2020 has been one hell of a year, both personally and for businesses. The new year is bringing leaps of hope and optimism for everyone who’s spent most of the year in lockdown.

The new year typically brings an increased interest in personal growth: A lot of people will already have resolutions to lose weight, exercise more, or even journal every day. But who says resolutions can’t be for business goals too?

Starting the year off with a set of clear goals will keep your team motivated and focused. As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, goals are easier to stick to if they follow the SMART acronym:

Specific

Measurable

Achievable

Relevant

Time-bound

As long as you can measure your goal’s success, it doesn’t matter whether you achieve it or not. Goals are just a good way to get the team focused when they get back from the festive break.

To help you get started with your goals for 2021, we have created a list of ideas that are all great for E-Commerce businesses. 2020 was a year of growth and development for the online world, so you need to stay in the loop and keep up the momentum.

Improve the quality of site traffic

Not everyone who ends on your site will be interested in buying your product. That’s just the way the industry goes. Rather than setting the goal to ‘increase traffic’, it’s important to find a way to increase high-quality traffic. High-quality traffic is those people who actually would buy your product.

Use a tool like Google Analytics to find out more about your current customers, and the visitors who aren’t sticking around. From this, you’ll be able to find key information like age, gender, location, and use this to create better marketing campaigns tailored to the correct people. By targeting more specific audiences, you’ll naturally increase your highly relevant traffic, rather than wasting money on broad searches.

Grow Your Mailing List

Newsletters are still a hidden gem in the online world. Sure, your open rates might look a little weak, but as we’ve discussed above, those who are signed up are usually high relevancy and high-quality traffic. So even if they don’t open every newsletter sent their way, the emails they do open might just tickle their fancy and turn into a sale. The ROI of mail marketing is way higher than typically marketing too, so it’s totally worth your time and effort. A super-easy way to increase revenue and grow your list is by offering a small discount on their first order if they sign up.

Get Ahead of SEO

The world of SEO is ever-changing. So, if you’re using an SEO strategy from way back when then it’s likely not doing a great job anymore. Google is constantly changing its algorithms, so to stay ahead, you’ll need to keep in the loop with their changes and improve your own site accordingly. Google no longer accepts repetitive keywords; it can tell the difference between plurals and singular and can identify when sentences actually make sense. Avoid keyword cannibalization and just focus on how your content sounds. This is the simplest way to rank highly in searches.

Start Influencer Marketing

Use our guide on influencer marketing to get your foot in the door. This new form of marketing is still fairly scary for businesses, but by introducing the idea slowly at the beginning of the year, you’ll be confident and prepared for the festive period in 2021.

Reduce the workload for Customer Service

If you’ve not already started using chatbots to manage the new demand for online business, this is definitely something to consider in 2021. We’ve already discussed how great a chatbot can be for your company, and your customer service team will welcome the help after the busy festive period. Check out our article on how chatbots can work for you.

Improve Your Sustainability

If there’s one thing every business should do in 2021, it’s becoming more sustainable. Sustainability has been a huge consumer trend over the past few years, and there are no signs it’s slowing down. Find one thing in your business that is having an impact on your carbon footprint and look at ways to improve. Alternatively, you can also use this resolution to make your business more cost-efficient. It’s often the case that those parts of your process that are quite costly, also have a bad impact on the environment — for example, packaging and returns. Read our article on how to make your business more eco-friendly.

Reduce Your Returns

There are several ways in which you can reduce the number of returns your business is processing. The first key option would be to review the current reasons people are returning your products. Is it a manufacturing fault? Are the items arriving damaged? Is the product the wrong size? By reviewing your current product range to identify any issues, you can quickly improve your service and in turn, reduce returns and the cost to your business.

Another way would be to provide customers with an alternative to return their goods — that way you don’t have to waste time, effort and money processing and restocking. ReturnGO handles customer return requests by offering each customer a personalized amount of store credits to cancel their request. The customer can then either donate the product, keep it, or even return it at a later time. Not only does this reduce stress within your office, but it also rewards the customer and provides you with repeat custom.

So there you have it. Following some of the biggest tech and consumer trends, you can easily create your own measurable goals that will help you stay focused in the New Year. Good luck, and we can’t wait for 2021 to be your best year yet!