This article was written by 10+ year veteran Tampa Web Design guru, John Siebert.
If you are in the business of E-Commerce, then I am sure you are doing everything you can to boost its sales. It’s important that you are able to leverage the maximum potential out of your E-Commerce website to ensure that your sales hit the roof.
While thinking of E-Commerce strategies, tips and tricks that will act as a sales booster, you must think from the customers’ point of view. You need to think the way they might be thinking, so that your E-Commerce plans are crafted to suit the needs and requirements of your target audience. It’s only by implementing tips that are customer oriented, that will help you push your business’s sales in the right direction, which is upwards.
So, let’s take a look at 5 such tips that for my money will not only help you engage the attention of your potential customers but also help you convert them into your actual paying customers.
If you are offering your target shoppers something that they don’t really need, your E-Commerce dreams will never be realized. This is the reason, why your online business must be a product of thorough market research and a deep focus on the needs and demands of your market.
Your products and services must subscribe to market demand, and satisfy an inherent need. Get a good idea of what your customers’ want, which will help you, offer products that you know have a demand. Its important to remember that something is only worth selling, if there is a demand for it; otherwise that product will only end up a failure.
So, if you want to get your sales in fifth gear, understand your market and only then start catering to it.
User Friendly Website or Shopping Cart
Whether you have a website that is marketing your products and services or a site that is selling them, you will have to maintain the highest standards of usability. You must focus on user friendly navigation, which allows potential shoppers to find the information that you have on your site quickly and effortlessly.
Website visitors, especially online shoppers, are notorious for their fickle attention span and if your E-Commerce presence appears difficult to understand or go through, they are going to avoid it like the plague. Result – Your Sales Go Down. So, focus on building as user friendly a site as possible.
If you are going to take your visitors through an onsite shopping cycle, then you have a job on your hands. This is because you will need to offer them a process that is clear, concise and intuitive. Its usability should be in line with the abilities of the target audience. As can be imagined, if a shopper finds your shopping process confusing, he/she is going to abandon the cart, pronto!
USP Driven Pricing Strategy and Quality
You are going to face some real tough competition in world of E-Commerce. There will be competitors offering huge discounts on their products and there will be others who will be attracting customers with attractive offers.
This in itself is a good idea, but you are not going to win the battle to catch the imagination of your shoppers, purely by giving them a nice offer. Yes, that work’s but in the long run what matters most is quality. Are you giving them a quality product? If the answer is yes, shoppers are going to come to your E-Commerce site, irrespective of whether there is a discount on offer or not. So focus on offering a quality product rather than anything else.
Another thing, the product/s or services that you are selling must have a marketable USP and you must put a price tag on this USP. A customer is drawn to products that have a certain kind of appeal, a USP that they are willing to pay for. If your pricing strategy is USP driven, then you will ensure that you won’t sell yourself cheap, and this is what counts. Whether it’s an E-Commerce business or traditional business, what you need to do be is sure of your products and prices them accordingly.
This is what leads to profits.
SEO
Search engine optimization has become a part and parcel of a business’s online marketing efforts, and you must make good use of it to improve your E-Commerce site’s visibility. The more, the awareness about your site, the more traffic it can attract, which in turn leads to more chances of accomplishing conversions; all in all, SEO can act as the catalyst for your sales figures, and push them up.
Use a lot of linkable content to your E-Commerce website in the form of ‘product videos’; you can even integrate a blog into your website, which allows you to write customized content to subtly market the products and/or services up for sale on your site; you could also have some infographics up on your site that are a great link building option and also engage the attention of your website visitors.
It’s understandable that an E-commerce website, especially if it’s a shopping website doesn’t leave a lot of scope for traditional SEO, but you can go off the beaten track, to incorporate some innovative SEO strategies that will help you attract traffic to your site.
Don’t Forget Analytics
How do you know that all the marketing tactics that you are using to improve your E-Commerce efforts are working? This is why you need to use a good, robust analytics program to track whether your tactics are working for you and where all your shoppers are coming from. A comprehensive analytics program also helps you get the hang of your bounce rate and also gives you a fair idea of why, your shoppers are abandoning your website. This in turn helps you improve your E-Commerce website wherever it lacks.
Successful E-Commerce is about plugging the gaps and making constant improvements to the shopping experience that you are providing your shoppers. It’s also about making sure that the methods you are using to improve sales are delivering the results that you are looking for, and if they aren’t, it helps you make the necessary improvements to them.
In Conclusion
Boosting sales in E-Commerce is not something that conforms to a set pattern. There are plenty of aspects to it that you must understand, and try to get right. The whole process of increasing sales is always a work in progress. A tip that works today, might not work tomorrow. So, try staying on top of the latest tips to keep reaching out to your customers in a manner that offers the best ROI and leads to maximum profits.
April 3, 2014
