ShivaniHaving an eCommerce brand is not enough, you need to have some amazing eCommerce business strategies to acquire new customers and to entice old customers to run your store. In this post, I have incorporated some eCommerce business strategies that will teach you how to drive more site traffic, develop relationships and win customer’s trust, and bring back those lost sales.
Let’s get started to know more about eCommerce business strategies.
10 Best eCommerce Business Strategies
1. Optimizing Checkout Process for your customers
For reducing cart abandonment by your customer it is important to optimize your checkout process. This eCommerce business strategy is often overlooked by businesses, therefore before neglecting to keep this thing in mind that you are making a lot of effort to build trust with potential customers and convince them to purchase from you. Ensure your customer that your checkout process is smooth and trustworthy and once they get convinced, it will improve conversion rates and lessen cart abandonment rate.
2. Easy Checkout Process
Customers find it really helpful when they get all details on a single page. Suppose you have to have several page long checkout processes, then make sure that you provide a progress bar at each page’s bottom so customers can easily visualize how much time your checkout process will take. Make buttons easier to find – the more time a customer takes to find the next button or the checkout button, the more it frustrates the customer..
3. Providing customers with good product descriptions.
Whenever you sell clothes or accessories, make sure that you offer a size guide. It will make it easy for customers to get an accurate size as well as decrease the cost of order returns. For example, if you’re selling men’s formal wedding attire, adding the size guide will help customers choose the right fit for their body type, reducing the likelihood of returns due to incorrect sizing By adding customer reviews or testimonials you can also ensure customers. For solving customers’ queries create pages of frequently asked questions. It will help you with SEO as well if you write quality descriptions that possess keywords. Optimizing product descriptions will improve your search rankings, which lead to more visibility for your business and lead to more sales.
Product description makes it easy for your customer to get your products easily and also makes it easier for them to make purchase-related decisions.
4. Show shipping costs
Today, everyone is busy and likes to do away with the process in a few simple steps, therefore, do not make it a huge bundle of information so that at the end customer finds that there is a huge shipping cost. Be transparent with your customers even in the beginning. In the beginning, let them know how much they will be paying at your check out process. Or charge a flat rate shipping if this is an option for your products.
In addition to being upfront about your shipping costs, give customers an idea of when their products will arrive, or if there are any other shipping details, they need to be aware of.
Francesca’s also shows shipping costs before you go to purchase your items, and they offer the option to checkout with PayPal, which is a trusted platform that many shoppers already use. If shoppers already have a PayPal account, this expedites their checkout.
Another handy thing that PayPal and many other eCommerce brands are doing now is sending receipts through Facebook messenger. This makes it so easy for customers to keep track of their purchases. The easier you can make it for customers to purchase or return products, the more likely they are to return to your online store.
5. Give customers the option to keep shopping.
If customers are given the option to keep shopping before they check out, they might consider it and continue checking out. But a lot of the time customers will continue to browse your site to make sure they didn’t miss anything. Ecommerce marketing strategies like this are easy to incorporate into your checkout process. Add a “keep shopping” button next to your “continue checkout” button. Please make sure they are both easy to find on your web page.
6. Let customers know what forms of payment you accept.
You can add the logos of what types of credit cards your store accepts. This helps build trust with shoppers and makes them feel safe when they are entering their credit card information. Add popular security seals to increase trust as well. If customers recognize a security logo, they will feel at ease knowing their credit card information is in good hands.
Francesca’s shows this popular security seal during their checkout process. It is easy to see and appears above the fold of the page. This can be a game-changer for your checkout process.
7. Retargeting
98% of users do not convert on their first visit to a website. If you want to capture those sales, you will need to have retargeting eCommerce marketing strategies in place. There are several ways you can retarget customers so that they return to your site to purchase your product. One of the most popular ways is to run retargeting ads on other websites. When a customer comes to your site and leaves without buying, you can use other sites that they are visiting to show your products. Pretty cool right? You can also retarget customers with email campaigns. Have you ever added items to your cart in an online store without purchasing and then received an email a few days later that looked something like this?
If so, you have just been retargeted. These emails may entice you to purchase items you have left behind or to shop for other similar/complementing items on the same site. This will increase traffic to your site, which can get you more conversions, aka more sales.
8. Update Your Website
If your business has been around for a while, you may want to consider a site update. Older sites tend to look spammy. People trust familiar things, so if your site is similar to other sites with regards to design, your customers will feel safe and comfortable. If you don’t believe us, which site would you trust?
This is the Apple website in 1998. If you saw something like this on the web today, you probably would be wary of making a purchase, but 20 years ago this was the norm.
Today Apple has a clean and sleek site that is aesthetically pleasing. Their up to date design puts users at ease and comes off as trustworthy.
Design is constantly changing, so make sure you are up to date on the latest trends.
9. Humanize Your Brand
People trust people so take some steps to make sure customers see the faces behind your brand. Send out videos showing how your products are made and testimonials and images of loyal customers. Communicate with customers, respond to tweets, reviews and comments. Monitor what customers are saying and don’t just reply to the bad comments or reviews. Taking the time to send out longer helpful responses will let your customers know that you care and that there are people behind your brand that are working hard to make sure customers have the best experience possible.
10. Invest in Mobile
When Facebook put out the mobile version of their site, they invested tons of money into a complete revamp because they knew that mobile was the next big thing. A complete site overhaul is probably unnecessary for you, but you will want to check your mobile site to make sure it is functioning properly. You always want customers to have a good shopping experience. There are ways to build your site so that certain elements appear on the desktop that does not appear on mobile and vice versa. You can make elements appear differently on different devices as well.
Conclusion
In this post, we have seen eCommerce business strategies that will give your eCommerce business a boost and further strengthen your relations with your customers. You can apply these strategies depending upon your business; moreover, you can also merge or tweak them to generate more results.
