Online retailers take help of innovative marketing strategies for leading the customers to their services or products.
However, good marketing strategies can also make you lose out on valuable customers if the site is not well optimized for sales.
Attractive website design is necessary for converting e commerce website visitors into potential customers. Website’s design should ideally make the buying procedure smooth and stress free.
Here, I will list some tips to develop an effective e commerce strategy:
Come up with an e commerce goal
Initial step towards your e commerce strategy should be to set goals for your e commerce business.
No matter your goal is to lure certain customers or yield a specific amount of revenue within a particular period of time, it will give you the potential to judge the online store’s performance and efforts of the e-commerce campaign.
Ensure to measure goals against the industry standards and then set a quantitative benchmark.
One of the best starting places will be to set key results and objectives. Objectives delineate goals and key results are the crucial steps taken by you to reach there. Below listed are the example:
Example of objective:
Aim at becoming a well known work out clothes company like brands like Reebok.
Key results:
• Lure x number of qualified customers to online stores every quarter.
• Create a loyal customer base
• Satisfy customers with your helpful, friendly and responsive service
• Build an authentic and relatable presence on social media to connect well with the target group.
Develop the buyer’s personas
Having knowledge about your target group is important to attain success in your e commerce strategy.
Thus, developing your buyer personas, recognise your target group. Buyer personas refers to the representation of a perfect customer, which can bring in more target potential customers.
Basically, they are the fictional characters created for developing a real customer base to assist you focus on your efforts. Also, they are a reflection of your organization’s ideals and goals.
Building a persona assist to guide your marketing tactics and establish the tone and voice of your online store. Marketing to an incorrect customer base will hurt your potential to yield sales and also waste your money and time.
By asking the listed questions to yourself, building a buyers personas would be easy:
• How well the buyer knows my service/product or good?
• What kinds of media they consume?
• Are your product being used by customers to solve issues?
• Can your product/good impact their life?
• What are the items better positioned as compared to your competitors?
• What is the communication channel they prefer?
• Who influences the customers buying decisions?
Optimize checkout procedure
Optimizing your checkout procedure refers to making it a smooth experience for your target group. Poorly built checkout procedure can result in increased cart abandonment rate. Ensure that it is simple to navigate.
Bring forth an automatic option for sign in through social media to create a convenient experience. And omit the idea of creating multiple form pages for your customers. Enable customers to view what is present in their cart, which would help them make last minute additions or removals.
Here are few ways to avoid shopping cart abandonment:
• Implement simple and clear return policy
• Provide money back guarantee
• Offer various delivery options
• Allow simple and easy access to the customer support
Perform retargeting & remarketing campaigns
Maximum audiences who come to your online platform will not buy at the very first attempt on visit. As per data, 79% of audiences abandon their shopping cart when online shopping.
Perform retargeting advertisements on various other sites or social media platforms to showcase your products and services that they earlier were looking for to recapture their attention in regard to their interest.
Set remarketing email and Google advertisement campaigns to recapture audiences of the goods or products they left in your online store.
Offer promotions and discounts to encourage such audiences to take relevant actions.
Customized emails and advertisements enable you to re engage and nurture customers that results in increased conversions.
Optimize your online site for the mobile devices
Pixel Union’s data emphasises on the necessity of optimizing your website for the mobile device:
• By the year 2021, sales on mobile e commerce are expected to be 54% of the total sales on ecommerce platforms.
• 67% of the audience admit to conducting digital window shopping for time pass on their mobile and about 77% make impulse buys when doing so.
• 70% of the mobile searches result in action in just an hour
To allow your site visitors to have great experience, you should optimize your online site for mobile devices.
Build trust
Trust is completely important in running an online e commerce store. As customers provide you with sensitive data/info about their cards and themselves, ensure to use HTTPs protocol and encrypt all the info/data that is transferred to & from your site.
Ensure to be transparent regarding the products costs or services and also shipping, return/exchange policies and tax expenses. To your e-commerce pages, ensure to add in trust badges like SSL certificates, payment processor logos, third party endorsements and security badges.
Also, implement a few customer reviews on your site and social media campaigns.
Quick loading time
Chances of a mobile audience leaving your site is high in case your loading time is over 3 seconds. Ensure that the design elements and the images used on the website are not slowing down your loading time.
Create FAQ page
Ensure to provide your audience with answers to various common questions to save them their effort and time. Doing so also helps to establish customers’ trust in your good/product.
Use good quality photo as well as product description
Reduced resolution images can absolutely be a turn off and can also lead the audience to think about your product quality.
Remove distracting elements
Pop up window pesters users to sign up for the newsletters or get offers. This tactic can be annoying and result in your target audience abandoning your cart. Try and minimize such distractions to the extent possible and concentrate on highlighting your services or products.
Sanjay Dey