Tom Welbourne
Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
Optimising Your eCommerce Store For Sales
- May 15, 2019
- , 8:38 am
Are you looking to start an ecommerce business using Woocommerce or Shopify?
Or do you already have your ecommerce business set up and you’re now looking to use digital marketing?
Either way, you need to be using digital marketing channels such as Facebook ads, Google ads or a blog for example to drive revenue to your store.
People think that you can set up an ecommerce store on Shopify and become an overnight success with millions of pounds following to your piggy bank.
Not true.
Some of our clients have taken years to get to a point where they’re seen by their customer as the go-to brand for a product/service.
However, we’ve learnt a few things that can help you grow your ecommerce business and avoid as many mistakes as possible so you save yourself time and money.
In this article, we’re going to talk about how to use digital marketing to increase your sales for your ecommerce store.
WHO IS YOUR CUSTOMER & WHERE ARE THEY?
Before you pull your money out of your pocket to spend £££’s on Facebook Ads, have a think about who your audience is.
If you’re expecting somebody else to go find this out for you then you should not be setting up an ecommerce store. Period.
You need to have at least a general idea of the demographics of your audience before you plug a load of money into your store.
Age
Gender
Location
Socio-economic group
Your customers like & dislikes
These are just come of the basics and they may not be right.
You may think that your audience is 18-22 year old females, you run your Facebook ads and find out that it’s not that group at all.
This is good news for you.
“Good news?” you may be asking yourself.
Think of it this way, you’ve taken an educated guess and found out from a small initial amount of ad spend that 18-22 year old females are not your demographic.
Cross them off your list and test a different age group or even men!
Other qualitative factors to account for are:
How does your audience talk?
What gurus/influencers are they listening to?
Where are they going to find products/services like yours?
Put yourself in their shoes and become their best friend.
Literally treat your customers like your best friend or family member.
Know everything about them and make it your priority to help them and provide as much value as you possibly can.
YOUR ECOMMERCE CHECKOUT PROCESS
Have you ever been queueing in a shop and the person on the checkout is taking forever?
You start getting frustrated and may even travel to a similar shop because you can’t wait any longer.
This is what a customer feels when they’re shopping on the internet and find that they have to jump through 10 hoops just to purchase from you!
Your customer is literally begging to give you their money in exchange for your product/service and you’re putting up walls that cause FRICTION.
Take away the friction in the checkout process and bring those walls down.
How To Remove Friction In The Checkout Process?
Reduce the number of fields they have to fill out
Make sure your website speed is optimised
Let your customer login with no details or with their already setup social media profiles such as Facebook
Those 3 points above can literally TRANSFORM your customers journey and your bank account.
Make it as easy as possible for them to checkout and if you need an example to copy then go to Amazon and purchase something.
Amazon has made it so easy for the customer to purchase something that all you have to do now is swipe and your product is there the same day.
ABANDONED CARTS
The bulk of your customers will probably come from those who put your product in the cart and then didn’t purchase.
You have to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and realise that they are getting distracted at nearly every point of the day and with the internet, they’re under no pressure to purchase straight away.
They are not in the car dealership anymore with the pushy salesman who is telling them that this car is the only one ever made and is at the price it ever will be.
Your customer can literally find out how fair-priced your product is compared to the other players in your market in about two clicks.
The abandoned cart rate stands at an average of 69.57% according to baymard.com.
How do you get those customers who have abandoned back on board?
Follow up with automated emails
Follow the point before and make it easy for them to purchase
Retarget them using Facebook/Google remarketing campaigns
We’re not saying it is easy to bring people back to your page and that customers will come back grovelling at your feet with money in their hand.
However, most customers will give your ecommerce store one more browse at the very least if the product your selling is even slightly of interest to them.
MAKE YOUR PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS STAND OUT
Most people who start an ecommerce store will be dropshipping or selling similar products to other businesses.
Unless you can compete on price then you need to stand out somehow.
You can do this quite easily with your product descriptions by making them descriptive, informative and even entertaining.
Can you put a new interesting spin on a product that is seen as boring by most?
Do that.
Better yet, include a video of someone (maybe you) wearing the piece of clothing if you’re a fashion ecommerce store.
CONCLUSION
The above is a loose structure and really only the beginning of what you can do to enhance your ecommerce store.
It’s important that you spend the bulk of your time taking action rather than reading countless articles on different strategies to optimise your website like this one.
We work with a number of e-commerce clients and helped them transform their stores, increasing their sales and cutting down costs.
If you’re a bit overwhelmed with all the information out there and would rather just have an agency do it all for you whilst you get on with the important stuff then set up a call with us HERE.
