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Originally Posted On: https://camberlion.com/find-ecommerce-agency/

The ecommerce industry continues to see rapid growth, even though there’s a worldwide pandemic and massive issues with climate change. This growth is excellent news for all businesses that do ecommerce. However, it also poses a few possible issues. How can you be sure your company continues to grow in a more competitive environment? What can you do to make it stand out?

To answer those questions and many others, every ecommerce business should consider hiring an ecommerce agency that can take advantage of the growing market and lead the company to even more success.

With that said, choosing the right ecommerce agency is key here – you don’t want to just work with the first company you saw on the internet; instead, you want to be prepared and genuinely find people who will nurture your company’s growth and care about it thriving.

That’s why we’ve prepared this short guide to help you identify what you need to look for in an ecommerce agency.

Let’s get started.

Know Your Future Plans and Goals

Ecommerce goals are usually pretty straightforward: sell products to make more money. You need an agency that is able to take these goals and adopt a marketing approach geared to them – you don’t want to spend extra time and effort on advertising campaigns that have no actual value. With ecommerce, you will most likely want a direct approach that gets potential clients to DO something, be it subscribe, follow, buy, or review. If you aren’t really sure how to phrase your marketing goals, then here are some examples:

• Increase qualified website traffic.
• Help increase the time users spend on the website.
• Get more people to subscribe to your mailing list.
• Increase your following on social media.
• Increase sales and the average order value.
• Improve customer loyalty.
• Decrease expenses and possibly cut marketing costs.

However, don’t forget that all these goals should be measured around specific outcomes you want to achieve. You want to avoid being vague and leaving things to interpretation. When sharing your goals, do it in the following manner:

• Increase traffic on the website by 25% in the next six months.
• Get 2,000 new followers on Instagram by the end of the first three months.

By specifying your goals, you leave zero room for interpretation. When the period you’ve set for the marketing campaign ends, you will have specific numbers to measure its effectiveness against.

The Important Characteristics Every Great Ecommerce Agency Has

While choosing the right ecommerce agency might not be considered rocket science, it’s still an important decision that has to be thought over and carefully considered. We’ve narrowed down some characteristics that we believe any relevant ecommerce agency should have.

The Agency Has Knowledge of Your Industry and Business

Every industry has its own bubble of issues and specifics. It’s great if your agency already knows all the unique jargon and problems that surround your industry. That experience will make it easier to understand how to successfully attract new customers, navigate competition and provide a good custom ecommerce development service.

If your company isn’t very niche and offers a variety of products and services, then it may be a good idea for you to work with an agency that has a more broad, generalized skillset. However, if you’re a tight specialist in a field, or you make a unique product, you should find an agency that has a subject-matter expert in your area.

Having this know-how will enable the agency you choose to promote your brand and its products/services more efficiently without wasting time and effort on extensive research. Based on the agency’s past experience, the agency will know what tone of voice to use and how to best promote your business to the target audience.

The Agency is Customer-oriented

A lot of the time, ecommerce owners only think of their customers, but they never consider themselves as clients. In this case, that’s what you’re looking to become. That’s why you have to look for an agency with a customer-first approach, one who will cherish your input, will listen to it, and adapt to your feedback. Along with that, you want to work with experts who will be willing to tell you when you’re wrong; sometimes, the advice of the business is not the best for marketing.

The Agency Will Prioritize Revenue and Returns

As an ecommerce business, your goals will always revolve around earning money and getting a higher revenue. Your agency should know and follow that. Every marketing effort should have a goal to increase revenue. The work you pay the agency for has to be able to pay for itself – it should be able to generate leads, sales, and traffic.

Along with that, hiring an agency at one point has to reduce your marketing costs. A good ecommerce agency should prioritize and optimize advertising campaigns so that they’re more cost-effective.

The Agency Will Put Focus on Metrics and KPIs

A good agency has to identify which marketing metrics apply to your business and have to be tracked. Usually, for ecommerce businesses, the core metrics that should be the focus of your agency are

• Website traffic rates
• Subscribers to the e-mail list
• Sales conversion rates
• Average order values
• Return rates

When you ask about these metrics and want to see how they’re progressing, a good agency should be able to provide you with clear and correct data.

The internet is full of ecommerce specialists …

But don’t let yourself be fooled by a good-looking marketing campaign and a few how-to videos – before hiring an ecommerce agency, take a good look at its previous work and talk with the people that work in it. Only then can you truly make an informed decision about starting a working relationship.