Running a successful e-commerce store takes a lot more than just choosing the right platform. In fact, having a wonderful product or an incredible service to offer isn’t enough either. Even if you generate a decent amount of leads with successful content marketing, you cannot guarantee sales and growth without incorporating one thing in your business – an exceptional online shopping experience.
Keep in mind that there is more to shopping than just clicking the checkout button. The scope of the shopping experience includes several other factors outside the act of shopping itself. It includes the experience of learning more about a particular product, trusting the authority of the seller, and of course, enjoying a seamless, hassle-free checkout system.
These are the true keys to an exceptional shopping experience. Fortunately, you no longer have to do everything from the ground up. As the e-commerce industry grew, the supply of tools that help online entrepreneurs reach their goals grew as well. The challenge now is to identify your goals, develop plans on how to accomplish them, and find the best tool for the job.
Your business is only as good as the tools you leverage, so you shouldn’t settle for less except if you want your sales to underperform. Without further ado, here are the 5 of the best e-commerce tools you can use to maximize your online sales:
#1. GetResponse
An effective email marketing strategy is one of the most important components of a successful e-commerce business. In the digital age, marketing emails serve as a method of “personal” communication between businesses and their target audience. They are used to maintain brand awareness, inform about company events, announce new products or promotions, and to ensure the movement of leads down the sales funnel.
GetResponse is an email marketing platform that will let you do all of the things above and more. It allows you to easily create sophisticated forms, responsive email designs, effective autoresponders, and highly converting landing pages. It is also packed with all the additional features you need for your email marketing campaign including an A/B testing tool, a drag-and-drop email builder, a mailing list manager, and analytics.
The best thing about GetResponse is that you only require minimal design and development skills to create professional-looking content. With its fluid and minimalistic user interface, you can easily build responsive landing pages and emails within minutes. If you’re targeting mobile users, worry not because the content you can produce with GetResponse will be 100% responsive, which means they will automatically adjust in different screen sizes.
#2. 2Checkout
Supporting as much payment processors as possible is crucial for maximizing conversions. Bear in mind that not all people use the same payment gateway when shopping online. This is why you need to support most, if not all of these services to accommodate every prospective buyer. Think of it as the final bit of convenience that your audience needs before finally converting into paying customers.
2Checkout is probably the easiest way to integrate a payment system in your e-commerce business. It supports payments through credit cards, debit cards, and PayPal unrestrictedly over 196 countries and 87 currencies. It also features fraud protection protocols like CVV and address verification.
Implementing 2Checkout to your ecommerce store or an existing shopping cart platform is easy thanks to their extended support. Although integrating the system can be simple, the platform offers a lot of flexibility under the hood. You can basically tailor the entire payment process to suit your exact needs like automating tax surcharges, coupon discounts, and so on. Thankfully, 2Checkout has put together learning resources for complete instructions regarding their platform.
#3. MyUKMailbox and MyUS
What’s the point of having a global marketing reach if sales can’t do the same? Even though you transact on the internet, sometimes you are forced to narrow down your target audience based on location. It may be possible to sell products to distant countries, but it usually comes with high shipping charges, which is a big let-down for prospective buyers.
Instead of opting for the pricier, traditional freight services, you can use MyUKMailbox if your online shop is based in the UK or MyUS if yours is based in the US. These companies offer parcel forwarding services, which will significantly reduce the costs of delivering physical products worldwide.
Basically, buyers simply have to open a MyUKMailbox or MyUS account and their purchases will be forwarded to them at a much lower price.
For example, if customers want to buy from an ecommerce site based in the UK, they must create a UK mailing address with MyUKMailbox. The customers can get their orders forwarded to the UK address and MyUKMailbox will take care of sending the orders to them at prices lower than the freight services.
This, in addition to the reputation of these service providers, can increase buyer confidence and your company’s target market.
#4. Salesforce
Marketing automation helps companies save time, funds, and manpower while ensuring that every aspect of the business is duly optimized from managing customer relations to remarketing development and execution. There are many automation tools available out there for the specific needs of your business.
Salesforce is a complete automation platform that can help you with multiple areas of your marketing efforts. While their product line has emphasis on customer relationship management, Salesforce can provide you with an all-in-one toolset for lead generation, analytics, and conversion optimization.
Aside from these, Salesforce also has products for app development, B2B marketing automation, and data management. If something needs to be done for your online business, then there’s a good chance Salesforce has a product for it. You can find a complete list of their products from their website.
#5. Crazy Egg
Optimizing your ecommerce website for conversions requires you to take a deeper look at your customer data. You need to observe your audience’s browsing behaviour, your website’s heatmap, and what particular page layouts are more effective. This is what analytics software are for.
Crazy Egg, while curiously named, is actually one of the best analytics services that can help you optimize various on-page elements such as call-to-action buttons, navigational buttons, menu buttons, contextual links, and so on. It will also provide you with accurate heatmaps that track the number of clicks in these elements.
Obviously, Crazy Egg will help you determine which on-page factors are ineffective for conversions. This is extremely useful for identifying problems with content layouts, navigation, and overall site design.
Expanding your Toolset
In the end, always assess the ROI of each tool you invest on. In this highly competitive world, there is no valid reason to be left behind by being reluctant to implement automation and the use of effective tools. A sound solution would be to examine the goals of your business, break them down into clearer objectives, and find the exact tool needed for the job. With the booming e-commerce industry, there is bound to be one for everything you need done.
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