Jason Simon offers tricks for expanding an eCommerce platform’s customer base

eCommerce is all the rage, and there are strong reasons behind it. It is growing uninterruptedly and without apparent limit, reaching every day more and more facets of our lives. Companies are wondering how to take advantage of it, but sometimes their efforts do not achieve the expected results. Jason Simon, an expert in the field of eCommerce, provides some tips on how to expand an eCommerce platform’s customer base.

It is very important to maintain personalized communication with customers in order to meet their needs and improve eCommerce tools. For this purpose, Simon recommends the use of Email Marketing, since this technique allows interacting with subscribers in a very simple and fast way.

“Thanks to emailing platforms, marketing campaigns and communication with our customers can be carried out in a more efficient way,” says Simon. “It is possible to segment the recipients in order to reach exactly a very defined target at any given time and thus not waste resources on customers who are not interested in certain products.”

It is very important to maintain a two-way dialogue with customers as you cannot expect to bombard them with emails on a daily basis and not learn anything from their feedback. You have to optimize each campaign with the results and feedback from the previous campaign in order not to make the same mistakes and go about defining an increasingly efficient strategy.

It is important to take care of your subscribers to always receive exclusive content and personalized offers. And if you have subscribers who are not interested in your content, it is better to forget about them and focus on those who are.

Product recommendation is a very effective method to increase average order size. According to Simon, 54% of retailers using automatic recommendation services increase the average order price.

But the quality of the recommendation tools will influence the success of the purchase: recommendations must be personalized for each shopper based on their unique user behavior, because the more relevant they are to them, the more likely they are to buy. According to a recent analysis, 45% of online shoppers are more likely to buy from a site that offers personalized recommendations.

To take full advantage of the capabilities offered by these tools, choose a recommendation engine that takes into account the company’s inventory and does not recommend products that are not in stock. In addition, it should also be able to suggest complementary products to the one you’re looking at, such as a case for the smartphone you’re looking at, a tripod for the camera you want to buy, etc. so that the shopper can buy what they need without having to browse endlessly.

“If I had to give one piece of advice to companies that have an eCommerce or want to sell through the Internet, I would talk to them about the need to implement a method,” asserts Simon. “It is basic that, before starting to develop any action, they do an initial analysis of the situation, of the starting point they are at. I always talk about an initial audit that includes three types of analysis: organic positioning, web traffic, and digital reputation.”

It’s not enough to have an online presence, an attractive store, and a good purchase flow; it must also provide a satisfactory experience and be useful for mobile users. And it is not enough for your eCommerce to be well-positioned in “normal” organic searches. It must also be well-positioned in mobile results.

It is true that for many, the majority of purchases are not yet made from mobile. But, increasingly, the user uses it to make queries while talking to friends, moving around the city, or looking at a physical store. And being present, and mastering, if possible, all channels, including mobile, is necessary to increase conversion, because more and more users carry out several interactions in various channels until they reach the purchase.

Most Internet users, in addition to their desktop or tablet, have a cell phone with Internet access. And unlike the former, they carry their cell phones with them at all times. Cell phones are and will be increasingly decisive in the purchasing process, and online stores that know how to take advantage of this trend and adapt will have an advantage over their competitors.