Online retailers utilize inventive and ingenius strategies to lead the audience to their goods and services.
No matter how efficient your marketing strategies are, one always has the potential of losing out on crucial customers if your site lacks optimization for sales.
Attractive website design is important for converting ecommerce website visitors into target audience. Design of a site should ideally be such that makes buying procedure stress free.
Before you make the decision of hiring services for e commerce development, know what are the major factors that have the potential of making your website a hit.
Establish your own e commerce goals
Basic step towards your e-commerce tactic is to set basic goals. Your goal can range from attracting a certain number of target audiences to generation of specific revenue within a particular time period, which will help judge your online store’s performance and efforts of your campaign with set goals in place.
Ensure to measure your goals against the industry standards as well as set quantitative benchmarks.
A great beginning point will be to set the objective & key outcomes. Objective delineate the goal whereas the key outcomes are the measures you take to reach the point. Listed below are examples:
Become a renowned and loved workout shoes company in comparison to Reebok.
Key outcomes
- Captivate x number of qualified audience to your online store every quarter
- Create a loyal customer base
- Delight target audience with amiable, responsive and helpful customer service
- Create authentic and relatable social media presence to get connected with the customers.
Utilize these as your base for setting and promoting your store on the online platform. What measures do you require to take to acquire such key outcomes? It is really a good way to decide priorities and then align your business strategy with your whole team.
Recognize unique value proposition
Online audiences generally tend to conduct a lot of research before they make a decision to buy.
It means they will probably be striking a comparison of your products and services with those offered by your competitors.
Recognise what is your company’s unique value proposition and ensure it is clear to your customers.
Value proposition answers crucial questions, which every e-commerce audience focuses on asking, i.e ‘why should I purchase from you and not your competitor?’
It even details out how you can resolve audiences’ pain points and how you can ameliorate their experience by including some value.
This can refer to few specific advantages such as how your product/service is cost effective, eco friendly, incorporates swift shipping and is more convenient and easier.
Ensure to keep the buyer personas, wants, pain points and requirements in mind at the time of determining your company’s value proposition.
Create effective service or product descriptions
Write a detailed description of the services and products that you are selling on the e commerce page.
Descriptions must highlight their advantages, features and also must be easy for the audience to read.
Give the audience as much data/info as possible. Along with description, it is also important to add in some high quality photos.
Visuals can either break or make a sale. Insert in various photos at distinct viewpoints to assist your audience with better understanding about your product.
Design must be easily maneuverable and viewable through different devices like iPhone, tablet, laptop etc.
Do not miss out on optimizing the e commerce store for SEO optimization. Optimize the pages for short, and product-driven keywords, which involves the product name.
Ensure that your page titles, image alt text and headers concentrate on targeted keywords, so that the search engines are able to understand that they require to show your online store on being asked the query as per your target keyword.
Delight your audience
There are various ways to delight your audience and build your brand. Think about a feature that will make your audiences’ shopping experience highly pleasant.
For instance, offer free delivery/shipping, 20% off on first order, personalization on packaging and others.
Costly shipping is one of the reasons why online shoppers leave their carts.
Providing them with free shipping on their orders more than a specific amount encourages your audience to purchase more of the services/products and make them feel from within that they are getting value out of their buy.
Chatbots are an excellent feature that companies can pre program to provide customers with answers about basic questions.
Those customers with queries about their service or product can rely on the chatbot for answers.
Optimize checkout process
Ensure to optimize your company’s checkout process. Make sure it is very smooth and provides a friendly experience.
Poorly implemented checkout processes result in an increase in cart abandonment rate.
Ensure it is simple to navigate. You can even offer an automatic sign-in option with social media for a better experience and avoid asking them to fill multiple forms for sign-in.
Enable customers to view what they have in their cart and even make it simple for them to make any last-minute changes to the cart.
Here are some other measures which can reduce shopping cart abandonment
• Add in easy access to the customer support
• Provide customers with money-back guarantee
• Offer distinct delivery options
• Implement a simple and clear return policy
Run retargeting & remarketing campaigns
Many people who visit online stores do not buy the first time on their visit. Mostly, near to 79% of people leave their shopping cart while shopping online.
Run retargeting advertisements on various other sites or social media platforms to show services and products that the audience earlier looked at and placed in your online cart to recapture their attention & also remind them that they were interested to buy the product.
Run remarketing google ads or email campaigns to remind your audience about the products they left in their cart.
Offer promotions or discounts to encourage the audience to take the required action.
Customized emails and advertisements enable you to re-engage and nurture your customers, which results in enhanced conversion.
Optimize your company’s e commerce website for mobile
Listed findings from Pixel union greatly emphasize on the importance on optimizing your website for the mobile device:
- By 2021, your mobile e commerce sales expect to account about 54% of the total e commerce sales
- About 70% mobile searches that leads to actions with just an hour
- Nearly 67% of the audience admit to conducting digital window shopping just for fun on their phone and about 77% of them can make impulse buys when window shopping.
- Shopify said on Black Friday weekend about 69% of the sales took place on tablets or phones and just 31% were done through desktops.
To make sure your web visitors get a good experience, optimize your e commerce website for mobile.
Establish trust
Trust is completely important for running your e commerce store. Customers after all are providing you with highly sensitive data/info, thus be sure to utilize HTTPs protocols for encrypting all the data that is transferred to and from your site.
Ensure to be transparent regarding the products cost or the services and shipping, return or exchange policies and tax expense.
Include trust badges to your online pages like payment processor logos, security badges, SSL certificates and third party endorsements.
Implementing customer reviews on your online site can also be helpful to gain trust as such reviews are coming from people who invested in the company’s success.
Sanjay Dey