Ecommerce has become a vital part of the economy and a go-to option for consumers who want to shop online. However, with a plethora of ecommerce websites available, it can be challenging to stand out and attract customers to your store.
So, we'll explore various ways to optimize your ecommerce store, from improving the user experience, to increasing visibility and driving more traffic to your site... And this guide will provide you with actionable tips and strategies to help you take your online store to the next level.
Optimizing your store
Do you know how to optimize your store, increase your sales and offer a fantastic buying experience? It's not rocket science. However, in most cases, it’s not enough to start a business with love and good products. It definitely helps, but you need strategy and optimization tricks. First, check your marketing plan and identify in which phase of the process you want to focus:
- Attraction: It is the first of the phases and focuses on getting qualified visits to your website.
- Conversion: It’s the process of converting a lead to a customer.
- Closing: It’s when the lead becomes a customer.
- Loyalty: It is when you already have a customer and both of you maintain a relationship.
Most current marketing techniques focus on the customer attraction and closure phases, but the conversion to registration and loyalty phases are largely forgotten. With this in mind, there is a fundamental problem that you may be falling into:
- Problem in the closure phase → the website receives many visits but they don't buy.
This situation is discouraging and we know it can feel like a punch in the face. Especially knowing that there are more than 2 billion buyers in eCommerce (Ecommerceguide).
If your marketing campaigns are bringing potential customers to your store, you have part of the job done and you just need to transform that traffic to real sales.
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How to transform traffic into potential clients
To retain potential customers, you need to optimize your store and make it as good as possible to retain customers and offer your products in the most simple way. Check out these steps to make your brand go to the next level and finally increase your conversion rates:
Check the browsing experience of your store
Do you know how the user feels when entering your store? Is navigation simple and intuitive? Your store’s visitors value clarity and ease of navigation to make decisions. Make it easy for them to find what they need and in turn, they will feel better about your store and your brand.
Besides, online shopping is common nowadays and customers internalized that the vast majority of websites have the same structure to make the purchase. So, making your store’s structure intuitive will make your sales go up.
User experience is a top priority. Your website has to be easy to handle and fast. The fewer clicks people have to make to find what they're looking for, the better.
Similarly, another common mistake is forgetting about the users who access your website from their smartphones. More and more traffic is coming from mobile devices and it is essential that you design the user experience from a "mobile-first" point of view. That is, to make sure your store is mobile-friendly or you'll lose more than half of your potential customers.
Web traffic from mobile devices is growing year after year, so not having your website adapted to all devices will make you lose sales. And remember that Google stopped indexing websites that didn’t adapt to the mobile environment. So, if you’re not mobile-friendly, you don't exist for Google.
Check the page speed and load times of your page
The loading speed in eCommerce is a turning point between making a purchase or not. Web users are increasingly impatient and want to surf the internet and find what they need in the blink of an eye, so an extra second can turn into a very long waiting time that some users are not willing to tolerate.
So, make sure to check your upload speed. Google will give you the specific points to improve your website like reducing the loading time and optimizing images by reducing the size and only using JPG archives instead of PNG.
Optimize images
Apart from image size, take into account that Google doesn't read images. Google only reads text and you must name the images and use keywords. Don't use filenames such as pj2648718. On the contrary, make it easy for Google search engine to find your image and add something like this: truck-fire engine-toy.
Likewise, users are unlikely to buy online if they don't see high-quality images, so it's essential that image optimization is a top consideration for conversions. Images are also a potential source of traffic and revenue:
Image searches account for 12.4% of web searches and image recognition is a $25.65 billion market (MediaPlanet).
This number is likely to increase, as the use of emerging visual search technology continues to expand. To successfully optimize your images for search and conversion rates, you must:
- Use several images per product because it increases conversions and offers you more images to optimize. Incorporate your own images instead of photos to better stand out in the SERPs.
- Optimize each image correctly. Each image must have a file name and a title that uses the target keywords.
- Include image sitemaps on your site, so that Google can receive information about the images you have uploaded.
- Include Alt attributes as Image Alt tags.
Include product videos
People love videos and you can download or embed your product's videos to make your visitors understand how your products work.
You can make your own videos to show products, and If you don't know how to make videos, you can hire PUNCHY to make them, but add videos. They will help you convert visitors into customers.
Improve your product’s descriptions
In eCommerce, descriptions acquire great relevance and they are what your customers will use to make decisions.
When considering the launch or development of an online store, the first thing we usually think about is the need to have a considerable range of items, as well as quality images that represent them.
Your visitors don't have the possibility to physically touch and test the products, so they need a more detailed description to feel confident and make a purchase. That’s why we recommend you to work with appropriate keywords, make them concise but complete descriptions, use bullet points, bold and hierarchies to facilitate reading. With words, we can describe what your customers can’t garner through images.
The written word is a strategic tool to connect with your customers, not to mention Google. So, don’t forget the importance of copywriting for eCommerce. Persuasive writing, coupled with strong visual content, convey credibility and drive purchase decisions and are the key components to knockout marketing.
Choose your keywords well
In an online business, keywords are important since they are used in marketing copy, web pages, images and product descriptions. SEO will help you convert more since users who buy your products were already looking for them. In addition, users prefer organic results to paid ones, since it generates more trust.
Not everyone is in the first search results, but you can study keywords in your niche and the level of competition there is.
Work on an effective branding
The appearance of your online store: colors, logo, distribution, navigation guidelines will help to improve the UX. Think that your online store is a representation of your personality.
SSL security certificate
It is important to transmit trust on the internet and even more in the case of eCommerce. So make sure that your website meets all the necessary requirements to transmit trust and, of course, make sure you correctly install the SSL security certificate.
Simplify the registration process
When registering users, avoid asking for unnecessary data. Users are reluctant to give more data than necessary to any store. Start with the basics (name, surname and email address are enough to start with) and when you're closing the sale, you can ask for an address and all relevant information in your niche.
Highlight your star products, cross-sell and upsell
Let users know your strength and make that a hook to attract more visitors. That's the reason you have to show your best-selling products first.
Cross-sell and upsell are two techniques that work very well in eCommerce to improve the purchase ratio and increase the number of items a user adds to the cart. Cross-selling is a technique that focuses on recommending complementary products and upsell is about selling a more expensive similar product.
Make payments easier
One of the most valuable points in eCommerce conversion rate is the ease of payment. The user experience when paying is a critical, if not the most critical point in the purchase. A fast, easy and secure payment process is decisive in the final result
Whenever you can, put several methods of payment (cash on delivery, card, PayPal, etc.) The greater the range of possibilities, the fewer excuses the user will find for not making the purchase.
Achieving this requires the sites to have a payment gateway, operative from any device, which includes a wide variety of payment methods, with the aim that the potential client finds the one that best suits their personal needs or preferences and reduces the number of steps to complete the transaction and provide purchase confidence.
Return policies
Another element to consider and one point in which users fix the attention is in the return policies. Just explain this point well and make it easy to access, as this builds a lot of trust for the user.
Generally, consumers feel more secure when they know that they can request a refund for that purchase or exchange the product if the item does not suit their needs.
Encourage testimonials and reviews
Seeing that other users have obtained a satisfactory experience on your website helps to humanize your store and increase user’s confidence. Testimonials increase your credibility and you should highlight everything good that your customers can say about you and your service.
Offer free shipping and promotions
Many stores choose free shipping when the purchase exceeds a certain amount of money and the truth is that offering free shipping is one of the best digital marketing strategies for enhancing eCommerce sales.
Similarly, every brand needs a marketing calendar to offer promotions on holidays. For instance, Black Friday is when stores have the highest sales. For this reason, you must find digital marketing strategies for your store and take advantage of them.
Get their emails before they leave the store
Large numbers of visitors to your eCommerce space leave without making a purchase. It is inevitable. What you can do is lay the foundations to provoke a future visit.
For this, nothing better than getting visitors to provide their email addresses before leaving the store. And one technique is using exit pop-ups that ask users for their email for future communication. They are windows that appear only when the user is about to leave the web. And they perform very well.
Wrapping up
Many of these digital marketing strategies for eCommerce may seem like common sense, but you’d be surprised how many shops miss out on these opportunities. Identify your customers and make regular notifications to make special offers, notify the launch of new products and make personalized communications, so that you make your customers part of your marketing campaigns and strengthen the bond between you and your customers.
Optimizing your product pages will make your eCommerce more likely to sell, position and improve the profitability of your online marketing campaigns. We recommend that you follow these tips and that you send us an example of a product page of your online store.
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