Engine23

10 eCommerce Experts Give Their Secrets on How They Optimized Their Business in [2016]

Insider trading may be illegal. But sharing optimization secrets is a no holds barred tactic that we here at Engine23 are exploiting.

We know the stress you go through trying to find the right solutions to help you achieve your company's growth goals. So we did a little reconnaissance for you and found ideas that you can take to your next brainstorming session.

We asked eCommerce experts “What were the three most impactful changes you made to your business in the last year?”

Find out what business lessons the eCommerce experts spilled in their responses..


Sleeknote

Sleeknote Content Marketing

“Focusing on… going more in depth… investing heavily on…”

Sleeknote is a software that allows you to build lead forms that will allow its users to create opt-in forms to grow their email lists. You can segment your appeals to better fit your traffics needs and engage with them more efficiently. Sleeknote users are also able to build their own template to direct traffic to specific products or pages that they are trying to get people to see.

Sleeknote Twitter

  • “We’ve been focusing more and more on culture which, among other, helps us recruit the right people for the company.
  • We’re going more in depth and being more precise with our KPIs and unit economics. With these numbers, we have a way better platform for scaling the company to new markets and industries.
  • We’ve been investing heavily in content marketing, which have finally begun to pay off. The results are not booming yet, but we’re beginning to see why and how this can be extremely valuable for us – now and in the future.”Mogens Møller, CEO & Co-founder of Sleeknote

Mouseflow

Mouseflow Traffic Optimization

“Create Flow... Getting serious about… Watching…”

Mouseflow is a software that allows websites to track their traffic clicks, mouse movements, and scrolling use. In addition, the users of Mouseflow can look at individual traffic sessions and break their users down by location. Mouseflow gives you heatmaps to see what your users like most and what sections of your page receive the most attention.

Mouseflow Twitter

  • “Creating a funnel report using Mouseflow and filtering/segmenting it to understand what causes our traffic to convert or not convert.
  • Getting serious about A/B testing and using heatmaps in Mouseflow to determine why one variant is more successful than another.
  • Watching recordings of visitors who abandon a key process on our site (sign up) to understand what causes friction, where undiagnosed bugs are, etc.” Evan Hill, Account Manager at Mouseflow

Location Rebel

Location Rebel eComerce Business

“Diversification... Renewed focus...Following the momentum…”

Location Rebel is the new American Dream, working from anywhere besides the stuffy office. They provide training for people to learn how to work from anywhere they please. They also have three additional pieces of training one for how to create a lifestyle blog, another on mastering emails, and the last is how to overcome the fear of uncertainty. Their site is really about taking over your life and how to make the most out of it!

Location Rebel Twitter

  • “Diversification - A few years ago I doubled down on Location Rebel Academy, the thing that was working the best. That was absolutely the right decision. But now, we've got such a broad community that there is a big segment I haven't been serving with just that one product, so we created a series of less expensive courses to help target that audience.
  • Renewed focus on 1 on 1 Interaction - Part of what sets us apart is we encourage every blog reader and email subscriber to email us personally and engage in a conversation. Not only does it help us build more meaningful relationships, but it allows us to do a better job of helping people take the first steps in building an online brand and business.
  • Following the momentum - Sometimes it's easy to get bogged down in doing the same thing month in and month out - yet when you really look at it, you see that one aspect of the business is actually gaining momentum. We've been paying close attention to the strategies that are going well, and putting more time and effort into that. Instagram, for instance has been a big driver of that. “Sean Ogle - Lead Rebel

Yoast

Yoast SEO Marketing

“Yoast has grown...Andrea Fercia… Irene..”

Yoast is all about that SEO. They have created six different plugins for WordPress users to advance their websites SEO. They have built several different SEO courses. Learning how to use their plugins, site structure, keyword research, SEO copywriting, basic SEO, and different bundles are they different types of training they provide. Lastly, they have a very educational SEO blog.

Yoast Twitter

  • “In 2016 Yoast has grown from just under 25 employees, to just under 50. That has had a tremendous impact on the entire business, as I’m sure you can imagine. We’ve done lots of things that have had a real impact, but some of the biggest gains, were in the smallest improvements.
  • We hired Andrea Fercia, who heads up the core accessibility team and has had a tremendous impact on the usability and accessibility of our own products as well.
  • We hired Irene, a linguist, who, together with the development team and my wife Marieke, has built some of the best readability testing features you’ll find on the web. All of those improvements make me incredibly proud. Our focus is, and always will be: how can we help people build better websites. I think 2016 was a good year for that, and we will strive to make 2017 even better :)”Joost de Valk, CEO and Founder

Ometria

Ometria eCommerce Marketing

“Reducing marketing silos… Marketing Automation 2.0… Personalizing mass communication…”

Ometria is a software company that provides its user’s life for an eCommerce marketer a little easier. This one platform gives marketers the ability to review customer data, view insights into customer segmentation, predictive analytics, and then put their plans into action through emails, product recommendations, and social retargeting. However, that is just a piece of what they can help with creating your marketing campaigns.

Ometria Twitter

  • “Reducing marketing silos: many ecommerce marketers have to deal with using a raft of different technologies on a daily basis - from email service providers to customer insight tools to Excel to ad managers and more. The result? A nightmarish amount of time spent analysing data, downloading and uploading csv files into various solutions, which makes for an altogether pretty disjointed experience across brand touchpoints for the customer. Choosing a solution that not only centralises all the customer data an ecommerce marketer needs to market effectively, but also incorporates the ability to turn this data and insight into actual marketing actions, like sending automated emails, targeting customers with social ads and more is having a huge impact on ecommerce marketers’ workflows every day.
  • Marketing automation 2.0: In the past few years, we’ve witnessed retailers start to embrace basic behaviour-triggered automation campaigns, like cart abandonment emails. Now, we’re seeing retailers benefit a great deal from taking automation up a notch, implementing advanced AI-based automation campaigns - such as predictive replenishment when it’s likely a customer will be running out of a product, and anti-lapse campaigns aimed at re-activating lost customers.
  • Personalising mass communication: ‘personalisation’ and ‘mass marketing messages’ may appear a contradiction in terms, but in the past year we’ve noted many retailers waking up to the idea that even broadcast campaigns like newsletters are more effective when they’re tailored to a customers’ tastes and preferences. Dynamic content blocks that change depending on the customer profile of the recipient have a lot to offer in this case, enabling retailers to change up the content presented to recipients without having to create thousands of different templates.” Ivan Mozour, CEO and founder of Ometria

Veeqo

Veeqo eCommerce Management

“our product, our pricing, and our people...”

Veeqo allows eCommerce merchants take a break from the struggle of listing all their products on Amazon, eBay, and other selling sites. The software also gives you reports on sales trends, reorder, and gross profit, Veeqo makes restocking your inventory easy and allows for its user’s accounting and inventory integration a breeze.

Veeqo Twitter

  • “We've made three big changes at Veeqo over the past 12 months - changes to our product, our pricing and our people. With the core Veeqo product, we rolled out some huge updates in 2016. We added brand new channels and integrations; dramatically improved the speed, reliability and usability of our product; developed a world-class smartphone app so retailers to manage their business on the go - the list goes on!
  • Another big change we've made has been to our pricing model. Veeqo is perfect for ecommerce retailers turning over upwards of £5m a year. So it's important we aligned our pricing model with the expectations of the retailers using our product.
  • A final change we've made has been around our people. We opened a London office in the middle of last year. And to ensure we have access to the world's greatest talent, we've increased the amount of remote workers employed by Veeqo. This means our team is made up of the very best people, working out of either our head office in Wales, our London office or any of the remote locations all over the world.” Matt Warren Founder of Veeqo

nChannel

nChannel Integration Management

“Standardized integration… extended support… launched a migration…”

The software provides a solution for organizing and managing your inventory across all your sales channels. nChannel also gives you product information management and multichannel order management. Their last primary solutions consist of multi-channel listing that makes listing your products across different channels easier and more efficient. They also provide other solutions such as drop ship management, accounting integration and more!

nChannel Twitter

  • “nChannel is a channel management platform that connects a merchant’s sales channels with their fulfillment systems. The improvements and changes we’ve made to our business this last year really helped simplify the way merchant’s sell.
  • nChannel created a standardized integration offering between eCommerce and ERP to make listing items, keeping product availability up to date, and processing orders automated and easier to manage - especially for higher volume merchants. We extended support for integration into third-party logistics providers including Amazon FBA.
  • Lastly, nChannel launched a migration tool to help merchants more easily switch from one eCommerce platform to another.”Steve Webber, President and CEO of nChannel

TriggMine

TriggMine Email Marketing

“Launched..Growth...Mastered”

TriggMine is an email automation software that works with any email service provider. It fast tracks your emailing process with information your customers have already provided. TriggMine provides email campaigns that are confirmed to work. With the software it allows you to send out personalized emails to your subscribers. They have a fourteen-day free trial and if you decide to continue with their software they estimate that you will receive 1,000% return on your investment.

TriggMine Twitter

  • “In 2016 we have launched the 3rd version of our product, this is the most important change. We’ve had a significant growth in the number of clients and partners.
  • Also, we mastered the integration process for our clients, now this process is very smooth and easy. Basically, we’ve moved from a pre-release stage to a period of expansion on the market, and we are doing everything for our existing clients/partners to be happy, and..
  • we are also seeking for new business relations.” Yuliia Honchar, Account Manager at TriggMine

CreativeMinds

eCommerce Development CMinds

“Moving our efforts… replacing our… using both…”

Creativeminds develops WordPress Plugins, and Magento and eCommerce extensions. These extensions are created to be compatible with the latest versions of Magento and WordPress. They have developed several different extensions to help people with their sites. You are able to recognize their ‘best sellers’ by the green ribbon on them.

CreativeMinds Twitter

  • “CreativeMinds is committed to developing premium Magento products and ecommerce solutions. Three of the most impactful changes we have made over the past year include moving our efforts to developing Magento 2 products,
  • replacing our task system to Jira (we used Asana before),
  • and using both written documentation and video driven tutorials to help users better manage with our products.” Courtney Jones Marketing Manager at Creativeminds

Bottom Line...


A huge shout out to those who contributed to making this post everything it is! If you found this post useful, go ahead and share it!

Key takeaways for you to take your next brainstorming session:

  • Analytics are worth their weight in gold, knowing and segmenting your customers is crucial to improving your sales.
  • Aligning your pricing model to meet your customer's value proposition, makes your products ROI a no brainer
  • Invest in your company's culture to get the right people on your team.
  • Marketing is crucial, always be opening new channels.
  • The old adage of It’s not what you know. It’s who you know is still true today, continue building more business relationship.
  • If you are standing still you are falling behind because the world is continuously moving forward. Never stop improving your products.
  • Your current customers are you best source for ideas on what new products or features the community you have easy access to wants.

What were the three most impactful changes you have made to your business in the last year? Seriously, let us know! We and the community would love to hear about you and your business! Finally, if you know of any great books that the community can use to implement the takeaways, let us know about them too!

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