Market it and they will come
If your site is new or you haven’t focused on your online marketing strategy, now is the time to start. It’s time to start thinking about how you are going to get customers to your site. Search Engine Optimisation, pay per click advertising, affiliate marketing, email marketing and social marketing are just a few ways. Regardless of which avenue you decide to use, realise that your online store is one of thousands - so set yourself apart. Start by either focusing on a niche part of your product line or the service that you offer.
Creating engaging relevant content will help drive qualified traffic to your site, which is more likely to convert into sales or enquires.
Focus on promoting and marketing fewer products.
On your home page and subsequent lead category pages, focus on featuring or promoting fewer products.
This allows you to:
- Focus more in depth on the features and benefits of selected products or product range.
- Avoids analysis paralysis or choice overload. Analyse your options, make a choice and buying products or services is mentally taxing. People who are presented with too many options can feel overwhelmed with choice resulting in them picking none and move on.
There are simple changes you can do such as:
- Keep the number of products listed under 6. Research shows that 4 - 6 is the magic number. People who shop online tend to browse and explore more. 6 gives your customers choice without over loading them.
- Use related products to link products together in value added groupings.
- Use categories to split larger product ranges into smaller manageable specialised groupings. If you sell 100 different kinds of kids tables and chairs, divide them up into smaller groupings such as material type, size, use, number of chairs, age, etc
Don’t go for the hard sell straight away.
Many online retailers make the mistake of including very little information or content about their product or service, before asking their customer to commit to a purchase. Unless a customer knows what they want and are shopping purely on cost alone, you have to establish trust and credibility before a customer will buy. Include as much information as possible. Does your product or service solve a problem, save time or money, tell them how your product is going to achieve this.
Be clear about your customers want.
Make your copy scannable. Mose website visitors will scan your copy, looking for words or phrases that catch their eye. Break it down into smaller chunks, use sub heading, italics, bold type and highlights to emphasise phrases that matter to them. By running a SEO or Adwords campaign you will know which words or phrases are important for the traffic coming to that page.
Creating clear and compelling calls to action that benefit your customers will results in higher conversions. For example which is better ‘click here to subscribe’ or ‘to receive the latest offers and exclusive promotions subscribe now’.
Including calls to action in your content may also result in higher conversions. If your content is telling a story or talking about solving a problem, include links to the service or product that will provide the solution your customer is searching looking for. As they are reading through the content and identifying that your are able to solve their problems, there is a link to the product or service that you are selling.
Add credibility to your brand.
Testimonials are a great way to show prospective customers that you are reliable and trustworthy. How can you get people to write you a testimonial? Ask them. Send your customers a follow up email after a purchase asking them about their purchasing experience and ask for feedback or a testimonial. It’s a great way to show your customers you care and to also get something back in return.
Build a subscriber base.
Keep engaging your customer base. Many retailers only care about making the sale and miss out on the huge potential for after sales follow up. Do you sell shoes online? Why not follow up with cleaning tips and care instructions. Ask for feedback on your service. Engaging your customers in this way shows that your not just a machine, but a person that cares about your customers and their experiences. Building a relationship with your customer will make them more likely to buy from your or recommend you to their friends.
Test everything.
Did you know that you can test which layouts, content, promotions and calls to action convert more? A / B or multi variant testing enables you to test small changes to your site such as different titles, calls to action, images and button colours.
Stay relevant.
Having content become stale and out of date is a real killer. Not only do your customers feel that you don’t care about your store or their experience, search engines like Google will value the relevancy of your content less too.