Grow your webshop? 9 practical tips

Starting your own store online sounds very exciting. It offers nice opportunities, but it is also a challenge. How do you get traffic to your website? How do you ensure that orders come in and that customers come back satisfied? We have nine super useful tips for you to grow your webshop.

Start at the beginning: ensure traffic

1. Invest in marketing

It all starts with good marketing. Make sure people know about the existence of your webshop. How do you do that? Start with social media. Be active on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. It is possible to create featured messages on all these social platforms.

Of course you can also use the 'old-fashioned' PR method. Think up a good advertisement or send a press release. And make sure that you can be found in Google through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Most visitors will type the name of your webshop on Google, instead of directly visiting the URL. Then you want to be the first hit.

2. Work together with others

It may sound strange to work together with your competitors, but this still offers opportunities. You can benefit from each other's network and the collaboration itself can ensure publicity. Start a marketing campaign together or promote each other's products. Certainly if one of you has a large newsletter list or a frequently followed social media account, this offers benefits.

Convince

3. A strong brand

Build a strong brand. Think about what makes your webshop so unique: what do you offer that someone else cannot offer? Maybe the webshop offers special products, or customer service is excellent. In the ideal world this is a mix of both. A strong brand has a good story. This story can also be personal, for example when a family business was founded.

4. Choose the correct niche

A store that was very specific to niches is Coolblue. The webshop had 327 individual domain names that represented a niche. Whether the customer was looking for a washing machine or a camera, Coolblue owned a domain name for every product. Nowadays everything can be found on the main site of the web store, but you can still sort by niche by typing '/ washing machines' after the domain name.

Choosing the right niche is important. Imagine that you have a web shop in garden articles. Then you could focus on barbecues. That may be too broad, for example, focus on Weber barbecues. That already looks more like a niche. And if you specify even further, such as Weber gas barbecues or barbecue accessories from Weber, you will come closer and closer to the perfect niche. Enter one keyword research to find out what kind of search volume there is on interesting keywords and how fierce competition is in your niche.

5. Offer added value

Let's face it: there are a huge number of web shops in the Netherlands. Many webshops have already been killed or will die this year. Not really a bright prospect. That is why it is so important that added value is offered.

Ask yourself what your problem is Online store dissolves. Is there perhaps a lack of a certain product, and can you offer this product? Or is there perhaps a purchase problem that you solve? It is good to think about it, because visitors have money left over for solutions. That is how money is earned with web shops.

Welcome your customers

6. Know your target group

If you have found a niche for which you can offer value, you naturally want to attract it. For that you need to know who your target audience is. Know your customer: what kind of products does he or she find interesting? How much does he or she have to spend? What is the age of your customer? You can tune your webshop to this data. Thinking of a calibration person (persona) is also always a good way to determine a target group.

Not everyone can be satisfied. It is tempting to come up with a huge range, so that there is 'something for everyone', but you will not reach anyone with that. The more products are offered, the harder it is to make a choice. Then the easiest choice is to order nothing and to click the webshop away again. Research shows that a too large a choice makes us unhappy.

7. Mobile access

Ensure that the website is also accessible for mobile phones and tablets. 65 percent of purchases made by Dutch people under the age of 35 were made via a mobile phone or smartphone. That fact already indicates why it is so important that your website is mobile accessible.

8. Pay attention to the appearance of your website

Before the time of the internet, there were people who had made it their profession to build beautiful shop windows. People were enticed in with these beautiful showrooms. These shop windows can now also be found online and are called 'websites'. A good looking website is the calling card of your webshop.

A good looking webshop sells more products than a webshop with a poorly cared for design. That is why it is a good idea to have a designer look at your website. For example, a designer knows that it is better not to start a webshop to place stock photos. Many web shops, for example, put a stock photo of a lady with a headset on the customer service page. That looks cheap and scares customers.

9. Choose a sustainable relationship

Optimize the entire customer journey: from the moment the website is visited to an order and afterwards. Build a lasting relationship with your customer by, for example, calling or sending a service e-mail a week after the order was sent. Ask if everything is satisfactory. Some companies even include a handwritten card with the product to thank the customer for the purchase.

By going that extra mile, customers are happy to come back to you. Always do something more than what is expected of you, so that customers can tell others about the web store. That way your webshop will continue to grow.