Spring is a time of renewal and revival, so why not extend that sentiment to your e-commerce business? A thorough spring cleaning can help you shake the dust off your e-commerce business and keep it up-to-date.
Unlike your home or closet, though, clearing out your business of things that no longer serve you takes a lot more careful planning. We’ve gathered some tips on a few ways you can refresh your e-commerce business for that sparkling squeaky-clan feeling.
1. Reorganize customer data
Analyzing customer data can help you discover areas you might have missed about a specific customer segment, uncover changes in customer habits and behaviors over time, or simply help you better hone in on your target audience for more relevant campaigns and marketing material.
While data needs to grow over time in order to paint an accurate picture of trends and similarities, checking your customer data seasonally is a good way to ensure you’re not missing out on any important information. Spring cleaning your business is a great way to clear out irrelevant data, focus on data that matters, and organize it in a way that works for your business. Here’s how clearing, organizing, and analyzing data can help:
- Get a better understanding of the types of customers shopping with your business, their purchasing habits, and the products they’re most likely to buy
- Identify areas for improvement in your customer service and product offerings
- Develop strategies to increase customer loyalty and improve customer satisfaction
- By organizing customer data into segments, you might uncover potential audiences you weren’t catering to previously and create a strategy to reach them
Through this type of analysis and organization, you can better target customer segments, tailor your campaigns, improve your sales, and even grow your business.
2. Declutter your inventory
With the winter season drawing to a close, now’s the time to go full steam on clearing out your inventory to make space for new products. Whether products are seasonal, aren’t moving from the shelves, or you simply have too much, early spring is the perfect time to put those products on promotion. Here are a few ways you can do it:
- Offer free shipping discounts on clearance items
- Create flash sales with steep discounts on excess inventory
- Sell your excess inventory on other channels such as retailers or marketplaces
- Promote items you want to move by tailoring specific items to relevant customer segments
Decluttering your inventory allows you to focus on those products that are most profitable and successful so that you can continue to build on those in the next quarters and seasons. Focusing your efforts on clearing out your inventory now, in the spring, will also ensure you’re prepared to start ordering and storing inventory for the upcoming holiday season. While this may seem like a while away, holiday season prep starts months in advance, so ensuring your inventory is healthy and manageable beforehand is essential to succeed.
3. Shake the dust off of your website
Spring is as good a time as any to update your website pages. Consider whether any of your product pages, informational pages, or even the look and feel of your website need to be refreshed.
Your website can always be optimized based on data gathered from organizing and analyzing your customer data or even by sorting through your inventory. Based on this information, you can create new pages that appeal to different audience segments, or make sure that products that are on clearance or that you want to move quickly are front-and-center on your website. Update your website by swapping old product images for new ones, especially for products in clearance, to give them a fresh and appealing look.
Finally, don’t forget to check that all links and processes still work on your website on different devices, such as checkout, email signup, or other CTAs.
4. Clear out and automate manual tasks
While you’re decluttering the rest of your e-commerce business, take a moment to assess your operations and see if there’s any room for improvement. Maybe your team is still focusing a lot of its time on taking care of manual tasks, or you need to go over each order one by one. All these small tasks can add up over time and hold you back from growing to your potential.
When looking for tasks to automate, consider the following:
- If you haven’t yet, consider using a CRM to help you organize your pipeline and customer relationships in one place
- Streamline your multichannel sales by automating order management, inventory syncing, and fin ops with platforms like Cymbio
- Project management tools can help you automate your workflow and ensure your entire team is on the same page
Automation helps employees free up time to focus on other tasks, while also ensuring the accuracy and consistency of your processes. In turn, you can help reduce the frequency of errors and improve the customer experience, all while saving time and money.
5. Refresh your partnerships
Spring’s the time for something fresh, like new partnerships. E-commerce business partners can help you access new avenues for growth and innovation and introduce you to new products or services. Additionally, partnerships can help you improve your existing operations or explore new customer segments.
For example, with Cymbio as a multichannel retail partner, you can bring your business to new heights by connecting with new retailers and marketplaces that might have felt out of reach to get to on your own. Cymbio’s multichannel platform can help you streamline your sales operations on third-party platforms and our experienced retail experts can connect you with new channels, enabling you to grow your brand even more.
Fostering new partnerships, whether it’s to help you grow your product offering, grow your retail services, or connect with new retailers, will allow you to stay ahead of the competition and create new opportunities for growth.
Cymbio: Your best spring cleaning tool
With Cymbio, you can clean up several parts of your business at once. Thanks to our multichannel retail automation platform, you can:
- generate reports to help you better understand your shoppers
- connect with new retail partners to help your brand grow
- eliminate time-consuming manual tasks
- clear out your excess inventory by selling on additional sales channels
Whether or not you feel your business needs a spring cleaning, it’s never a bad time to test the waters with a new multichannel e-commerce platform that will help you scale your business without extending your budget.
Speak with one of our retail experts to see how we can help you spring clean your business.