How do I build a successful ecommerce website? What are the best strategies for an ecommerce business? What works and what doesn’t?
We hear these and similar questions all the time. Everyone running an ecommerce website wants to know the best tips for reaching more customers and increasing sales.
And while there are hundreds of tips that can help you create a website for an ecommerce business, you need to start with the most effective ones.
Let’s get straight down to business and list the essential strategies for creating a successful ecommerce website.
Optimize your online store
Your online store is the final destination of your customers. That is why optimizing the online store should be the first step of each ecommerce business.
You can start by choosing an attractive WooCommerce theme for your online store, but there are many other steps that you should follow.
Optimize your checkout process and make it easier
Cart abandonment is the worst nightmare of all ecommerce businesses.
To reduce cart abandonment and increase conversion rates, you need a smooth and trustworthy checkout process:
– Try to have only one checkout page. The more pages you have, the more likely your customers are to abandon your cart.
– If you do have more than one page, show a progress bar at the bottom of each page.
– Make your buttons visible and easy to find, reducing the time your customers spend looking for them and accelerating conversions.
Write helpful product descriptions
Detailed product descriptions are proven to cut back on returns for your business. They can include a size guide for clothing and accessories, customer reviews and testimonials, or frequently asked questions.
Not only will this help your customers, but quality descriptions with keywords will also improve your SEO in the long run.
Show shipping costs
Shipping costs play a huge role in your customers’ decision to buy your products. Show your shipping costs at the beginning of your checkout process. You can also charge a flat rate shipping or even better, ship your products for free.
Finally, include estimated delivery time so that your customers have an idea when to expect their items.
Indicate what types of payment you receive
If you want to build trust with your shoppers and make them feel safe when entering their credit card information, show the logos of credit card types you receive and add popular security seals.
Personalize buying experience
Personalization is the key to building a strong, long-lasting relationship with your customers. If your online store recommends products based on previous purchases and helps your customers choose a perfect product, be sure that it will stand out from the rest.
Optimize for search engines
If you ask online marketers what is one tactic that can get you significantly more traffic in the long run, most of them would say: SEO.
Even though SEO can’t bring you results right away, it is the most effective long-term strategy for your online store. Search engine optimization can help you with sticking with your exact audience but also with acquiring new customers.
To boost your online store, use the following SEO strategies:
– conduct an SEO audit
– analyze keyword search volume, CPC, and user intent
– use the right keywords (focus on long tail)
– conduct competitor research
– raise your homepage SEO to a new level, including title tag, meta description, and content
– work on internal linking
– create backlinks
– reduce page load speed (decrease image size, dimension, etc.)
Marketing, marketing, marketing
Each ecommerce business needs marketing strategies to reach new customers and keep the old ones engaged.
The following ecommerce marketing strategies will keep customers coming back to your online store.
Social media
If you want to reach as many customers as possible, running a social media campaign is a must. And a successful social media strategy requires careful planning.
Since every social platform has a specific target audience, you need to target those that are the most likely to convert your audience. For ecommerce purposes, the best platforms are those with visual content like Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.
This is how you should approach your ecommerce social media marketing:
– Know your followers’ demographics to approach them better. They are not all the same, so they will have different habits and be on different social platforms.
– To build customer loyalty, share with your audience user-generated content posted by your customers.
– Create a social calendar to keep a regular posting practice. This will help you maintain consistency and balance in your social marketing activities.
– Engage in regular competitor monitoring to see where you can be better than your competition.
Email marketing
Email marketing is by far the most effective and personal marketing channel when it comes to increasing website traffic and sales. You can expand your email list and keep your customers engaged by asking them to subscribe when they check out. Also, try adding an opt-in form to your blog homepage and other popular pages of your website.
These are essential ecommerce email marketing strategies:
– Build your email list by adding only quality leads to it.
– Create email funnels – first feature a few blog posts to introduce yourself properly, and only then send an email showing your best-selling products.
– Always segment your email list – just like with social media, you won’t send the same email to all your customers. Rather, try to personalize and segment your emails as much as possible.
Content marketing
Even though you may think that an ecommerce website could not benefit from it, content marketing is one of the most popular marketing strategies for online stores.
High-quality content keeps acquisition costs low, warms up your leads, and builds a strong relationship with your audience. By creating tutorial videos, for instance, you can educate your customers and help them become better within a particular ecommerce niche.
You can post your content as blog posts, ebooks, infographics, videos, podcasts, webinars, etc.
Here are some advanced tips on how to get the most out of your content marketing:
– Blogging
This is definitely the most effective content strategy, especially when starting out. For long-term growth, build your content around your exact niche and then move on to a wider audience.
– Picking the content
You need to know your audience and goals, and then create your content accordingly.
– Being different
To outrank your competition, you need to be different and better than them. It’s that simple. Try to provide as much as your competitors but always upgrade on it and do something differently.
PPC marketing
Pay-per-click advertising is a great way to reach your audience, especially if you are a new kid on the ecommerce block. It may cost more than other mentioned options, but it also allows you to target your audience more aggressively.
– Google AdWords
With Google ads, you target specific keywords to show up in relevant searches, where ads are displayed above search results.
– Facebook and Instagram
For online stores, this may be one of the most effective marketing strategies. On these two platforms, you target users based on their age, location, and interests, introducing them to your product with the help of images and video marketing.
– Pinterest
Promoted Pins on Pinterest work like a combination of Facebook and Google ads, popping up in relevant user feeds and/or appearing in relevant searches.
Retargeting
If a customer has already shown an interest in your online store, they are more likely to make a purchase when they visit again later on.
This is where retargeting does wonders, tracking customers who have already visited your website and displaying ads to them in order to get them back on your website.
If you want to rock your retargeting campaign, your ads need to be as specific as possible and include links to the page of the product. In a word, you need to show the information the user is searching for the moment they click the ad.
Make sure that you direct them to the exact product they are searching for or have added to their cart prior to leaving your online store. This way, they are much more likely to move on with their purchase.
Optimize for mobile
According to a study by Statista, more than half of online shopping is expected to happen on mobile devices by 2021.
This, of course, means that you need to have a mobile responsive online store, but it means much more than that. You need to design your ecommerce website for mobile devices from start to finish.
To fully optimize your online store for mobile, consider these solutions:
– Create a bigger add-to-cart button on mobile product pages, making it easier for your visitors to add products to cart without having to zoom in.
– Show your images in a different format, enabling mobile users to load product photos and zoom in faster.
Build a mobile app
Have you ever browsed a website on your phone, found the perfect item, and then had to switch to your computer to make a purchase? Among ecommerce customers, this is a deal breaker much more often than you would think.
With an app, load time will be faster, customers are just one tap away from viewing your products, and you can send push notifications when having a sale, for example. With an effective mobile app maker, you will create an application easily and be much more effective at driving your customers to your online store.
Final Thoughts – Mix and Experiment
As you can see, there is a wide variety of options at your disposal for improving your ecommerce website. Some of them can be implemented quickly, while others require a longer working process.
However, it is important to realize that following one or a couple of these tips is simply not enough. Instead, it is only when you use all of them that you can actually expect a significant improvement in your ecommerce website traffic and conversions.
Mark these words ‒ it is a long way to the top, but it will pay off in the end.
