Have a physical store or chain of stores? Don’t have any transactional online presence? There is good news and bad news.
The bad news is that there is a huge online market that you are not tapping into and your competition has already got a head start in winning customers online.
The good news is that many of the brick and mortar retailers with online presence are either only showing topline growth while making a loss or are cannibalising their in-store customers and moving them online without any real benefit to the business.
You may have the benefit to learn from the mistakes from the retailers who have taken an early plunge in eTailing and there are many more interesting models available today to jumpstart your eTailing strategy and ambitions. Let’s focus on 5 secret strategies available to you today to get a headstart to you eTailing strategy and jump ahead of your competition where it really matters: the profits and new markets you can tap from eTailing. These tips can also be used by Retailers that already have an online presence to improve their eTailing offering.
- Set-up a Facebook store and engage in f-commerce
With over 800mn users Facebook today is a large marketplace on its own. Facebook store offers a fantastic opportunity to build and promote your eTailing channel in quick time with great visibility. Here is a link to the most popular UK Retailers on Facebook as on July 2011. The interesting thing and the great opportunity is that with some good design, promotion and branding it would not be too difficult to find yourself breaking into the top 10! Retailers have not been paying focussed attention to this channel and those present are treating it as a ‘me-too’ strategy rather than having a serious plan.
- Be innovative about shipping and deliveries
A new service provider that has great potential is Shutl. They have a model to aggregate the power of local delivery providers and offer a service that promises delivery within 90 minutes or within a one hour window of the shopper’s choice. If your Retail business is in and around the locations that Shutl serves they might just have the solution for you to quickly and cheaply setup a delivery service that matches and betters the best in the land today.
- Marry iOS-Android-Windows apps and online voucher sites
It is far more easy to build a good app on the iOS, Android or the Windows Phone platform that a full-fledged website. The apps market for Retailers is still less competitive than the traditional web channel and presents an opportunity for new entrants to make their mark.
A good way to build momentum on this channel is to have a sustained focussed campaign that takes benefit of the many online voucher sites and bring the traffic to the apps for conversion. These websites will offer free listing of the vouchers and may take a fee for referral thus offering a low cost distribution and marketing channel.
- Be smart in using Google AdWords
I heard this fantastic podcast on The Power of Spread Sheets by sitevisibility that talks about using simple but powerful Excel and Google Docs plug-ins to do keyword research. The tools allows for doing comparison and understanding rankings before you make a decision on which keywords to place your bet and get the most out of your Google AdWords budget. These complement the already rich analysis capabilities offered by Google AdWords. A little bit of good time spent on keyword research and combining this with subtle changes made to your website can go a long way to drive traffic and improve chances of conversion, all with a modes AdWords budget.
- Use innovative ways to stay connected with your customers
The eTailing strategy should focus as much as driving traffic and conversion as it should on ensuring that you build a relationship with your customers that brings them back to your offer repeatedly. Retailers have adopted various means to build and sustain this relationship by implementing their own loyalty programmes, offering personalised promotions and simply by sending regular newsletters for customers who opt-in. All these have a high cost associated. Remember, one to the goals of eTailing is to make it highly profitable as compared to the tradition store.
A good way to trial newsletter or mailings to customer is to use of innovative start-ups such as mailchimp that offer an online service to at a fraction of the cost of building your own system ground up or invest in products with costly licence costs associated with them.
So these are my top 5 secret strategies that new entrants to the world of eTailing can adopt to quickly build an online offer that complements your brick and mortar stores and give the established big boys a run for their money.