6 Tips An Online Retail Business Must Not Overlook
Your business is only sustainable if the processes that govern its day-to-day operations are sound. Poor business operation standards affect everyone, from the social media intern you didn’t onboard correctly to the potential customers you’re losing by sticking to outdated marketing practices.
This article offers six tips on optimizing business operations that will help transform your struggling online retail business into a finely tuned, attractive, and trusted digital store.
1. Establish Achievable Goals & Quantifiable KPIs
All retail businesses strive for growth, but growth as such is a vague metric that isn’t necessarily indicative of an increase in success. Any effort to optimize business operations should start with assessing which goals everyone involved should work toward.
Implementing key performance indicators or KPIs is the simplest way to do this. These help you visualize concrete improvements and break complex goals into smaller, better-defined milestones. For example, you may want to double your mailing list in the next three months or launch two successful social media campaigns to raise brand awareness. KPIs like these also act as an early warning system, allowing teams and leadership to reassess their strategies if they aren’t proving to be effective.
2. Leverage Automation & Refinement
You’re already relying on a set of practices for sourcing products, acquiring customers, and keeping existing ones happy. How can you improve upon them? Which inefficiencies can you eliminate?
On one hand, there are bound to be redundancies and time-wasting steps you can safely eliminate. On the other, don’t be afraid to embrace automation! You can now automate everything from email campaign creation through social media posting schedules to using chatbots to answer website visitors’ questions. Most people won’t know or care about the change. Meanwhile, you’ll free up precious time to focus on innovation, strategizing, and the bigger picture.
3. Strengthen Data Access & Password Security
It’s impossible to run an online retail business without relying on an increasing number of related services. CRMs, messaging apps, and calendars – not to mention your website and databases – all depend on robust security, and a growing number of passwords per user makes it challenging to enforce.
Solving problems with appropriate tools is the hallmark of any agile online business, and team password managers are the right tool to address account security. They create and store passwords as needed, ensuring each team member has unique login credentials resistant to brute force attacks.
This single measure strengthens access control while also making your business more resistant to data breaches that frequently happen due to password misuse.
4. Harness the Power of Data
Your day-to-day operations already generate valuable data – are you fully exploiting it? Data-driven decision-making isn’t a buzzword – it’s a necessity that makes leadership aware of patterns they previously hadn’t considered and act on them to secure a better position even in fiercely competitive markets.
The applications are legion. For example, you can examine past trends to optimize logistics, cut storage and transportation costs, or cash in on seasonal trends.
Customers expect personalization and are willing to share data about themselves to enable it. Creating a streamlined and memorable shopping experience that doesn’t end at the virtual checkout will keep them returning.
5. Follow Cybersecurity Best Practices
Greater willingness to share data comes with increased responsibility. As your business grows, so does the amount and potentially the sensitivity of customer data. No one is immune from data breaches and ransomware attacks that seek to steal such data, especially businesses that believe themselves too small to matter.
A comprehensive cybersecurity strategy is in order. Access management and password protection are an excellent start. However, it’s not enough unless you enforce measures like regular security audits, data encryption, backups, and sharpening everyone’s cybersecurity skills through training.
6. Safeguard Customer Privacy
Customers are growing increasingly concerned with their privacy and how different entities exploit information available to them online. Your business needs to be transparent with its data collection policies. Likewise, you should only collect data necessary for normal operation, preferably with consent.
Some customers may wish to minimize their digital footprint and expect you to delete any data their association with your business generated. Honouring their wishes isn’t only ethical; it ensures compliance with data privacy laws like CCPA, GDPR, etc.
Partnering with data removal services is advisable to tackle such requests professionally. Working with data removal providers lets you identify all the repositories where personal data may be stored and ensure you dispose of it safely and completely.
