Starting up a successful e-commerce site is no small or easy task. But even when your website achieves success — either in the short or long term — you’ll no doubt face a slew of new challenges. Of course, the more visitors your website attracts, the more likely you are to see an escalating number of customer service issues.
And to maintain the success of your e-commerce site, you’ve got to continue creating and promoting your content, while also handling any technical issues that arise. Continuing to handle these tasks while managing an increased customer service workload can get a bit hairy.
Thus, effectively managing your website’s growing pains after your e-commerce site has achieved success requires adopting a different game plan. Here are four strategies you can use to help you manage success after your website takes off.
1. Outsource Your IT Management
Many e-commerce site owners start off wearing all hats at their company, including IT and website development. But as your site becomes more successful, there will be some everyday responsibilities you can afford to delegate to someone else. In particular, you can reduce your IT responsibilities by turning them over to a website management outsourcing services provider, like Optimle Studios.
Using an outsourced provider can save you time and technological hassle. Additionally, relying on third-party professionals can also improve the quality and security of your site, since you’ll be entrusting it to dedicated IT experts who specialize in web management.
Plus, many of these providers offer complementary services, including SEO and digital marketing solutions. Ultimately, the less time you have to spend on IT responsibilities, the more time you’ll have to concentrate on the core of your business.
2. Economize Your Content Creation
Generating continued website traffic requires creating and distributing a steady stream of content, which can be quite time-consuming. But one way to reduce your content creation workload is by outsourcing it to professional content creators and freelancers. Another way to increase you content creation efficiency is by using a content marketing platform.
These specialty apps can help automate your content marketing strategy, production and distribution, as well as provide tools to measure the success of your content promotion. While turning to a reliable third-party provider can make your job infinitely more easy, you’ll want to research some of today’s leading content marketing platforms that meet your pricing needs and specifications.
3. Automate Your Customer Service
Keeping up with a growing number of customer service issues is another challenge of an expanding business. But one of the most effective ways to handle volume while maintaining quality is to adopt a cloud contact center. For example, Aspect CXP Pro can provide your customers with automated self-service options, including live live chat and email support, that will reduce the workload of your live agents.
Moreover, interactive voice response systems use voice control to present your customers with automated phone options, while chatbots can provide them with live chat support. Of course, issues that require a human touch can then be escalated to a live agent.
Meantime, cloud contact center solutions can be used in conjunction with outsourcing to third-party providers to further reduce your workload. Plus, since your customer support center is in the cloud, you can hire service representatives located virtually anywhere.
4. Scale Up Your Marketing
As your customer service department becomes more efficient and can handle an increased workload, you can begin to scale up your marketing efforts. Upon starting out, you’ll likely dabble in marketing strategies like content marketing and SEO. But as your revenue grows, you can begin exploring paid marketing methods, such as Google AdWords and Facebook ads, to reach a wider audience and generate a quicker response to your campaigns.
Using paid advertising can become an expensive undertaking, particularly if your company isn’t seeing results. That’s why it’s important to test your ads before scaling them up. Use tools like Google Analytics and Facebook’s Ads Manager to measure ad performance as well as make adjustments and improvements accordingly. Once you’re confident your ads are performing at more balanced and profitable levels, scale up your advertising budget to keep pace with your revenue growth.