From Offline to Online!

The effects of the pandemic has been all pervasive, especially on the economy. Business small and large have felt the impact – mostly adverse, but some positive too. At one end of the spectrum you have a startup like Whitehat Jr. which saw spectacular growth (and an even more spectacular exit) thanks to the pandemic. And on a smaller scale, you have examples of how a local dry fruit seller is thriving since he now takes orders and accepts payments online. Clearly, the beneficiaries are tech oriented businesses or those that have been quick to adopt new, mostly digital methods of doing business. But, for the vast majority of offline businesses which derived its revenue through traditional channels, this period has not been easy – to contend with shrinking revenues and at the same time, upping the ante on digital technologies to take advantage of the consumer behaviour shift. When I speak to fellow entrepreneurs, I see most of them grappling for answers. They are wondering what to prioritize and where to invest as they go about digitally transforming their businesses. In our own case, more than 85% of our business pre-Covid came from retail stores (own and 3rd party). Today, we don’t have any other choice but to make digital platforms our primary channel of sales. There is a pot of gold waiting for someone who will get this right. Here is an article which offers plenty of hope for smaller direct to consumer brands: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/indian-e-commerce-witnessing-a-shift-away-from-large-marketplace-model-to-smaller-direct-to-consumer-brands/articleshow/77372929.cms

As we have embarked on this journey, I have listed down what we have learnt in the last few months and what we have spent most of our time on.

1. E-commerce platform: A key decision to make for anyone wanting to have their own website is to choose the right content management system (CMS). One can go with a hosted platform like Shopify or a self-hosted option like Magento. Each of them come with their own pros and cons which have to be carefully evaluated. Close to 85% of the traffic will be via mobile devices, the website has to be mobile optimized unless of course you have your own app, which is all different ball game. In our own case, our website has been built on a monolithic architecture which we are now changing to a micro service based one which when completed would work far better on mobile devices.

2. Product content: For an e-commerce company, this is probably the most underrated aspect that often gets overlooked. On digital platforms, content is king. The richer and more comprehensive the content, the better are your chances of selling. Beautiful photos, explainer videos, features, highlights & benefits of the product and finally customer reviews. The better the content page, higher the chances of the visitor converting to a customer.

3. Digital Marketing (Search Engine Optimization, search engine marketing and Social media marketing): One can often get misled into thinking that this is the most important aspect of e-commerce business. This is because the number of companies who call themselves ‘digital marketeers’ promise the moon to the entrepreneur. Slick marketing can only get traffic to the website, but to have consumers transact on it is a separate challenge.

4. Brand building through social media: Its easy to get confused between social media (organic) with social media (paid). Paid social media is a great way to get off the door to talk to millions of prospective customers. However, growing organically on social media, having good customer engagement is the only sustainable way to succeed. And to have good engagement, it is important to have a team or an agency to help tell your story effectively. Once again, great brand content is vital to create loyal fans.

5. Customer experience (CX): While you can bring customers to your webstore with nifty marketing, only a great CX is what will help in retaining the customer. A platform like Amazon have mastered every aspect of ecommerce; to compete, you need to offer something extra. Telephone/whatsapp support, seamless delivery and efficient handling of escalations is de rigueur! A good place to start is to start measuring CX through NPS or any other means to see what customers feel about their experience. A happy customer is a customer for life!

6. In-house vs. Outsourcing : Another key decision the entrepreneur needs to take is to decide which aspect needs to be handled by the in-house team and what has to be outsourced. Unless you have a fairly large team, it is advisable, that the experts handle specialized areas such as building and hosting the website, SEO and paid marketing. With so much talent available through the gig economy, free lancers to handle specific tasks is also a very viable option.

7. Conversion Optimization and Analytics: If you are looking at one area where with the least amount of effort, you can achieve the most, it would be to improve conversion rate on the website.  (Conversion Rate is the percentage of website visitors who convert – either buy or sign up, whatever be the objective of the website) And this can happen only if you are able to extract and analyze the relevant data available to you. Don’t neglect analytics and CRO. A good place to start would be to ensure Google Analytics (GA) is well integrated into your website and tracks the most important metrics.

8. Culture change: Finally, to succeed online, the entire organization has to think and act differently – think digital first. What worked in the offline world no longer holds good in the new world. Both the speed and way of working has to transform if the business has to succeed digitally! In our company, we have had numerous training and orientation sessions to get people up to speed on what’s expected of them.

Like I mentioned before, this is work in progress and I am sure we are going to discover many other facets of digital business in the days to come. Let me also mention that these learnings are mostly relevant to mid-sized consumer brand such as ours. The relative importance of each aspect may vary with size and type of business.

I would love to hear others views on whether we have covered all our bases for now?