In today’s rapidly changing environment the eCommerce landscape is extremely competitive. The use of the internet, social media and buying online is increasing each year with no sign of slowing down. This means that brands have to stand out and differentiate themselves in a very noisy environment.
In this post we will look at ways you can increase your eCommerce sales and grab attention, covering the following areas:
These points can be useful for those just starting out in the eCommerce environment or those looking to increase their eCommerce sales and take it up a gear.
Social media and eCommerce
Using social media to promote your eCommerce store helps to build brand awareness, attract new followers, promote products and increase sales. Increasing your social media following can help to build a community, be a hub for customer service and provide you valuable insights through social listening.
Just relying on your website alone to generate traffic and sales is not enough. Your website will take time to rank and if your brand isn’t recognised people may not click through. By utilising social media people will get talking, they are influenced by who friends and family follow and if others are following you that will be a trust signal to them.
Ensure your message through social media is consistent and fits with your brand values. This way people get to know who you are and gives them a reason to connect with your brand and continue to follow you.
There are many ways you can utilise social media through brand awareness such as competitions, showcasing what the brand has to offer, how the business is progressing and following your story. You can demonstrate products and their value either through content or videos. Most social media platforms now have shops you can add your products to and link to your website.
Usability
As you attract more people to your website you should start to think about the journeys they will take and keep a close eye on your analytics. Although the path to conversion may look a certain way to you, others may not see this, or it may alter on different devices and browsers.
Look at how many steps are involved from first entering your website to that order confirmation page. Does it give all the information required? Are the steps clear? Do you have too many steps and can this be reduced for simplicity?
As part of usability, you need to understand your customers pain points, why they are buying from you and the time and journey they will take to convert. A high price point might mean they want plenty of information and take time before committing to that sale.
Look at the call to actions through your website and make it clear the action you want people to take right from the very first page they land on. The CTA needs to be a clear button format and not just a hidden link within text. Think about the content you put on the button such as read more, submit, view X products. Using a CTA such as ‘buy now’ early in the journey can put people off when they are not ready.
Search functionality on your website can be a great source of information about the audience that’s visiting your website. By monitoring what people are searching for you can understand questions they might be asking popular products they are looking for (but not always buying), common misspellings and alternative products you may not stock.
Its worth investing time and sometimes money (additional plugins) into a good search functionality. Once you understand what people are searching for you should be able to redirect incorrect searches to the correct pages via you admin system. For example, common misspelling may lead to a no results page but putting a redirect in your admin system can take them to the correct product page.
Wishlist’s
You’ve now increased your audience through social media and improved the journeys on the website, so people are staying longer and have a clear path to conversion. Now we can look at creating wishlist’s for those who know what they want to purchase but can’t make that conversion right at that moment.
A wishlist means a person will create an account on your website giving you chance to capture details and sign them up to further marketing, expanding your email database. A wishlist can remind a person of what they were interested in and reminders can be sent to encourage that conversion.
You can also gain insights into what caught people’s attention and the products they are liking. From here a campaign could be created around this product group to encourage conversion and to let others know about these popular products.
Cross-sell and upsell
Cross-sell and upsell gives you a chance to increase the basket spend per customer. When you cross-sell you are suggesting additional or related products to what they have in their basket. Upsell encourages them to buy the next model up from what they are looking at and spend more on that higher spec.
These functions having a similar goal in that they are encouraging the customer to spend more and increase their order value. The key success to doing this is to truly know your customers, how they will respond and to know your products well in what will go together and the features available that stand out.
Search Engine Optimisation
SEO is a big topic in itself so I’m just going to go through a few tips on what you can start looking at to help your website. The first area I will touch on focuses more around content and images and I’ll list these areas.
· Page titles – make sure these are under 60 characters and contain your keywords.
· Meta description – this is more SEM and will be what people read in Google to entice them to click through. Keep the characters length between 155-160.
· Product description – describe your products well, give the key benefits, unique selling points and pain points it could resolve.
· Image optimisation – check the size of your images so they are not slowing down the page speed, give them a good title with keywords in and separate each word with a hyphen, add alt tags with your keywords.
From a technical SEO point of view, your biggest focus should be on securing the site, the speed of the site and if it is mobile friendly. Security of your website is a ranking factor but also gives the customer piece of mind when they are entering their card details. Always ensure you test your website on a number of devices and browsers as they can react differently. You can use an emulator online that replicates how different devices and browser work.
The URL’s across your website should be consider for SEO. Check that these are readable and don’t have a long link of characters. Include keywords in your URL’s and separate each keyword with a hyphen.
Discount codes
We all love a good discount, right? The reality now is that many customers expect to get a discount or see a sale on your website at some point. People have become savvy to the tricks to get these discount codes and some will not shop without one.
There are benefits to you as a retailer though as discount codes can help increase sales quickly, can help boost your social media following as people look out for these and increase your mail list with exclusive discount to email subscribers. Think wisely with this offering and ensure you include it within your marketing strategy.
Reviews
Word of mouth has always increased sales and online is no different. People don’t want to be sold to they want to know how other people have got on with the product, what other customers think and see or hear about the product in use.
This can be via reviews on your website or from a review one friend gives to another. Take a look at your website and see how you are gathering reviews; do you have reviews on your product pages? Do you have reviews about the level of service provided? It can always be good to include reviews in your social media strategy as well. Seeing the review can encourage people to click through to the website.
Don’t be put off though and worry about bad reviews. People will expect some negative comment along the way, we’re all human after all. But what people will look at is how you deal with this review and the customer service you provide. They want to be assured that if something does go wrong you are there to look after your customers.
To round it up…
I hope that was useful and should have created a long to do list for you! Remember always think about the customer journey from their first thought of the product or problem they want to resolve, to how they will search for this, the decision process, to making that sale. If you can relate to the customer and make the journey smooth and easy for them, you will be going in the right direction to increasing your eCommerce sales.
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