07 Aug How To Optimize Your E-commerce Opportunities

While there are tremendous opportunities in the e-commerce industry, there is also plenty of competition. Improperly managing your online store can lead to many missed opportunities. No matter whether you are a well-established online store or a start-up, there is always room for improvement in terms of sales performance and improving your user experience.

So, what should you do to optimize your e-commerce store? 

Before getting into what you need to do to optimize your e-commerce site, let’s first take a look at conversion rates and why they matter.

What Are Conversion Rates?

When someone saves an item to buy later, adds an item to their shopping cart, or makes a purchase, it means you have made a conversion. To be more precise, among those who visit your site, the percentage of users who took some form of action on your e-commerce page is your conversion rate.

According to Growcode, the global average e-commerce conversion rate stands at 2.04% (as of July 2019). Conversion isn’t as easy as it may seem, after all.

However, not all e-commerce stores experience the same conversion rates. For example, a store that sells relatively expensive items—such as professional-quality cameras—will have a vastly different conversion rate than a store that sells relatively inexpensive clothing and accessories.

So, what affects conversion rates?

Some conversion rate influences include product types, costs, how users access your website online, user operating systems and device types. You can find your site’s e-commerce conversion rate on Google Analytics, where you can set tangible goals to improve it.

How to Optimize Your E-Commerce Opportunities

Optimization should always be an ongoing priority for your e-commerce business. Here are some strategies for optimising your e-commerce opportunities: 

• Product Pages — Your products are the purpose for your e-commerce store. Therefore, they need to look appealing to potential customers. Make sure your product images show the full detail of your products—especially in-use—along with helpful descriptions. If possible, consider adding videos of products in addition to images. Finally, website navigation breadcrumbs will help users better interact with your site and products, along with SEO-influenced product titles. 
• Personalized Content — Personalization in terms of the e-commerce industry refers to providing your site visitors with content and offers catered to their specific interests. The data collected by search engine histories and social analytics can provide you insight into the demographics, locations, and interests of visitors, along with data on how they interacted with your site. Ways to provide the content users want to see include featuring related products to ones they have viewed, automatically tailoring website navigation to user data, sending email marketing reminders and providing relevant offers. 
• Flash Sale Announcements — The limited time of sales are extremely appealing to customers who are always looking to get the best deal possible. Make sure your sales promotions are properly advertised on your e-commerce site with a sense of urgency, a direct call to action, featuring your price compared to competitors, and sales countdown timers at the top of the website. These strategies will encourage site visitors to make that purchase. 
• Product Pricing —  Buyers will not be interested if your price listings aren’t comparable to other sellers. Additionally, placing two items of a similar type next to each other is also likely to encourage e-shoppers to purchase the lower-cost item. Use actionable phrases to encourage users to make the purchase, such as “buy now,” and limit the number of options so as not to overwhelm customers. Finally, charm pricing (e.g., “1.99” instead of “2.00”) and live chat options can also increase conversions. 
• Abandoned Carts — When customers leave your website without purchasing items they saved to their online shopping carts is known is cart abandonment, and it is a major hurdle for e-commerce businesses to overcome. There are a number of strategies available to help avoid abandoned carts. These include providing all costs upfront (no hidden costs that show up only at check-out), allowing for multiple payment options, providing easy cart access at all times, not requiring a site account to make a purchase, sending email reminders and offering coupons. 
• Mobile Optimization — Mobile devices now dominate the world of online shopping. Therefore, you can’t afford to be missing out on sales opportunities from mobile visitors to your e-commerce site. Make sure your website loads in three seconds or less, integrate video marketing on your website, integrate mobile-friendly SEO text and implement mobile marketing campaigns. 
• Email Marketing — As we’ve previously discussed, email marketing remains a very successful and direct method of reaching your customers. Be sure that your subject lines are attention-getting without seeming like spam, add personalization (name, relevant content, products based on purchases, etc.) for recipients, include seasonal promotions and send emails to users when they complete transactions on your e-commerce site. 
• Upselling — Upsell your products to visitors to your e-commerce site by enticing them to buy a pricier version of products they are considering. This can be done on the page of the product itself, in the checkout process, or after the initial purchase by featuring the higher-end products on the page. Rather than just pushing more expensive items onto customers, however, they need to know why the item that costs more would provide greater value to them. Additionally, you can increase conversions by providing social proof in the form of testimonials and reviews. 
• Customer Feedback — The best way to know what’s working and what isn’t on your e-commerce site is through customer feedback. Survey forms—especially through popups or emails—are the easiest way to collect responses. Offering a live chat option can also help in collecting real-time customer feedback. You can’t know what your customers want until they tell you, after all!

Integrated Strategies to Improve Your E-commerce Website

In search of ways to implement these tips for your e-commerce site? Look no further than Virtual Stacks Systems UK. Our fully integrated marketing strategies can help boost conversions and ROI through email marketing, review management, SEO, social media marketing and website design services! Contact us today to start developing your online strategy.