6 Tools that Ramp Up E-Commerce Growth

Building an e-commerce business is easier now than ever.

E-commerce platforms like Shopify consolidate everything you need to set up a virtual shop, from website hosting to payment gateway integrations.

These platforms are also backed with truckloads of guides and a supportive community that can teach you the skills needed to grow in the industry. You just have to be patient and comb through these learning resources to find the information that can help with your goals.

This time, however, we’ll take a look at external tools that can supercharge your marketing and brand building.

Remember, in any endeavor, you need to overreach if you want to outshine your competitors.

Expanding your arsenal of marketing tools could give you an advantage no one else has.

And without further ado, let’s get started.

1. Buffer

It’s no secret that social media is one of the prime platforms for connecting with your online audience.

Other than providing your content with a reliable source of traffic, social media networks also give you the opportunity to build an authority and earn your target market’s vote of confidence. But in order for that to work, you need a consistent content strategy that can supply your audience with valuable, relevant, and actionable information.

Buffer acts as a conduit between your website’s content to your social media pages.

It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to get more followers on Instagram or just want to bring more people to your blog. Buffer lets schedule posts across major networks while managing only one queue.

This makes social media marketing for e-commerce businesses an absolute breeze.

2. Quora

Although it’s not exactly a cloud-based tool designed for e-commerce entrepreneurs or marketers in general, Quora is a gold mine of content topic ideas that can fuel your marketing efforts.   

Similar to most self-service tools used in content research and SEO, you can start using Quora by entering a seed keyword that’s relevant to your e-commerce brand.  

Once you assimilated a useful topic idea and actually published the content, you can offer it as an answer to similar questions.

Just remember that your goal on Quora is not to blatantly promote your product, but to help users with solutions to their problems. That said, insert the link to your content as discreetly as possible.

Here’s how most brands promote their content through Quora:

Of course, you can also link to your product pages as long as it makes sense to your question. Whatever you do, prioritize the needs of users and avoid forcing product links into your Quora posts — doing so could result in downvotes, which will cause your e-commerce brand to lose face on the platform.

3. MailChimp

It’s an unfortunate reality in e-commerce that most consumers won’t make a purchase on their first visit.

So, rather than shoving a sale down their throats, a better approach is to offer them more free value in the form of educational content — delivered through timely emails or newsletters.

MailChimp is an email marketing platform that has all the tools you need to convert visitors into subscribers, design engaging emails, and automate emails based on user activity. It even has a built-in landing page and form builder to help you with the lead generation aspect of your email marketing campaign.

4. Crazy Egg

The success of your e-commerce brand is tied to the kind of user experience or UX you can offer.

It’s not rocket science: visitors won’t buy or subscribe to your email list if they don’t like your site. And while you can consume every tutorial or online course ever conceived, it’s still impossible to come up with a perfect web design blueprint.

What you need to do is measure the performance of your website, identify areas of improvement, and perform the necessary adjustments.

Crazy Egg is a heatmap tool that lets you skip the number crunching and visually observe how visitors interact with your website. It also comes with A/B testing and a drag-and-drop page editor that allows you to save time as you create variations of your pages.

5. Mobile-Friendly Test

Statistics show that the online traffic share of mobile internet now sits at 51.2 percent.

This means over half of your potential customers could be browsing your store on a smartphone or tablet instead of a desktop computer.

The good news is, most e-commerce platforms, page builders, and content management systems natively support responsive website themes. These allow on-page elements—be it menus, headers, logos, and content cards—to automatically adjust and resize to fit the smaller displays of mobile devices.   

To check if your website platform already did the heavy lifting for you, use the Google Mobile-Friendly Test to give your website a quick evaluation. Simply enter your website’s URL on the main field, click “Run Test,” and wait for the tool to finish its analysis.

On top of actually determining the mobile-friendliness of your website, the tool will also generously provide you with actionable optimization suggestions.

6. PageSpeed Insights

Finally, your e-commerce website’s loading speed is something you can’t afford to overlook.

According to studies, 40 percent of online consumers would abandon a website without hesitation if it takes over three seconds to load. This is much worse on mobile devices, where 53 percent of users would have left by then.

If you’ve been hard at work building and improving your site, make it a habit to run a PageSpeed Insights analysis to spot performance-related issues.

PageSpeed Insights calculates if your website’s performance is enough to provide visitors with a smooth UX. Just like Mobile-Friendly Test, the tool will also provide you with a long list of optimization suggestions that can help you improve your website’s loading speed.  

Conclusion

In e-commerce, improving the UX factor on your website is synonymous to conversion rate optimization or CRO.

You need to put your target audience first if you want them to realize the value of your brand, trust in your unique selling points, and eventually shell out cash for your products. The tools should be more than enough to help you achieve these e-commerce goals.

What do you think is a must-have tool that every e-commerce business should have? Feel free to discuss it in the comments below!