After you get your eCommerce website live, it’s time to run into the serious business of selling your products. The two primary challenges which the website faces initially are:
- 1. How will people get to know about your website?
- 2. How to attract people to come to your website and make a final go with purchasing products from there?
Digital marketing is the all round solution for the issues stated above. Right from optimizing your website according to the basic rules of Google to stretching promotional activities across various online channels, digital marketing strategies can help your website gain brand recognition. Once the initial hurdle of getting your website among the masses is achieved, now it’s time to frame the strategy for selling products. However, some businesses carry both the processes hand in hand to get the most value for their business.
It can’t be taken for granted that once users get to know about your website, they will surely become your customers. You need to take the right steps to turn your visitors into customers. Let’s see below what are the areas you can focus on to convert your visitors into customers.
Ways to Boost Your eCommerce Sales
Overall Website Usability
Considering the behavioral pattern of website visitors, you can classify them under 2 broad heads.
Visitors Landing Just to Check What You Offer
In order to focus on this segment of customers, you need to make them aware of the USP of your products. Keeping a “top selling products” section and “latest products” section in the website can actually bring the customers into your products section and can eventually make them purchase a product or keep it in mind for future consideration. Also, the overall product navigation in the site needs to be user friendly so that they can hop around almost each category with ease.
Visitors to Your Site with a Purpose to Buy
Put yourself in the shoes of a customer who urgently needs to purchase a product. What exactly you do on reaching the website? You quickly search for a product, go to the product details section, read on the reviews, look at the price and proceed to make payment. Your website needs to provide this seamless experience for the users to proceed. The search functionality of the website needs to pull up results fast and accurately. As a website owner, you need to keep things in order for the conversion process to happen fast. eCommerce web designing mistakes can hamper your sale. Better be aware of it!
Product Details
Keeping product details up to date and properly mentioning the attributes and features of the products is of utmost importance. You should ensure to keep the product description in bullet format and try to include the key features at the top of the list. The other driving factors which grab a customer’s attention are the images and videos. These two are the only ways users can get a sound idea of the product. Try using high quality images from different angles, also you may try out with 360 degree view of the product images. As far as product video is concerned, it helps to build trust about the product and also helps to have a better explanation about the product. Interestingly, statistics show – 73 percent More Visitors Who Watch Product Videos Will Buy.
User Reviews
In this digital age, seeking out for product reviews has pretty much become a standard as a part of the buying process. Numbers suggest that 70 percent of customers consult reviews or ratings before making the final purchase. Reviews play a vital role in trust building for new eCommerce brands. Your product having a good review and rating helps to boost the confidence of the prospects. So, as a store owner you can try out the following methods to attract customers to write product reviews.
- Include review options in the product pages. Try keeping the review process quick and simple.
- Send an email to customers asking for review, just after they make a purchase.
- You can use third- party review providers.
- Provide incentives to customers in the form of discount coupons, to submit a review.
Cross-Selling and Up-Selling
Cross-selling and up-selling accounts for more than a quarter of online sales revenue. They can surely help to boost up eCommerce sales, at the same time providing the customers a better shopping experience. Up-selling helps in piling up the extra sales when you are sure of the fact that the customer is going to purchase from your site. However, you need to be careful with the extra products you are offering and it should not appear irrelevant to the user. More stress should be given in displaying items which will complement the original product or provide value addition.
Reducing Shopping Cart Abandonment
Based on a study conducted by Baymard, roughly 1 in every 4 customers actually finish the purchase. This seems infuriating for an eCommerce site owner and the questions that can arise in his/her mind are – why are they not converting into customers, and what are the things I can do to bring them back.
There are quite a few possible reasons for the customers to leave the purchase process midway:
- Customers are not happy with the shipping charges and the delivery method.
- Customers doubt the overall security of the site while making the online payment.
- Customers are not yet ready to purchase.
- The shopping process is too lengthy or complex.
Website related issues, if tackled in the proper manner, can actually reduce the cart abandonment rate. But how to deal with customers who are not yet ready to purchase?
The most common practice to deal with this issue is sending shopping cart abandonment-triggered emails. After a customer abandons a cart, all you need to do is tempt them to come back to your site.
Statistics suggests nearly half (44.1 percent) of all cart abandonment emails are opened, and under a third (29.9 percent) of clicks lead to a recovered purchase on the site. Timing of the cart abandonment email is essential, since conversion rates seem to be on a higher side with the emails sent after 20 minutes of abandonment. Providing discount coupon in the email certainly entices the users to come back and continue the shopping. It is necessary to mention the product along with its images, which the user left in the cart so he/she finds it easy to right away make the purchase. To set up cart abandonment plug-ins, you can contact an ecommerce developer.
Rounding It Up
Customer engagement is one of the key factors in this digital age. Other than the promotional methods and the factors discussed above, it is highly important to keep the customers updated about the latest improvements in the site along with the product updates and special offers. But you should not over do it and a right balance needs to be maintained. The traditional email marketing still holds the key in certain industries to boost up sales. Let us know of any other strategies which you feel are influential for eCommerce conversion in the comment box below. Until then, happy selling!
Ecommerce Photo via Shutterstock
This article, “5 Factors to Consider to Boost Your eCommerce Sales” was first published on Small Business Trends