Ecommerce sales are increasing every year as Business-To-Consumer (B2C) numbers tell the tale of how this growing yet highly competitive market is trying to provide great deals to customers and still stay profitable. To fuel more revenue and attract more customers here are the best strategies for you. The mega guide to maximizing eCommerce sales, revenues and performance on all fronts is right here:
1) Mobile eCommerce (Mcommerce)Â
We cannot stress more on this fact as the number for mobile users are rising every day. It is expected that mobile ecommerce will hit the billion dollar mark in 2015. For marketers and ecommerce businesses it is very important to target the smart phone users as soon as possible. Currently mobile ecommerce accounts for only one-tenth of the total ecommerce purchases. For improving your sales make sure you provide crisp and vivid product descriptions along with videos and reviews on your platform. The engagement before the purchase makes an impact and potential customers really like this to be hassle free. For example, Amazon’s one-click ordering is really quick and saves the customer’s time. Also, to optimize user experience on tablets and mobiles, make sure your website is responsive.
2) Planned and Organized Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
More products means more and more pages on your website. Indexing is a big issue you have to take care of to maximize your sales and get potential customers to like you. Investing time in the SEO process and organizing it for the entire site is key. You need a plan to implement this and plan out your SEO goals in analytics as well. For products make sure you have very unique and high quality descriptions and keywords research is done really well. Add reviews and ratings so that customers can see for themselves that you are a trusted ecommerce website.
3) Increasing Page Speed
converting visitors to customers is the main sign of growth for your business. Analyze and optimize your website with PageSpeed tools to implement best web performance practices. This may lead to higher visitor engagement, retention, and conversions. People leave if your page does not load properly and if your site lags proper optimization. Tips for increasing page speed are optimizing product images, remove all dead coding, minimizing requests to the server and removing duplicate scripts.
4) Conversion Analysis
Analyzing customer behavior on the basis of the kind of targeting campaign you are running gives you exact information about what works and what not. Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns are used to target and see if the investment is worth it or not. Heatmaps are really useful to identify CTA buttons as well as images on your ecommerce site. Security and safety information must be added for customer validation.
5)Â Shopping Cart Abandonment
There is a fine line between customers making a confirmed purchase or leaving the site at the last payment step. The shopping behavior is thus analyzed on basis of data you collect as to what percentage of customers leave stacked carts on your site. Now you have to plan on reducing the shopping cart abandonment and you can do so by following methods like not making registration compulsory, being clear about the shipping costs, allowing social media integration and giving your customers a well informed checkout page.
6) Purchase Funnel Testing
Effective testing of your strategies is done with the help of many popular tools. These tools include Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, Olark, Hellobar, KISSmetrics etc. These are extremely useful for deep analysis for marketers and ecommerce site managers. The four important things in purchase funnel testing are awareness, interest, desire and action. Identify pain points such as missing expectations of the customers and you can listen to these over social channels as well.
7) Assigning Values to Everything
Assigning values is based only on 2 things: the industry and the visitors. For industry centric values brands and the luxury feel comes in but for customers values like category breakdown, photos and videos of the products matter a lot. Education about all this makes your customers influenced.
8) Call-to-Action (CTA) and Goal Testing
Call to action, we know how important these buttons are. There are standard CTAs for an ecommerce site and also some special CTAs added to it. While the standard CTAs govern the usual navigation but the special CTAs are really helpful in separating on ecommerce site from a competitor. Here you can gain more by asking your customers to bookmark you by adding a special CTA button for the same.
Deepak Wadhwani has over 20 years experience in software/wireless technologies. He has worked with Fortune 500 companies including Intuit, ESRI, Qualcomm, Sprint, Verizon, Vodafone, Nortel, Microsoft and Oracle in over 60 countries. Deepak has worked on Internet marketing projects in San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange Country, Denver, Nashville, Kansas City, New York, San Francisco and Huntsville. Deepak has been a founder of technology Startups for one of the first Cityguides, yellow pages online and web based enterprise solutions. He is an internet marketing and technology expert & co-founder for a San Diego Internet marketing company.
