The success of an eCommerce website and its marketing efforts are intricately linked. Optimizing your company’s conversion rate should be a priority when aiming to become a key player in your industry. Despite being a term that became popular back in 2007 after Google introduced the Website Optimizer tool, and even though this tool is no longer available, in the last 3 years the importance of this concept has come to light. In order for even the smaller sized firms to stay ahead of the competition, it’s important to understand and be able to incorporate this concept.
The question everyone is asking is how do you transform your company into a successful eCommerce website? Here are a few important marketing tips that can be applied to your eCommerce website to boost conversion rates in 2016.
Business Plan and Conversion Rate Optimization
When deciding on an appropriate strategy for Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), it’s important to keep in mind the end goal. This means thinking about the purpose of your eCommerce business and how every CRO action that you take contributes towards your business plan. It’s important to answer fundamental questions such as how to reach your end goals, which can then be used to draw up a marketing plan which includes a conversion optimization plan.
Content marketing Plan
While having a business plan that is in line with the conversion rate that you are hoping to achieve is important, it is equally necessary to have a content marketing strategy. Make a note of all the methods that will be used to reach your target audience. This could be in the form of blog posts, newsletters or videos. Each of these strategies then needs to monitor with a check that is ideally done every week. See if the content distribution, as well as content creation process, is going well or not.
Reputation and Credibility
To increase the Conversion rate for your eCommerce website, there is a step that can be taken which will have a massive impact on the way visitors view your website. This relates to credibility. By increasing the level of credibility that is shown on your website, a visitor may feel it is safe to shop on it. A few steps can be taken to do so:
- Secure system: Firstly, the website should make the potential customer feel at ease when it comes to handing over their credit card information or other sensitive financial information that is usually required when making a purchase online. Ensure that your website looks and feels safe and reassure your visitors that the system is absolutely secure. Even though eCommerce websites have been around for 15 years or more, visitors are still hesitant when buying anything online if even a slight chance of theft is prevalent.
- Reviews: When a customer is satisfied with their purchase, your popularity will increase since word of mouth is a great method of advertising even today. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) calculates the likelihood of a customer to recommend your product or service to anyone else. A high NPS score will come from a personalized experience on your website so it’s important to include aspects such as testimonials and reviews on anything that was purchased.
Welcome New Visitors
A great way to make any new visitors to your eCommerce website feel great is to offer them special discounts on their first purchase. Asking for visitors’ email addresses is also a successful method when creating a list for a future email marketing campaign and also for keeping potential customers up to date with personalized offers.
Email marketing is a great way to stay in touch with your customers, send them useful information and influence them over time to buy more of your products. A tip to keep in mind is to personalize your emails by addressing people by their names in the emails that you send out.
Social media: Pick & Choose
When it comes to social media and your eCommerce business, a two-step plan is recommended for increasing the conversion rate. Firstly, diversify your social media presence by creating and spreading content on a large pool of social media. This means to create content for Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram etc.
Secondly, figure out which social media platforms are gaining you the most recognition while also bringing your actual website traffic. Pay attention to which social media platforms are working for you and then cut out the ones that are not. By spreading out your social media presence, you are giving a larger group of potential customers the ability to find you online. With the online space as saturated as it is today, it’s important for you to spread yourself around or a potential customer won’t even know of your existence!
Weather Segmentation
This is a great way for eCommerce websites to build a successful company while identifying the correct audience. Everyone changes their behavior with the seasons, for example, is it raining outside, is it snowing or is it hot? When it’s a beautiful, sunny day, people are more likely to go outside and less likely to surf the web, i.e go on eCommerce websites. This is a method of personalization that can be used by several industries including clothing and fashion, cosmetics, home and décor and even gardening.
Personalization
It is not always enough to offer a great product on a well functioning eCommerce website. The vision that you are selling, I.e. your brand, needs to have a ‘face’ to truly create a fan base. Create a story behind your company, display that story on your website, talk about how your products are made, how the company was started. Creating an ‘About us’ page which tells your story from the beginning to the present is a great way to interact with customers and give them a new way to connect with your brand.
An important point to note for most eCommerce sites is related to the ‘blog’ section which can be found on almost every eCommerce website today. If you have several writers working for your website, creating content, then try and develop a guide so that a unified voice is heard at the end. This means defining for the writers whether the tone should be more professional or more fun.
This will greatly reduce any confusion for the customer when reading through your blogs and will also give a more relatable brand image. For example, a leading price comparison website, Idealo, works with products from thousands of shops and visitors to its website, ten million monthly, come from both India and Europe. In this scenario, it’s important for their blog to have a uniform voice when catering to such a varied audience.
Adjusting your eCommerce website to the latest trends will help you reach the top of your niche. Innovation is the key to staying ahead of the competition and it’s important to constantly adjust your business to suit your target audience.
Image: Ecommerce concept man selecting virtual interface
