Hello Ecommerce Folks,
Underpinning all ecommerce businesses is a set of smooth-running, well-thought-through operations that help achieve your business goals. These operations include standard teams you’d expect in all businesses, like a sales team, a marketing team, and a customer services team, as well as digital-only requirements, like an IT and web development support team.
In this article, you’ll learn how to boost all of these teams, contributing to net efficiency across your business, and boosting your profits from your ecommerce business as a result.
Sales
We’ll start with sales, as it’s one of those operations that’s distinctly different when you’re selling in the online marketplace. In traditional sales roles, individuals would speak face to face with a customer, attempting to persuade them that the product or service on offer is worth their investment. But that face-to-face interaction drops away when you’re selling online, so your sales team needs to be composed of different skills that are better suited to online selling.
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So, what skills do Ecommerce salespeople need to make your profits rise? Well, you should consider looking for talent that:
- Can help you target customers’ reasons behind their purchase
- Rush consumers into buying, through offers and time-scaled discounts
- Remind customers that you have more products that they may enjoy
- Produce digital aspects to your eCommerce site that encourage sales
Make sure that you’re keeping an eye on the performance and productivity of your sales team in order to draw the best ROI from their hard work and creativity.
Marketing
A field of work usually fairly divorced from the sales team, in eCommerce the marketing team tends to work closer with salespeople, sharing resources and building strategies that intertwine and interrelate. Put simply, though, the sales team is generally in charge of the content and nudges on your website, while the marketing team deals with external advertising. Both contribute to your net sales, which contributes to your profits.
When considering how to improve your marketing team, you should focus on what it is that’s holding them back from working productively. Once you examine your team with this perspective, you’ll see that information and resource sharing takes up hours upon hours each week. With a brand asset management system in place you can centralize all of your marketing and sales material – allowing all staff to access it without chasing for content. Learn more about digital asset management online, to find the solution that suits your business.
Digital and IT
Now we’re looking more towards the nuts and bolts of your business. Any eCommerce business relies heavily on their IT infrastructure in order to maintain sales and boost growth. It’s online that you’re selling your products or services, and it’s in the digital realm that your sales go through, and your customer information is saved and stored safely for delivery and data management. You need a team that’s qualified and responsible enough to handle this data effectively over time.
But to really push your digital team to the next level, you should provide them with a number of different tasks and projects to work on. Those with skills in the digital realm are incredibly useful for eCommerce businesses, and not just in web development. They can also:
- Optimize your workflow with a number of online processes that cut corners for your staff
- Advise you on which software packages are best to automate your business
- Look into the data running through your business for key insights and revelations
- Design apps and other high-quality web content to share with the marketing team
- AI-based Conversational Plateform Analysis
All of these benefits can be drawn from a well-motivated IT team in order to get the very best quality and quantity of work from them at all times.
Customer Service
Next up are the customer service team – one of your most valuable assets when trading in the online space. While consumers are clearly excited to be spending online, they’re less keen on the lack of customer service that often goes with ecommerce businesses. As such, providing excellent customer service is one way to differentiate yourself in a busy marketplace, and encourage people to return to your store in the knowledge that they’ll be treated well if they have any queries.
You can, of course, set up your customer services team to be part-automated – with chatbots and other technological tools to help you answer FAQs. Meanwhile, you should always maintain some quality customer service administrators, who are able to see where you’re losing sales, where you’re making customers upset or angry, and how you can remove friction and fretting from the entire process – leaving customers happy and fulfilled from their journey with your brand.
Planning and Financing
Finally, there’s a central team in which you’re likely to make most of the important decisions as a company – and that’s in your planning and financial teams. These often overlap with executive positions, which means that in this team, you’re looking at your founder, your CEO, and your CFO. Sometimes, in ecommerce, those roles are filled by just one person. But it’s important when you’re planning your business outcomes and expectations, that you have at least one other perspective to help challenge you and your positions.
To make this team more effective, you should look first to the data that you’re fed, and that you’re basing your decisions off. Is it the most up-to-date data? Are you able to convert it into more insights, or make it more granular in order to see what’s hidden between the lines?
Bear in mind that data can help you:
- Understand where customers come from, and target those spaces with marketing resources
- Understand how your money is coming in, at what rate, and where to invest it
- Understand the performance of your competitors and the industry as a whole
- Understand what you should pivot towards in the future to make the highest profits
If you’re fed the right data by your software, and by your administration and IT teams, you’ll be able to make informed and enlightened decisions to guide your eCommerce businesses to new heights in 2022.
Use these tips to take a thorough overview of your entire eCommerce team, ensuring that you’re operating efficiently and effectively in all that you do.
Happy Reading?
