It’s the baby steps that pay the largest dividends on an ecommerce site many times the small incremental changes will have the biggest impact on the bottom line . As you know, marketing is part big ideas and part process. As an entrepreneur you have the ideas, and the products but the process part is where the money is made or lost and as I’ll cover here the small changes can have the largest impact on the profitability of a site. In this article I’m going to show you how a small increase in key business metrics has the potential to create a huge impact in net profits.
You know your products better than most of your competition online so take the time to write informative articles or blog posts on your site or high traffic sites in your niche. This is one of the most effective ways to drive qualified traffic to your ecommerce store for years to come since many of these articles are timeless and stay searchable for a long time. Not only are they great traffic drivers, but they simultaneously position you as an authority in your niche and raise brand awareness with your target audience. Theyr’e also great for SEO since they link back to your site. By linking to the product or products you are writing about or popular content on your website within your post your site will be light years ahead of your competition in no time. Engaged readers will click on your references and shop your store if they enjoy what they read.
Most ecommerce stores have a sign-up form, but how many have effective forms? One of the biggest reasons for poorly converting sign-up forms is that there is a lack of reason for signing up. Are you offering something genuinely unique and valuable in exchange for a prospect’s details? A recent study found that the main reason people sign-up to company emails is to get offers (61%) and discounts (59%), yet few companies make this really clear on their sign-up forms.
The location of your sign-up forms is also really important and it is well worth experimenting with multiple locations across your site. It’s rare for prospects to just land on your site and sign-up immediately, so make sure your sign-up form isn’t confined to the home page. To increase the volume of sign-ups, make it easy; don’t request too much information. Email and first name, so that you can personalise emails are enough.
Getting shoppers to your ecommerce store is only half the battle and arguably the easy bit. The bigger challenge is turning browsers into buyers.
If you want to convert prospects to buyers then making them feel that people just like them have already bought what they are looking at can tip the decision. Start by identifying the most common question a shopper has in your retail store about a product and make sure you address these points on your product pages and posts, consider labeling bestsellers and popular, hot items as social proof is the most persuasive.
One of the great challenges of ecommerce is that you can’t touch and feel a product before you make a purchase. This makes it difficult to convey the full potential of a product or service with a two dimensional photo and some copy. Using videos to showcase your products is a good substitute and one that improves conversions and reduces returns.
Instructional videos bring your products and services to life; they can create wow factor and educate your consumers about multiple features and benefits that are difficult to convey in words.
Email marketing can seem like a huge amount of work that you just don’t have time to manage but when properly setup in a template and with service like mail chimp it can be done very quickly and free all with content that you already get from most manufactures on a regular basis. A series of three emails is proven to be the most effective, one sent immediately, another 24 hours later and another one week later. Keep this series of emails focused and practical, make sure they are clearly branded, list the products left behind and contain a link back to the shopping cart to complete the purchase.
Suggesting relevant, related products to a customer is a great way to drive up order value. It’s the online equivalent of a up-sell. When buying anything, from a mower to a mower blade you should relate two or three additional relevant products. It’s incredibly successful and at times customers are even grateful for them when they drive them to buy that extra item, as they didn’t realise that it wasn’t included with the product they were purchasing.
Offering discounts for multiple purchases made at once can be an effective way to increase the amount people spend, but you need to find the sweet spot for your industry. Volume discounts, such as ‘buy one get one free’ and ‘three for two’ deals are typical retail promotions. Test and compare this style of promotion with percentage discounts for multiple purchases, these are often the exact same deals, just expressed differently and generate a different success rate as a result.
