The post-pandemic trend is all about going online. And this change is something that’s bringing a huge opportunity for e-commerce businesses. The market for e-commerce businesses is expanding, with customers becoming pickier about the kind of products and services they need. This shift has led companies to hire Salesforce consultancies in the USA to get the needed way to unify the data and manage operations and customer engagement centrally.
But the expanded market also means more competition, making it essential for firms to plan efficiently for future growth. This blog would be a starter guide for e-commerce firms to help them with a growth plan for the near future.
Growth Plan for a Winning Future of Your Business
About 20.8% of retail purchases are expected to be done online by the end of 2023. This makes it clear that the market for e-commerce businesses is expanding. Having a growth plan is essential for any e-commerce business, allowing them to always have their next move ready to prosper in the market.
This makes it crucial for businesses to step up and already start planning for the future to stay prepared for everything that’s coming next. Here’s a small guide that will help you to get started.
1. Build your Value Proposition
The value proposition for each company acts as a differentiator. Having a value proposition goes a long way for a company and helps to determine the business’s success. You need to set what makes you different from your competitors in the e-commerce sector. Are you offering better processes, or are you a renowned leader in your field?
If you can’t figure out what’s unique and differentiating about your organization, chances are your customers won’t be able to do that too. So, find out your value proposition and draft your business strategies around this.
2. Know your Ideal Customer
After evaluating your value proposition, you need to understand the audience that can benefit the most. That will be your ideal customers. Once you know your target audience, you’ll be able to come up with the best ways to reach them.
With the help of Salesforce consultancies in the USA, you can analyze and record customer information and evaluate details about them like:
– Channels on which they prefer engaging
– What product or services do they prefer
– How each customer likes to engage
When you have all of the information related to customers, it becomes possible for you to understand them better and evaluate who your target audience is. Then you begin working with omnichannel marketing campaigns and strategies for your e-commerce business using Salesforce Marketing Cloud and its tools like Social Studio. This will enable you to reach them at the channel where they are most active.
3. Analyze your Revenue Streams
One of the biggest reasons for the failure of small e-commerce businesses is that they are incapable of generating enough revenue to keep their operations going. When the idea is to plan for the future, the focus starts from evaluating revenue streams and trying to keep them optimized.
Having your data managed on a centralized platform like Salesforce; you can have a complete view of everything, evaluating the pipelines that are working, the reason behind the non-producing revenue streams, and even the reason why other streams are booming.
This shouldn’t be considered as a one-off evaluation. Instead, you need to keep it at regular occurrences. New upcoming technologies and changing e-commerce markets and customer preferences can cause the revenue streams to change frequently. With Salesforce consultancies in the USA, you can leverage custom reports and dashboards to regularly track your revenue streams and other KPIs.
4. Stay Updated with New Releases
With Salesforce coming up with three major releases every year and many other minor updates, it is necessary to keep your Salesforce solution up-to-date. While your competitors are growing and customers’ expectations are advancing, you don’t want to be stuck with old functionalities that might affect your productivity.
When you hire Salesforce consultants, you can get ongoing maintenance and support services. This will ensure that you’ll get experts to assist you in keeping your Salesforce solution scalable and updated.
5. Get the Best Salesforce Partner
When you want to leverage your Salesforce solution to its best, you need the best Salesforce partners to assist you. Implementing a Salesforce solution requires a lot of work, from evaluating the business architecture to customizing fields and objects according to the business. With trusted Salesforce consulting services in the USA, any e-commerce business can get along with experts to get the solution implemented successfully.
Also, Salesforce consultancies in the USA would take care of preparing your data for migration and safely make the move. Any error or redundancy can cost a company a lot, so it is essential for businesses to get a trusted team to manage it all.
6. Learn from Competitors
No business begins right from the top. Even being in the e-commerce sector, you’d probably have identified a gap in the market or any problem that needs to be addressed that led to you setting up the business. But setting up the business isn’t enough. Planning for the growth of your business requires focusing on learning, even from your competitors.
Make sure you evaluate insights to look around the market and understand who’s leading and why. You can leverage AI-powered Salesforce features like Einstein to evaluate these trends, like why they’re doing well and what they might lack.
Being in an age where customer expectations are skyrocketing, it is always better to know ways to improve digital experiences and strategies to run personalized engagement, trying to cater to customer expectations and keeping up with the competitors.
Get Ready for the Future with the Best Salesforce Consultancy in the USA
It doesn’t matter what timeline a company has set when setting its vision. It could be two, five, or ten years, but one thing that’s common is to have a future growth plan ready to actually reach the intended goals.
For e-commerce businesses, it is essential to prepare for the upcoming market shift and focus on engaging with customers in a personalized way. If you’re running an e-commerce business and seek ways to plan ahead, contact us and get our best Salesforce consultants to guide you.
Quiz Time
What exactly could be a differentiator for an e-commerce business?
a). Value proposition
b). Customer service
c). Marketing campaigns
d). Payment options
Show Answer: a) Value proposition
FAQs
E-commerce customers these days are getting more and more active, demanding a unified and connected shopping experience. This makes it essential for e-commerce businesses to leverage the best technology that will help them enable connected processes and track customers in a better way. That’s where hiring a Salesforce consulting service could be a great decision to implement a customized Salesforce solution to streamline operations for e-commerce businesses.
With the right Salesforce experts, teams at e-commerce businesses can leverage Salesforce features to access customer insights and conduct omnichannel marketing to easily reach the target audience at their preferred channel. Having a unified platform to record and manage data even improves decision-making, thus driving more sales.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud, when leveraged the right way, can be game-changing for e-commerce businesses. The Journey Builder in Marketing Cloud allows the team to track the journey of each customer, from onboarding to making a purchase. It acts like a centralized hub to store and manage customer data and engagement records to easily segment the target audience.
With Marketing Cloud, teams can also work with Social Studio to run omnichannel marketing campaigns, reaching out to customers on channels they prefer and at their preferred time, which helps in bringing more engagement and customer attention to the business.