Overcoming eCommerce Slowdown.
The key to survival is mastering the balance between cost cutting and smart investment.
Focus on existing customers.
Shift your marketing budget to nurture your higher spending customers. During hard times, online shoppers are less likely to try out a new brand so by reallocating budget from acquisition campaigns to repeat purchases you can keep costs down whilst still boosting revenue.
Audit.
Thoroughly analyse which marketing/sales channels have highest conversions or return and what offers are generating the most sales.
Nurture your CRM.
Work on your email campaigns to re-engage existing customers and improve customer retention. The happier your existing customers are, the more likely they are to tell their friends about you - so give them something to talk about!
Best sellers.
Focus on your best-selling products or those you believe are “essential” in harder times. Make the customer journey as smooth and easy as possible.
Research has shown that during and after a recession it is those companies that invest in their R&D and Marketing that have the highest survival rates - usually they don’t just survive, they thrive post recession.
Lower spend requires higher efficiency.
By diving deep into every single process and aspect of your business and looking at ways to cut costs whilst maintaining standards, you’re paving the way for steady and sustainable growth in the future. This is the perfect time to re-examine your companies operations to find profit-sucking areas and plug them now. That way, when sales start to rise again (because they always do), you’ll have a more efficient business model that delivers higher profits. Your costs stay low, your profits grow faster.
Consider removing items from your inventory that are slow movers to reduce storage costs. This has the potential to improve the purchasing process by reducing confusion but also could have a tremendous impact on your storage costs.
Outsourcing your packing and logistics and automating your fulfilment process can give you access to cheaper shipping rates plus free up time for you to focus on higher value tasks that generate more business. This can be particularly helpful in times of yo-yoing sales so that your need for staff fluctuates less - the 3rd party logistics company will manage fulfilment in times of high sales and low sales which sets you up for much quicker recovery.
Returns.
Offering free returns is a key element of eCommerce and a way to drive higher conversion and customer trust. However, it’s also considered one of the biggest costs in eCommerce. So whilst it may seem obvious to stop offering free returns to your customers, this could be really damaging to your conversions. Working on reducing your returns from the root is the best way to target this issue. Besides, these are all recommendations we make to help grow your business and be more sustainable so it really is a Win, Win situation.