Strapping in for a great eCommerce business launch

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If you have the right products, the right budget to get your business up and rolling, and a decent business plan, then you might feel ready to get the ball rolling on the eCommerce business you plan to run. However, you don’t want to get things started only to watch it grow at a snail’s pace. A good launch can help you start growing right out the gate, building momentum that helps you build the customer base that will sustain you months down the line. So, how do you launch your eCommerce business?

Know your target audience

Before you start putting out any communications, you should ensure that you know what kind of customers you’re trying to target. You can, for instance, work with market research groups to look at competitors or similar businesses, and to help you break down things like age group, gender, income, lifestyle, and even location of the market that you’re trying to target. This can help you not only understand how to communicate in keeping with their needs, and to find the best ways of reaching them, but it can help you shape your brand to appeal better to them, and to know how to hit the triggers that get them to click onto a newly launched website.

Create a purpose-built website

Your website is going to be the primary tool through which you drive sales, but it will also be where the majority of customer interactions happen. It’s where anyone who wants to check out your business will have to go, so you want to make sure that you invest the right degree of time, effort, and money into it. There are a lot of eCommerce site-building platforms at your fingertips nowadays, and working with them can make it easy to set up a site that meets your needs. However, if you want to have a truly impressive launch, then you might want to work with a website development team that can take it to the next level. Many of these teams will work the aforementioned platforms, making sure that your own team will be able to manage and update the site afterward.

Make your web presence known

A lot of eCommerce businesses launch poorly because they did little other than get their website up, and maybe start an account on a couple of social media channels, before waiting for their customers to find them. A lot of them don’t do a lot more because they don’t have the understanding of the online marketing landscape to do it effectively. If that’s the case, then you should consider working with an eCommerce marketing agency, instead. Being able to rely on the expertise of practiced and experienced marketing experts can allow you to make the best use of a variety of strategies, including social media advertising, Google Ads, email marketing, and much more to make sure that you can get your brand out there as effectively as possible

Understand what’s working and what isn’t

If you’re working with the right marketing team, as mentioned above, then it is likely that they’re going to have all of this covered, but it’s important to make sure that you understand the importance of analytics. There are analytics tools for your website, email marketing campaigns, advertising platforms, social media channels, and much more, that you should be keeping an eye on. These can give you a good idea of not only what is hitting your customers and what isn’t, but what is more likely to reach them based on time of day, message saturation, demographics, and more. This data allows you to tailor your launch as you go, making sure that you’re hitting the points that are most effective and not spending too much money on strategies that aren’t working.

Test and double-check your checkout process

If you want to make sure that the sales are able to roll in, then you have to pay extra close attention to the checkout. A checkout that doesn’t work effectively is going to see a lot of people bouncing from your website. To that end, test the various aspects of your checkout, ensuring that orders can go through and the delivery process picks up seamlessly when they do. Take a look at any shipping rates and discounts that might apply to ensure that they’re working, test your shopping cart editing tools to ensure that you can easily add or remove products from it, and check that links for all available payment methods are working. 

Get the PR rolling

When the day of the launch approaches, you want to make sure that the news is reaching as many ears and eyeballs as possible. To that end, you should make sure that you’re taking the time to get in touch with relevant publications, with a fully typed-up press release detailing the launch of the site. The right PR agency can help you connect to all manner of publications, too. There’s no such thing as kicking up too much of a fuss about the launch.

Ensure you’re protected

Last, but not least, you have to understand the importance of cybersecurity when running any kind of online business. As an online store, you are going to be asking your customers to provide personal, login, and financial details. Even if they are doing it through third-party providers, such as payment portals, any indications that your site and business are not secure are very likely to scare them off and prevent you from fostering any trust or confidence in your business. As such, work with cybersecurity experts to make sure that not only is the site secure, but that your own data collection and storage methods are secure. The legal and financial repercussions of a major breach are difficult for businesses of any size to survive.

There are no guarantees in business. There are, however, steps you can take to ensure the best chances of success, and, in the world of eCommerce, a good launch can be one of the best steps available.