There are still a lot of opportunities to succeed as an e-commerce business in today’s oversaturated market. In fact, there are more opportunities to seize as customers began to shop online more than ever. Unlike a decade ago, setting up a new e-commerce business is also relatively easy to do considering that you have plenty of resources to utilize these days.
The real challenge is not setting up the e-commerce business or developing products to sell. The actual challenge comes in the form of a crowded market and ensuring that your e-commerce store stands out from the crowd. You have to go the extra mile to convert traffic into email subscribers and customers. Fortunately, we have the top e-commerce tips and tricks for those of you who want to boost conversions from the start.
Be Personal
Forget about trying to build an extensive catalog with hundreds of products. What you need to be focusing on is user experience or UX of your website, specifically delivering a personalized user experience to potential customers. That’s not something you can do with hundreds of items in your catalog. Remember, less is more here.
If you pay attention to the latest e-commerce trends, you will see that the most successful sites focus on a handful of products, and then invest in making sure that customers can get to those specific products quickly and intuitively. When a website is organized well, this helps increase click-throughs and ultimately generate more sales.
Optimize Your Checkout Process
Another thing to forget is asking customers to go through three or four steps just to check out. Those days are gone. While you want to get more information about the customers at this stage of their journey, asking them to fill long checkout forms is a recipe for disaster. No one wants to spend 10 minutes checking out.
Make sure you choose a platform where the checkout process is simple and where you can easily identify where your customers are dropping off when it comes to completing orders.
Deliver Value
Delivering value is something that needs to be done before the customers start their decision-making process. If you want potential customers to remember your products by the time that they consider making a purchase, you have to deliver value before that.
Content marketing is a great way to deliver value to customers while still marketing your products. You need to generate interest in a particular product or a solution from the beginning. If you read our previous article about proactive marketing, you know that you then have instruments like flash sales to convert visitors into customers.
Beyond Sales
Last but not least, make sure your optimizations don’t stop with the purchase decision. The customers’ journey doesn’t stop there either. You have to think about maintaining a consistent – and positive – user experience after they made their purchases to stay ahead of the market. You want to ensure your customers keep coming back.
At the end of the day, after-sales are part of the customer journey. When customers are happy with your follow-up emails and after-sales services or exclusive offers, they are more likely to promote your products and e-commerce site, and you are more likely to grow your customer base in a sustainable way. One-off sales are not the way to build a long-term business.
So, do you want to boost your conversion rate from the start? As you begin creating your e-commerce business, use the tips and tricks we discussed in this article to get things right, and optimize your e-commerce site. If you follow these simple steps, you will see an increase in loyal customers.