offerings and convert them into sales.
As a new entrepreneur, you need to define your target audience and their niche, which will help you identify your potential customers.
The best approach to finding your target audience and potential customers is to identify a specific aspect of the market and drill down as far as possible to find a niche that is parallel to your offerings.
Analyze trends, pain points, and competitors’ e-commerce products to understand what is performing well and how you can provide a different solution.
Another factor in finding your target is pinpointing the ideal customer type.
Ask yourself questions such as:
- What are their interests, behaviors, and preferences?
- What are their demographics, location, age, gender, and buying patterns?
- How do they consume content and find products to purchase? Do they watch long – or short-form videos, read blogs, or engage on social channels?
By asking these questions, you’ll want to utilize tools like search engines and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help you find and analyze the data points to give you a complete picture of your potential audience and customers.
Finally, you should incorporate all these data points into your content and e-commerce platform to appeal to your ideal audience.
Social media, content marketing, and email marketing are phenomenal ways to communicate directly to your audience and provide them with the solution (your product) they need for whatever pain points you’re addressing.
You’ll want content personalized for your ideal customer at every stage of their buying decision, known as a sales funnel.
Sales funnels help direct an individual from learning about a product to wanting it and finally acting to purchase it. ClickFunnels provides all-in-one sales funnels that you can easily plug and play for e-commerce businesses of all shapes and sizes.
Defining your target audience, identifying what motivates them to act, and creating your marketing around them is a great way to boost your conversions, which is key for any new entrepreneur.
Create a Business Plan for Success
One of the all-time greatest coaches in sports, John Wooden, led his UCLA basketball program to dizzying heights of greatness.
One of his renowned statements about success was, “Failure to prepare is preparing to fail.”
That simple statement is crucial to understand – that success comes from preparation and planning, much more than simple luck.
As an entrepreneur trying to build a successful e-commerce business, your approach to planning and crafting a solid business plan will be the key difference between building something sustainable or not.
As the foundation for your success, your business plan should outline your goals and identify your market while providing ways you plan to serve that target market.
Research into potential audiences and their behaviors, as well as what competitors are doing, will help you outline the steps you need to take to achieve your short-term and long-term goals.
You will want to outline your business model, such as whether you are trying to sell digital products, grow a blog for advertising revenue, or sell physical goods and products.
Also, include the platforms from which you plan to grow your business and sell, such as email marketing, SEO, or other means.
Think of your business plan as your outline for success. It should include how you’ll handle logistical issues, financial funding, how you’ll identify, market, and sell to your target audience, and any other component that impacts your expenses and revenue.
The more comprehensive your business plan, the easier it will be to stay on task.
However, one thing to keep in mind as a new entrepreneur is that things will come up unexpectedly, so build some flexibility and wiggle room into your strategy.
Build Your Online Store
When you decide to start a business, one essential thing to consider is what platform you want to use to build your online store.
You want to find a reliable and, most of all, scalable platform so that as you grow, you aren’t required to switch platforms or make any significant changes that can stall your hard-earned success.
The platform you select and build your online store on should have SEO at the forefront of the platform, be designed for the best conversion rates, and be simple enough to set up and install so that you aren’t required to have a ton of coding knowledge to operate.
Once you set up your online store, you want to organize your product listings so that it’s easy for your customers to find and buy your offers.
To do this, you’ll want to group similar items together, write sharp product descriptions that describe the product’s benefits, use high-resolution images that showcase the product in use, and include customer reviews about the quality of your products.
Why include customer reviews?
People like to buy what they know, and from brands they trust.
For online businesses, customer reviews help create and nurture trust in their brand, helping them close more sales. One way to do this effectively is to utilize customer reviews and foster a community space for FAQs and user interaction.
Since you’re in the digital e-commerce space, you have the advantage of eliminating shipping costs.
One thing to consider is having add-ons that can upsell another product that supplements or enhances the one they are already purchasing.
You can set up your store to have pop-ups before the shopping cart or after purchase, using email marketing as a follow-up opportunity.
Finally, installing a simple checkout and payment processing system is the key to closing your sales.
The reasons for shopping cart abandonment are a variety of reasons, but some of the most common include:
- Hidden fees
- Complex check-out process
- Limited payment options
- Slow processing
- Impulse buying
To avoid this from happening to you, build your online store to provide fast, secure payment processing options and keep it simple.
The platform you choose should support e-commerce businesses. While many options are available, only ClickFunnels provides a wealth of tools to build and optimize your online store for total success.
With ClickFunnels, you can easily set up, optimize, and iterate your online store for maximum impact.
The all-in-one platform includes some key features including:
- Website Builder
- Landing pages
- Sales funnels
- Store funnels
- Third-party integrations
- Email marketing
- and so much more!
SEO is Key to Success
Finding, attracting, and converting customers is the lifeblood of success with an online store. One of the more critical aspects of achieving this is implementing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies throughout your website, funnels, and content.
To create a successful SEO strategy for your online business, you’ll want to begin with identifying relevant keywords that your audience and potential customers use to conduct searches.
You can create a list of keywords that you find through various means, including Google’s free keyword planner, but one way to find relevant keywords (on a budget) is to conduct some online searches and find out what results you come up with.
Even more, when you conduct keyword research using your search terms, Google will provide you with a list of terms others have used.
These insights will give you a wealth of terms and words to incorporate into website content, product descriptions, and blog posts to improve your potential ranking.
Creating user-friendly content and a mobile-responsive website is an effective way to boost your potential rankings since Google prioritizes content and user experience in its ranking results.
Finally, you need to establish a routine of creating and publishing content regularly. The type of content you create should be useful and relevant to the terms you used in your SEO strategy to get the user to your page.
Make your content shareable and incorporate user reviews when possible. User reviews are good social proof and can boost trust and credibility in search engine results.
Of course, implementing a good SEO strategy is much easier with ClickFunnels’ inclusive sales funnels, which can optimize your content, blog posts, and pages to provide maximum impact.
Develop a Marketing Strategy
For you to succeed in your e-commerce business as a new entrepreneur, your potential customers need to be aware and learn to trust your brand so that they’ll be willing to buy from you.
To do this well, you need a robust marketing strategy that identifies your ideal customers, where they hang out, and what interests them.
Once you understand their interests, you can, therefore, focus on understanding your potential customer’s pain points, needs, and wants.
After understanding these insights, you can begin segmenting your target market effectively, crafting your content, and offering solutions that align with their demands.
Tools like SEO implementation, social media, and email marketing are good ways to personalize your reach to your target audience and help tailor your product offerings to their needs.
SEO provides exposure for your brand, while social media and email marketing create opportunities for engagement.
This three-pronged approach of SEO, social media, and email marketing makes it easier for your potential audience to find and interact with your brand, leading to an opportunity to generate sales.
Another possibility is to utilize and leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence in your marketing strategies.
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is an algorithm that can instantly incorporate hundreds and thousands of data points to create personalized content based on every user’s interaction with your brand and similar products.
Using AI in your strategy will allow you to predict what your target audience may be interested in, helping you refine your pitch and offers.
Last, to create a successful marketing strategy, you’ll want to continually monitor it for success and iterate your strategy based on what’s productive and what’s not.
Using advanced analytics tools, you can see what your audience is engaged with, incorporate customer feedback into an even more engaging strategy, and increase the likelihood of conversions.
Social Media Strategy
As mentioned, using your social media channels is a huge opportunity to engage with potential customers in a space where they’re already active. Social media is a powerful tool to find potential customers while being able to promote your e-commerce business.
To implement social media successfully into your marketing and achieve the best results, consider what platform your ideal customer likes to utilize so that you can interact with them where they already are.
Think about your social media strategy as you fish. As an angler, you could try to drive your boat out and cast a line, hoping to find a school of fish. Or you could use the tools available to find fish and cast your lines where they’re already swimming.
One strategy is casting about in the dark, hoping for results; the other is using readily available tools to cast a line where it’s most likely to be successful.
So don’t overthink it; interact on the social media platforms where your potential customers are already engaging with others and create content that resonates with them in ways that you can showcase your products.
Emphasize Customer Service
When starting an e-commerce business, one thing that’s often overlooked is implementing an emphasis on customer service.
Putting a premium on customer satisfaction from the first touchpoint with your brand to following up after a sale can go a long way toward building brand loyalty and repeat opportunities.
To start, build your website and content around identifying common issues your audience struggles with and providing solutions for them.
Engage on social channels and respond quickly to questions and inquiries. This can build trust in your brand by demonstrating that you value your customers’ time.
Email marketing is a great way to connect with your potential customers, and having a dedicated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool is a great way to stay connected and make personal connections.
With a CRM, you can collect important information like birth dates and other significant personal information to tailor unique and personal messages to your targets.
By creating personalized messaging through a CRM, you can better provide solutions for their concerns and foster loyalty to your brand.
This personalization approach is one of the best sources of customer service. Other suggestions to implement a customer-centric approach that enhances your customer’s experience with your brand include:
- Have a user-friendly e-commerce platform.
- Have multiple payment options.
- Create a comprehensive FAQ section that addresses common issues and queries.
- Utilize SEO to rank helpful information.
By focusing on your potential customers and putting their needs in front of your e-commerce business, you can easily and quickly stand out in a crowded market, create loyal customers, and drive more sales.
Using Sales Funnels to Drive More Conversions
Finally, creating an e-commerce business can be chaotic and even more challenging without the right structure.
Finding, nurturing, and closing your leads can be a heavy task, which is why utilizing a tool like ClickFunnels, which is simple to install and use sales funnels, can take your efforts and drive them into the stratosphere.
With ClickFunnel’s new AI Smart Funnels tool, you can leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence into your sales funnels, personalizing your optimized interactions to drive even more sales.
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