No matter if your business is on the marketplace for many years or you are just a beginner, generating more sales and getting loyal customers are the things that every online shop owner aims to. Due to high competitiveness, it can be tricky and hard sometimes. Here are five industry secrets you can use to boost your web to print eCommerce business.
Know Your Audience
You may have a well-designed website or empower it with the latest trends, but if you do not know your target audience, you will fail. Knowing who your customers are is the first step of the correct business approach. To make this process easier, create a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer based on in-depth research of your existing customers. Following this, you will better understand your customers’ needs and pains and can put your marketing strategy on the right track.
To create a buyer persona for your business, you should analyze who is already buying your products, their gender, age, location, language, and interests. Google Analytics, or Facebook Audience Insights can help you to do this correctly. Also, you can learn more about your audience by distributing surveys or interviews and, as a bonus, even get valuable feedback.
Having a buyer persona will help you to speak directly to every customer group, create ads they love, or launch new types of products. Moreover, it will help you to provide the right content to the right people at the proper time.
Engage With Your Customers
Customers want to feel needed, listened to, and valuable. Try to be as active as possible in using your buyer persona to build engaging content for your customers. Starting an email list can be really helpful to stay tuned with your buyers. Despite new channels such as social networks, email marketing is still a fundamental approach in your leads nurturing. Send them valuable information, something that they really want to open and read. For example, articles where you share your product lifehacks, video of your product usage, or some case studies of existing customers.
Do not forget to thank them for choosing your company. Ask your customers about their feelings regarding the products they had already bought. Was there something they didn’t like? Were they happy with the purchase or the shopping experience? Or ask if they need your help with using these products. Try to build your communication so that it is not overly promotional or pushy. Make your customers feel like a part of your brand family.
Finally, if you have regular clients, surprise them in the form of a discount, sudden promotion, or a loyalty program. Engaged customers would always think back about you from time to time and what else they could look at buying.
SEO and Good Content Strategy
According to the statistic, 89% of purchases start with a search query.
In the first awareness stage of the sales funnel, people are not sure what they want to buy, so they ask questions.
They are likely to use long-tailed phrases in search queries. For example, “Where can I buy t-shirts” or “How to add design to my custom t-shirt.” When creating content for your website, make some long-tailed keyword research regarding your niche, and add them.
In the middle of the sales funnel, people are closer to buy your product, but they might still have some doubts and need to compare prices, check product details, etc. They might compare you with other companies as well on this stage. Your goal here is to assist them with the knowledge of whether your product or service is a good fit for them. You can provide them a checklist, some kind of infographic, or blog post where you compare your and your competitors’ products.
The top of the sales funnel consists of the final step, where the customer is about to put the product into the shopping cart and complete checkout. At this stage, they need the process to be smooth, well-informed, and predictable. To create more engagement, you can provide them with some product overview videos, testimonials, or instructions. Also, it can be helpful to analyze the content of your competitors and improve yours to do even better!
Make the Whole Process Easier
Creating a clear and straightforward workflow means a higher probability of conversions. The consumer should easily understand how to choose the product, personalize it, and complete the checkout. Avoid complex product catalogs, unnecessary pages, long customer flows, and non-working buttons or links. If you offer a wide range of products, it would be helpful to add some filters or suggestions based on previous customer experience. The more structured approach you use, the better sales traction you get.
Do you know that more than half of buyers leave a website without a purchase because of the hard and unclear checkout process? Make sure that you provide several payment options that fit your target audience.
Moreover, every user hates signing up to the account and filling many fields; it is too overwhelming for them to complete this task, especially from the mobile phone. Buyers start hating it more and more when they forgot the account password and need to register again. While guest checkout is a must-have in such cases, an easy registration process for returning customers would help driving returning sales. Try to make it as convenient as possible: ask only essential information, most forms inquire for email only, provide them the security of their data, and make your checkout form fast and user-friendly.
Personalization
If you want to have excellent customer experience and establish yourself as a strong competitor, you should provide and use the power of product personalization. People like things that are designed according to their preferences and needs. Consider adding web to print tool to your online store.
When choosing web2print software for your business, take into account the next things. Check if the software meets your requirements for product design and can solve the problem of streamlining the custom orders. Business owners often spend lots of time processing customers’ personalization desires or deal with refunds because of unmet expectations. The software should also be compatible with the eCommerce platform you are using right now or planning to use.
Finally, make sure that this tool is compatible with mobiles, tablets, desktops, and laptops. Today people are much more likely to make purchases on mobiles rather than on desktops. Finally, the company you will be working with must be ready to provide support to help you with the installation or some other issues you meet down the road.
Improving your website usability, adding some new tools, and deeply understanding who your customers are is key to setting yourself up for success. Tips you have read above should help you to increase your sales, boost your eCommerce business, and become a brand that everyone will appreciate and love. The sky is the limit!
man printing shirt -DepositPhotos