Create Your Ecommerce Growth Strategy: 7 Tactics You Shouldn’t Skip in 2024

Opening up a simple online store is pretty quick and easy. Let’s be real—almost anyone can do it, right? But building a profitable ecommerce brand that brings in sales and makes customers return for more is an entirely different matter. In order to get there, you need time, effort, and a successful ecommerce strategy for growth.

Source: Unsplash

If you’re an ecommerce store owner looking to scale your business, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll explore 7 tactics you can use to develop your strategy for growing your online store.

Why is it important to have an ecommerce growth strategy?

First things first. Why do you even need a strategy for your ecommerce store?

Over the past few years, the landscape of ecommerce business has changed. Although ecommerce was already a part of our everyday lives before 2020, online shopping really blew up during the pandemic. And so far, the ecommerce industry is showing no signs of slowing down.

This means that, while there are many opportunities for ecommerce business owners, there’s also steep competition. If you want to stand out and really make money from your online store, you need to make sure you have a well-thought-out plan or, in other words, a robust ecommerce growth strategy. A good growth strategy will help you improve your store, make your marketing campaigns more targeted and effective, and have a positive impact on customer retention and customer loyalty.

Source: Unsplash

Another reason why it’s important to have an ecommerce growth strategy is the changing nature of social media marketing. Until recently, online store owners relied heavily on paid online advertising to drive their sales. The idea was simple—get eyes on your brand, and sales will follow.

However, with tech giants like Apple or Google introducing more privacy-oriented features for their users, it has become harder and more expensive to get paid ads right. As a result, business owners have to adopt a more holistic approach when thinking about their ecommerce business.

This means that ecommerce growth strategies are a must-have for any business owner looking to stand out from the crowd, identify problem areas, and find new ways to expand their business.

7 tactics to include in your ecommerce growth strategy in 2024

Now that we’ve covered why it’s so important to have an effective ecommerce strategy, let’s get into the good stuff. We’ve gathered 7 great ecommerce growth tactics you can use when developing your own strategy.

Some of these will help you improve existing customer loyalty, and others will find you new customers. Either way, every tip on this list will bring you closer to ecommerce success.

1. Define your brand

This one might seem obvious at first. If you already own an ecommerce store, chances are you have an idea of what your brand represents, right? But it’s one thing to know the basics of your brand—your target audience, your brand colors, or fonts—and another to know what your ecommerce brand is really all about on a more meaningful level.

If you haven’t done so already, now’s a good time to sit down and define your brand’s core values and personality. This will be enormously helpful when creating your growth strategy. Having a crystal clear idea of your brand will allow you to expand your target audience, personalize your customer journey, as well as help you find new sales channels.

Brand values

One of the most important aspects of defining your brand is identifying your brand’s core values. These are the principles you and your brand will adhere to, even as your business grows. Having a clear set of values has become important for business owners in an era where consumers are increasingly interested in the ethics and practices of the companies they buy from.

Consumers are prepared to pack up and go if a company doesn’t share the same causes and concerns. Take a look at how recent customer boycotts have hit large, global brands like Starbucks or McDonald’s. On the flip side, shoppers might be ready to spend more if they feel a business reflects their own values and shares a common purpose.

This means that by defining your values, you can find new ways to resonate and communicate better with your audience. If you need some inspiration, you can see how other companies have defined their values. For example, here are LEGO brand values.

Source: Lego

Brand personality and voice

Brand values define what your brand is; brand personality and tone of voice define how you communicate your brand to your target audience. While these aren’t things that will directly bring you online sales, they are important in your marketing and social media strategy.

Your brand personality and voice will dictate how you communicate in your social media posts, what kind of user-generated content you’ll need, and what kind of jokes or memes you use. Duolingo is a great example of a brand with a very specific personality and tone of voice. It’s bold, topical, irreverent, and funny.

When you look at Duolingo’s customer base, you realize it’s primarily made up of young people. According to Similarweb, roughly 54% of Duolingo visitors are under the age of 35. This means Duolingo uses online trends and memes to communicate with its customer base in a way that resonates with them and feels approachable.

Source: @duolingo on X

Whether you’re selling to Gen Zers, retirees, or Millennial moms, your brand language should incorporate your audience’s mannerisms and tone to some degree to make sure you seem relatable. That’ll help you build customer loyalty with existing customers and improve your marketing efforts when you’re trying to acquire new customers.

2. Expand to more profitable niches

Having a clear idea of your brand’s core values can also help guide you when you’re looking to expand into new, profitable niches. For example, if your business sells trending products for hikers and your brand is all about loving nature and being adventurous, you can explore selling products to potential customers in similar niches like rock climbing, biking, or mountaineering.

The global ecommerce market is competitive and full of online stores that offer similar products. So, choosing a unique niche within this ecommerce space is one of the most important parts of all successful ecommerce strategies.

Having a clear idea of what your niche is will help you improve brand loyalty and guide your ecommerce marketing strategy, among other benefits.

Like most things, niches can go in and out of style. That’s why it’s important to keep your ear to the ground regarding trends in your industry. For example, if you own an apparel store and are looking for the most profitable niches, you can take a look at what niches are the most popular in 2024.

Source: Unsplash

4. Choose the right ecommerce platform

Your ecommerce success also depends on the platform and tools you use. When entrepreneurs start their ecommerce businesses, they often choose a beginner-friendly platform with a great deal of support for new sellers.

Choosing ecommerce websites like this means you can set up your store quickly and easily without much technical knowledge. That’s because these websites usually have simple website builders and a lot of learning resources for new business owners.

But if your ecommerce site is seeing a large increase in online sales and you’re starting to think about how to scale your business and improve the customer experience, consider switching to open-source platforms.

Source: Unsplash

Open-source platforms like WooCommerce or Magento typically aren’t recommended for beginners, since setting up your store takes much longer and requires quite a bit of technical knowledge. However, if you have experience running ecommerce businesses, open-source platforms can give you a lot of benefits in the long run.

You’ll be able to mix and match different plugins and tools, thus opening the doors for increased customization for your ecommerce website. You’ll also have more control over how much you spend on subscription fees, plugins, and extensions, allowing you to significantly cut costs.

And you don’t have to do all the work yourself—you can always hire developers to help you with the technical side of migrating your ecommerce website.

3. Personalize the customer journey

According to McKinsey research, ecommerce success is all about personalization. 71% of online shoppers expect personalized experiences when purchasing products. Plus, commerce businesses that grow faster drive 40% more revenue from personalization than their slower-growing competitors.

What does this mean? If you want to increase average order value and customer satisfaction, personalization should be your best friend.

Source: Printful

But where do you actually start with personalization? You start with your existing customers. Collect customer insights about who they are, where they’re from, their age, and gender. Also research how they interact with your brand—how they found you, what channels they use to engage with your business, and how long their buying process is. Once you know who your loyal customers are, group them into several segments based on shared behaviors or characteristics.

When you have your customer segments, that’s when you can really start reaching out with personalized, segmented content through email marketing or social media marketing. Create marketing campaigns aimed at specific segments, or try out influencer marketing. Experiment with different marketing channels and see what works best for your priority segments.

If you want to go a step further with personalization, you can also facilitate ecommerce business growth by offering custom personalized products to your customers.

4. Strengthen your social media game

Where would ecommerce be without social media?

Social commerce, or selling products directly on social media platforms, is a major part of the ecommerce world. Social commerce revenue is predicted to reach $6.2 trillion by 2030, which means that if you’re developing an ecommerce strategy for growth, you must have a plan for selling on your social media channels.

There are plenty of ways to integrate commerce into your brand’s socials, whether it’s shoppable ads, social media checkouts, social commerce plugins, or something else. Showcasing your products on your social media platforms is a great way to promote them. Encouraging customer feedback and using user-generated content are also effective methods many ecommerce stores rely on to build trust.

Social media offers a broader opportunity to reach potential shoppers who otherwise wouldn’t visit your website or even know about your brand. But remember that this kind of digital marketing will work best if your product visuals look good. That doesn’t mean you need to dish out a ton of money on fancy photoshoots, though. Check out this tutorial on how to make good-looking photos on a budget.

5. Add more sales channels

If you want to reach your customers, you have to use the channels they frequent. When you’re looking to grow your business, it might be useful to embrace what’s known as omnichannel commerce. That’s an ecommerce strategy that combines all possible sales channels, providing customers with a seamless shopping experience.

There are many options for you. If you only have an online website and socials, think about expanding to an ecommerce marketplace like Etsy. Try optimizing your website for mobile or creating an engaging email marketing strategy that’ll allow you to engage with your customers through email marketing, too.

However, when adding new channels, be mindful that quality should always be over quantity. For example, if you’re selling to Gen Zers, it’s no use adding Facebook to your channels. Use your insight and knowledge about your customers and try to meet them where they actually are.

6. Optimize your business processes

Every business owner knows that time is money, and money is time. When your business starts to succeed, you’ll soon realize you can’t do everything yourself.

If you have a ton of sales coming in and you pack every order, answer customer inquiries, create social media content, and handle a hundred more tasks that come with running a business, you’ll burn out pretty quickly.

You need to focus on big-picture things like key performance indicators and customer experience. The rest? That’s where ecommerce automation comes in.

Source: Printful

How to automate processes with print-on-demand

If you’re selling custom products, one of the easiest and quickest ways to automate tedious and time-consuming business processes like producing, packing, and shipping your products, is to find a print-on-demand provider.

Print-on-demand is a business model that allows you to sell your designs without having to worry about inventory, packing, or shipping. Here’s how it works: you create a design, choose a product from your print-on-demand provider’s catalog, and add it to your store. Once a customer makes a purchase, your print-on-demand provider prints it at their facility, and packs and ships it to the customer.

Many ecommerce companies rely on print-on-demand providers since they help simplify the production process and cut costs. Take a look at how ecommerce shark Match Kicks used print-on-demand to take their business to the next level.

Of course, it might be a bit scary to trust your customer experience to a third party, but everything depends on the kind of partner you choose. With a partner like Printful, for example, your best-selling print-on-demand products would be in safe hands—only 0.24% of our products are reshipped due to quality concerns.

Learn more about growing your ecommerce business

Once you have your ecommerce growth strategy, remember that it won’t be set in stone. Ecommerce trends come and go very quickly, so if you want your strategy to be successful, it’s crucial to stay updated with industry trends to keep your strategy relevant.

If you’re looking for reliable sources, you’re in luck—we offer a wealth of free resources at Printful. As one of the leading print-on-demand companies in the world, Printful collaborates with all of the most popular ecommerce sites, and we always keep our ear to the ground regarding ecommerce industry news.

Be sure to check out the Printful Blog to find all kinds of interesting insights about running an online business. On our blog, we share the latest ecommerce, design, and social media trends, and various tips on how to grow your business.

Source: Printful

For those who prefer visual learning, you can find valuable information on our YouTube channel. And if you’re looking for more in-depth educational materials about, for example, how to define your brand or how to use Google Trends for ecommerce, you can always check out our Printful Academy courses.

Source: Printful Academy

Ready, set, go!

Did you find this list useful? If you have any questions about building an effective ecommerce business strategy, let us know in the comments!

Don’t forget that building a successful ecommerce business doesn’t happen overnight. If you encounter challenges or difficulties on your ecommerce journey, don’t be discouraged—every idea that doesn’t work out as planned might just lead you to something bigger and better.

Just look at Printful. Its founder, Lauris Liberts, started his ecommerce journey over a decade ago, printing posters in his living room and selling them on his small ecommerce store, Startup Vitamins.

The challenges he faced led to the creation of Printful. And now, 11 years later, Printful is one of the leading companies in the global print-on-demand industry.

Source: Startup Vitamins

You can never know where your passion for ecommerce might lead you if you do the work and stick to your dreams. We’ll be here, rooting for you! Good luck!