Online business has been around for a while now, and garnering consistent sales requires work, strategy, and customer care, not to mention the timely delivery of goods and services. One of the most effective approaches to winning customers and rake in more money involves the use of SWOT analysis to evaluate your business.
SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) was developed in the ’60s as a strategy for improving successful outcomes in your business.
The best time to perform a Shopify SWOT analysis is the beginning of every year, followed up by quarterly reviews. Alternatively, you can conduct SWOT with a new project or if you’re a startup business looking to grow in the online trading space.
The Four Main Areas of SWOT to Help Grow Your Business
Strengths –Include a strong online business presence, affordable goods and services, great social networking and customer engagement, competitive edge, an attractive website with engaging content, excellent customer care, and service delivery, etc.
Weaknesses – include poor inventory practices, weak marketing strategy, poor customer service, poor management, lack of business commitment, etc.
Opportunities – include business growth and expansion, changing customer needs, use of advanced technology to boost sales and reach more clients, social media marketing, and emerging markets, etc.
Threats – include Government regulations such as tax increments, competition from existing market rivals, unforeseen events such as the Covid 19, and increased cost of production.
Once you perform a SWOT analysis against the mentioned factors, it enables you to find solutions or new strategies to grow your business as you leverage the necessary strengths and opportunities and rectify the weaknesses.
How to conduct a detailed SWOT Analysis
You can start by involving your business partners, including staff, for the best results. If you are a sole entrepreneur, you can introduce the SWOT analysis strategy to your associate partners and service providers for maximum effects on your business.
In the exclusive domain of Shopify store optimization, this SWOT analysis technique works. It is done by using A/B testing tools that enable a proper eCommerce store landing page optimization. It is a method, wherein two versions of a web page are compared, by testing on various critical parameters, indices, metrics and attributes, like images, texts and overall layout. This is basically to find out the strength & weakness of one version in comparison to the other one. This is called split testing and a popular entity like “TridentAB” is an expert in this field.
Determine your strengths
Define positive attributes in the areas of customer service, available resources, skills, product development, distribution channels, and an existing customer base.
Do you have sufficient cash flow? Evaluate your branding and marketing strategy and identify your unique selling proposition.
Acknowledge your weaknesses
What areas do you find challenging to manage? Identify the aspects that derail growth in your business. It could be slow delivery, poor time management, and multitasking or poor customer service.
Do you listen to your customer complaints?
Do you take time to answer their questions, complaints, and concerns?
Do you lack enough resources to run your business effectively?
Only when you identify the core weaknesses can you begin to make the necessary changes to improve the overall performance of your online business.
Identify Potential Opportunities
Once you have done a detailed review of the internal processes that require change, you will see the opportunities for improvement and growth.
For instance, you can go ahead and incorporate a Shopify pop up or an email pop up app on your website’s home page screen, so that your visitors can convert to potential customers, and start shopping on your site. This is only possible when you’ve partnered with a specialist like “Tada” that can help infuse such lead magnet ideas for reducing shopping cart abandonment and improving sales figures, subscribers and conversion rate. It is also important to think of other ways on how to increase your sales one recommended way is to use upselling app on Shopify.
Look for emerging trends and social behaviour to turn around your sales strategy.
Identify new markets and make some noise in all social platforms for mass awareness.
Sit back and observe the response and subsequent expected sales. It may take a while, so practice patience and re-evaluate your strategies every few weeks.
Evaluate Threats
A thriving business will always have threats from time to time, so look out for competitors to minimize risk. Protect your products with necessary patent licenses to avoid duplication.
Provide honest feedback to your clients to preserve your customer base.
Offer quality, reliable products to maintain your existing customers.
Look out for negative external factors and stay prepared for change. Change is inevitable; it presents new opportunities and new clients. Learn to embrace change in times of adversity.
Success with SWOT Strategies
Take the time to evaluate your business performance by conducting a detailed SWOT analysis. The exercise brings out different outcomes, offers new ideas, and fresh perspectives for possible growth in your online business.