5 Low Hanging Fruit Ecommerce Revenue Sources You Should Focus On

Here’s the bottom line about ecommerce. You want to get as many sales as possible in the shortest amount of time with the least amount of cost and effort

Am I right or am I right?

It’s basic business. And when you’re just starting out as an ecommerce business, gaining customers rapidly and inexpensively is as important as it’s ever going to be.

Obviously, then, you should focus on the proverbial low hanging fruits. In other words, you need to identify the easiest, fastest, and most cost-effective ways to acquire new customers.

What are those ways? In my experience with ecommerce, including my own businesses and the hundreds of clients I’ve helped, here are three things I’ve discovered.

Why only three? Why not thirty or ninety-two?

I want to provide you with a focused set of tactics. I’m not going to dump a ton of stuff that might work. I’m providing a tactical list of things that will work.

If you’re ready to upgrade your revenue, use these methods.

1. Identify your competitor’s unhappy customers.

The people who are most likely to purchase your product are people who have purchased similar products in the past, but whom are unhappy with their purchase.

The concept is simple. Your competitor already has customers. (Otherwise, they wouldn’t be your competitor.)

You want customers. So, you reach out and get these customers.

Which customers are most likely to defect?

The unhappy ones.

Isn’t this unethical?

No. This isn’t about sinister tricks to steal away business. This is about honest business. Unhappy customers are the bane of any business. You’re doing your competitor a favor by taking away the burden. Plus, you’re doing the customer a favor by providing them with a superior service.

Isn’t it risky?

Yes, but not in the way you think it is. The only risk you face is the need to provide superior products and services.

Remember, you’re taking in unhappy customers. It’s important to ask several questions before you welcome them into the open arms of your ecommerce business:

• Why are they unhappy?
• What aspects of the product(s) are they unhappy with?
• What can your business do to overcome that dissatisfaction?
• What level of service on your part can remove some of their unhappiness?

It’s important to truly understand why they are unhappy. If you don’t understand this, then you might fail at your attempt to gain their clientele.

If you’re not careful, you could have a problem on your hands. If there’s one thing that’s worse than no customers, it’s having disgruntled existing customers.

Disgruntled existing customers not only demand refunds, but they also spread the word about their disgruntledness, which serves to wreck your business even more.

That’s the risk.

But instead of viewing it as a risk, you can also view it as an opportunity. It forces you to level up, creating a level of service and a quality product that far exceeds that of your competitor's.

How do you do it?

Some tools and apps purport to find negative feedback, but I haven’t found one that is effective. You may just have to do it the old fashioned way.

Because Twitter is largely an open community, this is the best place to start. You can use these techniques on Google+, Instagram, and Facebook, too. However, Twitter’s lowered privacy threshold means that you can find the information you’re going for.

First, go to Twitter advanced search.

Enter the keywords you’re searching for. These keywords do not need to include hashtags.

At the bottom of the search screen, click “negative.” This will return tweets that include sad faces.

Instantly, you’ll have a list of customers who might be unhappy with Verizon.

You can also find the Twitter account associated with your competitor’s service division, search for tweets to that account, and data mine these unhappy customers.

The results are often very helpful for your purposes.

Now what do you do with this information?

Simple. You reach out to those concerned customers, presenting them with superior products or service.

Explain that you’d like to help them, and send them some information to get in touch with you, look at your products, etc.

Generally, the technique looks like this:  

1. Find unhappy customers of the competition
2. Reach out to them.

That’s it. A few hours of consistent efforts on this point could yield a lot of new customers.

2. Expand distribution channels to third party ecommerce platforms.

Selling on your own website is great.

But why sell on one website, when you could sell your product on more websites?

It’s like this. Let’s say you have a brick-and-mortar shop, and sell widgets. Your shop is located in Ruralville, Nevada, population 500 (town name: fictional). Will you sell some widgets? Sure, you probably will.

But what if you can get your widget into a shop in Manhattan, New York? You’ll sell more. Way more. And what if you can get your product into every Target store in the United States? Even better. Or, what if you can turn your Ruralville store into a worldwide chain?

Now we’re talking.

That is the power of what I’m proposing here:  Expand distribution channels to third party ecommerce platforms.

What does this mean, practically? It means you need to sell your product other places. Like Amazon.

But here’s the tough thing about selling on Amazon. Everyone else is doing it, too.

It’s not as if you can pop your product up on Amazon, and expect to make bank the next morning. You not only have to sell; you also have to position your product to gain a higher ranking in the Amazon search results?

How do you do this? You do this through the power of product reviews.

If you sell a product on Amazon, your goal should be to get as many five-star reviews as possible. Five-star reviews are rocket fuel for your sales.

Amazon’s algorithm is designed to reward the products that have a lot of genuine reviews, positive reviews, and a natural velocity of reviews.

You can boost your sales by 18% simply by gaining positive reviews.

Here are a few quick tips for getting Amazon reviews.

• Send follow up emails to the customer, providing them a link or instructions to leave a review. A service like Feedback Genius helps with this.
• Create a promotional campaign where you offer free products to customers in exchange for a review. Platforms like Honest Society provide this kind of service.
• Provide an enclosed pamphlet or letter with your product, asking the customer for a review.
• Ask Amazon’s top reviewers to review your product. Amazon features these reviewers directly on the site.
• Ask for reviews on social media.

You can’t force people to give you positive reviews. But the customers who will be likely to give you reviews are usually more likely to be positive.

There’s a flip side to this, too. You can also search out your competitor’s products, identify unhappy customers, and reach out to them in order to gain their attention.

Here’s how to do it. Find a hot-selling product of your competitor’s. The more reviews it has, the better.

If the reviews are 100% five-star, you’re screwed. Rarely, however, is that the case.

Click on the product, and go to the review section. Filter the reviews by 1 star. These are the unhappy customers — unhappy enough to tell the world about it.

The great thing is, these customers tell you exactly why they’re so angry.

The best way to respond to the disgruntled customer is by replying to his or her comment.

Obviously, you want to avoid a direct sales-like response. Instead, you want to feature a natural and positive approach to their concern, and share some helpful feedback.

Here’s an example.

If you go all guerilla and start selling your product in the comments, you'll quickly be flagged for abuse, and may even be banned from Amazon. Take heed.

Don’t lose sight of the more straightforward method:  gaining positive reviews for your own product. Racking up positive reviews on Amazon is one of the quickest ways to skyrocket sales.

3. Leverage dynamic remarketing through strategic tagging.

Customers who have visited your site before are more likely to visit your site again, and make a purchase.

Everyone cries over shopping cart abandonment. Not me. Why not? Because I know that the people who just abandoned their cart will probably be back in a day or two to visit the site again and actually complete their purchase.

How do I get these people back?

Remarketing.

Retargeting, as you may be aware, is presenting ads to customers who have visited your website in the past.

How effective is this method? According to studies, 62% of customers would be encouraged to purchase a product if they see it while they are researching for that purchase.

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Many online retailers have discovered that the difference between conversion rates before retargeting and after are enormous. An average conversion rate is 2-3%. An average conversion rate after retargeting is closer to 16%!

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Retargeting has the highest level of efficiency among any online ad types.

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But retargeting alone isn’t guaranteed to boost your sales and change your life.

The real power of remarketing, specifically via Adwords, comes through using the dynamic remarketing tag.

The dynamic remarketing tag allows you to collect data that is unique to each potential customer. Data such as shopping cart pages, total value of items, and other detailed information is stored, then later used for remarketing.

To leverage this stored information, you must set custom parameters that will dynamically access data values for remarketing. You select the relevant values and parameters, and implement the appropriate remarketing methodology.

Remarketing as a blanket strategy is fine and good. But taking your remarketing game to a whole new level will give you a whole new level of power, customer insight, and, more importantly, conversions.

4. Implement marketing automation.

The term “marketing automation” can sound a little bit scary. This is especially true if you are fairly new to the world of ecommerce and online sales.

Don’t let the term throw you off. Marketing automation is basically collecting your repetitive marketing tasks, and allowing you to streamline and consolidate them.

Marketing automation includes a lot of different components of your marketing strategy. 

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Obviously, your marketing automation setup will look different, depending on what you need and what automation software you choose.

Marketing automation takes the complexity of marketing, and allows you to simplify it, creating a continuous cycle of optimization and improvement that will turn your sales funnel into a well-oiled machine. 

What’s the ultimate result? It’s another form of improving your ecommerce revenue.

Keep in mind that marketing automation requires a considerable amount of setup work. Maintaining marketing automation isn’t a hands-off event.

Businesses such as Hubspot are ideal for entering the world of marketing automation, as they can facilitate setup and ongoing improvement.

5. Optimize for LTV.

LTV, or lifetime value, is one of the most-overlooked yet most profitable revenue forms for ecommerce.

What does it mean to “optimize for LTV?”

Look at it this way. If you have a new customer, that’s great. The customer finds you, buys a product, and you get some revenue.

Okay, good.

But let’s not stop there. What if you can engage with that customer in such a way that she buys not once, not twice, but five times. Each subsequent purchase she makes is easier. After all, you don’t have the customer acquisition cost (CAC) to worry about. Plus each purchase she makes is of higher value than the last.

Is this a dream? Is this ecommerce fantasy?

Nope. It’s the cold, hard facts of optimizing for lifetime value.

LTV (lifetime value) places a priority on nurture, upsell, and cross-selling, and invests less in the actual acquisition of the customer. 

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Acquisition (CAC) is important, but ultimately produces less revenue and at a higher cost than lifetime value (LTV).

Another tactic you can do is optimize your LTV for each customer. Then talk about setting up upsells, crosssells, automation (mention using Hubspot for automation), etc.

Over time, a customer’s value actually increases rather than decreases. The typical customer lifetime resembles the familiar bell curve. 

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Focusing your marketing efforts at the center of the bell curve simply makes the most revenue sense.

How do you improve or optimize for LTV?

Every ecommerce business will have a different approach, but here are some of the most popular methods for improving LTV.

• Customer service improvement
• Personalization
• Data analysis
• Increasing customer retention
• UX improvements (Tools: Crazy Egg or GA Scroll Tracking Analysis)
• Loyalty programs
• Enhanced pricing models for repeat customers
• Multichannel marketing
• Subscription models and pricing (Tools: ReCharge)
• Improved ongoing communication (Tools: LiveChat)

Customer retention is one of the focus areas for improving LTV. 

The most common methods are upselling and cross selling. You can use special events and milestones to further enhance your lifetime value marketing efforts.

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Marketing automation, explained in the point above, can make the process of LTV optimization a lot easier.

Conclusion

Big time sales and massive customer pipelines don’t happen by accident. It’s going to take some effort, time, commitment, and a bit of cost.

At the same time, you need some methods that will yield big results as soon as possible.

I think you’re going to find those results by using these methods.

What are some quick-and-easy methods you’ve used for improving your ecommerce revenue?