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Here’s a list of six essential eCommerce tools that you need to incorporate in your business strategy to boost sales.
#1. ZopIM
Your eCommerce strategy should always be customer centric. The better experience you provide them, the more they tend to buy from you. Personalized customer service is no more a luxury for online stores; it has become a necessity in the recent years. The best way to provide such an experience is having an online sales person who can answer the shoppers’ queries.
In general, shoppers have numerous questions regarding products and after-sales services. If you think having after-sales services to answer product related queries and FAQ section to answer after-sales services and shipping are enough, it’s time to mull over once again. Having an online customer service person is a more convenient approach and can better assist the potential buyers via live chats.
ZopIM is one such tool using which you can provide a personalized customer service without employing a specialized team. This eCommerce tool allows you to talk to your potential customers through live chat, irrespective of their native language as ZopIM is integrated with Google Translate.
There are lots of examples where live-chat feature helped e-retailers boost their conversion rates. One such example is SupplyGeeks.com; the company saw 17 percent of increase in its conversion rates in 2012 by simply adding a live chat service.
#2. WP Greet Box
This is a powerful plugin for WordPress that allows you to display customized welcome messages to your customers based on the site they are coming from. For example, if your visitor is coming to your online store via Facebook, you can put on a personalized message like “Welcome, Facebook user” or “Like us on Facebook” to greet him/her. This plugin support multiple referrers such as Google search, Twitter, Stumble Upon, Digg and more. You can also create greeting message to ask your visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed.
WP Greet Box therefore provides a cost effective way to increase your email subscribers. The email sidebar often goes unnoticed, unless you are too keen to implement pop-ups. With this WordPress plugin you can create a customized box, making sign-up message and link more visible. Smashing Magazine is already using this plugin to increase their email subscribers.
#3. SearchSpring
A trendy site navigation solution, SearchSpring helps you connect your shoppers with relevant products to enhance sales. This tool is presently being used by several large eCommerce brands including Stanley Black & Decker to facilitate category navigations and advanced website search.
SearchSpring can even help you optimize auto-complete, collect better quality search data, drive search conversions, and provide relevant search results and automatic search redirect. In its essence, this tool unleashes findability to boost your online sales.
#4. Optimizely
If you are looking for an A/B testing tool, Optimizely is a great option. A/B testing, if you are not already familiar with the concept, is used to calculate the effect of two variants in a design. Using the Optimizely tool you can test different layouts, templates, colors and copy on your online store to determine which is more appealing and converts best, in terms of higher revenue.
Bigger brands like Fab and Sony are using this tool. Optimizely supports different levels of eCommerce businesses and features a selection of packages. If you have a small eCommerce website with less than 2,000 visitors per month, the basic package is an apt choice.
Optimizely also works as an on-demand technical team apart from providing instant testing capability. You can even schedule test, track engagement and clicks, and measure conversions using this tool. It even works with a number of analytics tools including KISSmetrics, Google Analytics and SiteCatalyst.
#5. Exit Monitor
As the name suggests, Exit Monitor tracks the mouse movement of your visitors and displays timed, targeted and personalized offers when a visitor tries to exit your site. It is a great alternative to the pricey monitoring tool Bounce Exchange. The bottom line of Exit Monitor is to optimize conversion for generating leads.
In addition, Exit Monitor provides visitors’ behavior reports as it can effectively track their mouse movement and even find out their exact position on a particular page. Using this eCommerce tool (especially its ability to provide perfectly timed, personalized offers) you can not only entice your exiting visitors, but also encourage them to stay and purchase from you. It can therefore lower your bounce rates or shopping cart abandonment rates.
Exit Monitor also provides app integration and real time reporting. Leveraging this tool, online retailers can connect their favorite email marketing tools with customer relationship management.
#6. MailChimp
For any business email marketing is a strategic part. This holds especially true for an eCommerce business. Even though we have several communication channels today, email is still a preferred mode of communication among consumers. Let’s consider the statistics here. According to Direct Marketing Association, the ROI of email marketing is 4300 percent. A killer statistic to begin with!
As an online retailer you just cannot ignore email marketing, unless of course you are too keen to miss big sales opportunities. MailChimp is arguably the best tool for your email marketing strategy. According to the company, 73 percent of users are from the eCommerce industry.
MailChimp is intuitive apart from being easy to use. You can use this tool to send bulk emails as well to track orders generated via newsletters and promotional emails and analyze their performances.
Conclusion
For a successful eCommerce business, it is important to comprehend customer behaviors and analyze their online habits and recent trends to keep your brand solid. The eCommerce tools we have discussed here are just a few to name and there are many others that can help you improve your market reach and customer engagement capabilities; thus, leading to higher sales revenue.
Images: “Close-up woman’s hands holding a credit card and using computer keyboard for online shopping/Shutterstock.com“
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