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January 6, 2022
5 min
The new year is expected to bring back the pre-Covid level of buying sentiment.
It is estimated that in 2024, India’s e-commerce market size will reach a whopping $100 billion USD, expanding at about 27% every year.
With growth opportunities emerging again, it’s the right time for Indian ecommerce brands to rethink their sales strategy for 2021.
It starts by taking a closer look at future challenges while evaluating current solutions.
For e-commerce businesses, the key to generating more revenue opportunities in the new year will be based on how well they can build a predictable sales funnel and deliver better pre and post-sales experiences at scale.
To grow in the face of massive competition and market crowding, businesses need to rethink how they can connect with new sales opportunities and delight existing customers.
To do so, it’s going to take more than just a busy top-of-the-funnel – for tapping into the needs and meeting the expectations of consumers, businesses need to look at each stage of their funnel for opportunities.
Let’s dive deep to understand how ecommerce companies in India can overcome common sales growth challenges in 2021 and generate more revenue opportunities.
When it comes to consumer sentiment, there’s a lot that has changed since the pandemic started.
Consumers have become price conscious, and value for money has become a crucial facet to making purchase decisions.
Yet, If there’s one sentiment that remains consistent about how people buy online – it’s the need to find quick answers and right solutions to their problems, and find suitable products and services to meet those needs.
So, how does connecting with leads faster help your business?
Irrespective of what’s being sold and where – speed and ease of shopping continue to be two key factors which affect the buyer’s perception, and ultimately, influence their purchase decisions.
Put simply, the faster you connect with opportunities online, the higher are your chances of converting them into customers.
In a deeply competitive industry, being the second one to reach out or respond can negatively impact sales. Further, it can also hamper the reputation and equity of your ecommerce brand.
If acquiring new customers is a key objective in the new year for your online business – being first to connect with opportunities online should be mission critical to your growth.
You can take a cue from Nolabels, an ecommerce brand that maximizes lead generation and sales by amplifying brand promotions during festive seasons.
> How SquadStack can help you connect with leads faster
To grow faster, businesses need to connect with opportunities faster.
With SquadStack, ecommerce companies can access an on-demand workforce with a talent pool of 5000+ fully remote callers.
Compared to in-house teams, our workforce is pre-trained for different industries, so you can get to growth faster and utilize the best talent for sales and fulfillment.
With a distributed workforce, e-commerce companies no longer have to compromise on quality or service delivery. Fast-growing ecommerce businesses can service more leads, respond to queries and connect with opportunities faster.
With SquadStack’s lead outreach and engagement platform, ecommerce companies in India can strike the balance between speed and scale, without worrying about missed opportunities to connect, follow-up or engage potential customers.
Your ecommerce business has set its sight on bigger sales goals for the new year, but how can you achieve them consistently?
According to research, on average, a salesperson spends only one-third of their time on selling.
The effectiveness of any sales team is determined by how they spend their time. The time spent with the right prospects can make all the difference to how likely a sales team is to achieve their goals.
To make the most of limited time, salespeople must first connect with relevant opportunities or ‘qualified leads’ with higher cart size value, and focus efforts on converting such prospects.
There’s another benefit of qualifying your leads, once you filter out purchase-ready prospects, you can run retarget and re-engage them via mediums like paid ads, social media, email, SMS, or push notifications.
The problem is – how to quickly find out the high intent, high-value prospects from your lead pool without wasting time on the irrelevant ones?
> How SquadStack can you qualify leads at scale
With SquadStack’s lead outreach platform, e-commerce companies can deploy custom cadences via automated workflows to qualify marketing generated leads, follow-up with them and generate up to 2-5x funnel growth.
Compared to a traditional call center, SquadStack brings campaigns across Voice, SMS, IVR, and Email in one centralized dashboard, passing on high-value, high priority sales opportunities to in-house teams.
We help you reach out to leads within hours, helping you provide superfast turnaround time, and keep your prospects engaged throughout their buying journey.
No more wasted time on low quality leads. Your sales team can deal with qualified sales opportunities directly.
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The number of leads you can reach, and service is directly proportional to the number of resources available.
Put simply, the more resources you have, the more leads you can contact, and ultimately, the more revenue opportunities you can generate for your business.
For fast-growing ecommerce companies in India, this often becomes a key challenge to be solved, before unlocking the next level of revenue growth.
Deep discounts, festive offers, seasonal deals and promotional campaigns help in acquiring leads, but keeping customers engaged at scale is the next challenge.
This problem emerges especially during the holiday rush and seasonal promotional campaigns where deep discounts, deals, and offers help in lead generation, but when it comes to having enough workforce to service these leads, it's not always a rosy scenario.
Ultimately, as ecommerce businesses scale, they have to make a choice – either continue to expand teams inhouse to cater to rising demand, or optimize only for incremental improvements and make compromises on experience.
But there is a better way, one that solves the problem of scalability without adding massive overheads or making compromises.
> How SquadStack can help you scale outreach without adding overhead
With SquadStack, fast-growing e-commerce companies can access an on-demand, fully remote workforce.
This helps convert cap-ex to op-ex while fastening your sales cycles.
With an on-demand workforce of regional callers, scaling your outreach becomes easier, as you can avoid long training cycles. This eliminates the need for hiring and training in-house, helping businesses stay lean and asset-light.
This, businesses can focus on their core competencies better, grow faster and outsource their sales and fulfilment processes.
This gives flexibility and customization to ecommerce companies who can confidently prepare for seasonal demand, campaign-specific shopping rush and year-long faster sales growth.
Making a sale is half the battle won, the key to growing your ecommerce business in a highly competitive market is to build customer loyalty as you grow to retain and engage customers.
Loyalty begins with trust.
As the world shifts to digital-first and virtual-only, building trust with prospective customers is even more critical.
A poor post-sales experience is likely to turn off one-time customers into long-term loyal users.
According to research, 58% of the buyers say that post-purchase experience is a crucial factor for winning their trust.
To build trust, businesses must ensure that post-sales delight is a core principle of the overall brand experience and not an afterthought.
The problem is that due to resource constraints, fast-growing consumer companies often have to shift their focus to customer acquisition and conversion, and as a result, they neglect the opportunity to delight their existing customers.
Offering deals and discounts alone doesn't help much in building deep customer relationships. Today, consumers expect brands to offer personalized pre and post-sales experiences, and e-commerce businesses must deliver them at scale.
How e-commerce brands can deliver delight at scale
Right from shipping an order to picking up a return request and collecting user feedback, every single touchpoint of the post-sales experience is an opportunity to delight users.
With SquadStack, ecommerce companies in India can easily set up automated follow-up campaigns for address and order confirmation, capturing feedback, managing and confirming returns and ensuring new orders are delivered for higher buyer satisfaction.
Ensuring responsive, streamlined communication at each stage of the post-purchase journey can be intimidating, and this is where our partners, like Clickpost, come into the picture.
Clickpost is a logistics intelligence platform that works with industry-leading eCommerce businesses to supercharge their post-purchase experience for customers via their courier API integration, performance driven courier recommendation and amazon-like tracking experience.
From smart logistics provider recommendations based on performance to ensure a better delivery time for orders to branded tracking pages and automated order status notifications on SMS and email, ClickPost ensures delight in an end-to-end manner by giving both sides real-time visibility.
The actionable insights provided by the logistics aggregator help drive upto 300% higher operational efficiency and higher customer engagement.
The pandemic de-accelerated growth for many businesses, but thankfully, India’s e-commerce industry in India has bounced back sharply from the slump, and 2021 is the year where growth will supercharge.
In the next five years, e-commerce in India is projected to exceed 350 million shoppers.
With the positive market sentiment making a comeback in the new year, it all comes down to one thing – how well can Indian ecommerce companies attract consumers and retain them.
The four key expectations of an online consumer revolve are:
Whether your goal is to grow revenue or build brand equity in the new year, in order to stand out and succeed in an increasingly competitive space, you need to rethink existing processes and solutions and ask – what do your consumers expect, want and need the most from your brand?
Between pre- and post-sales processes, revenue opportunities are created, perceptions are formed, and customer loyalty is built.
With SquadStack, consumer companies can leverage the power of technology and automation to accelerate sales faster.
India’s e-commerce market is re-ripe for growth – it’s all about how soon your business can embrace technology and automation to grow faster.
