Starting an Online Business is Easy
Anyone with $50 bucks can make an account on an e-commerce platform. The hard part is making money, and sustaining the business long-term. Having a competitive edge over other players in the industry is key to success. In today’s blog, we’ll talk about e-commerce strategies and best practices that will give your e-commerce company that extra leg-up over competitors.
Here is 3 E-Commerce Strategies to get you going.
1. Start by Defining Target Personas
Before we get into any more detail about how to run your e-commerce site, let’s spend some time talking about target personas. A target persona outlines a typical member of your target audience. These personas are developed over time based on feedback and analytics from past marketing initiatives. They ensure e-commerce stores are optimized for the right kind of customer.
This is the type of information you’ll need to establish about the audience to build these personas:
Where do they live?
How old are they?
What is their average income? (Can they afford your product or service?)
What is their native language? How many languages do they speak?
What motivates them to buy?
What are their interests?
With these personas in mind, you will be able to launch much more targeted marketing efforts, reaching the right customers at the right time, and with the right message.
Consider psychographics
While demographics are important considerations for any successful e-commerce business strategy, analysing the psychographics of your target market can yield important information. These are more in-depth factors that influence the purchasing decision of a potential customer. Factors such as:
Values
Emotions
Personal Taste
Opinions
Lifestyle
Personality
These factors can give you some insight about why your target persona buys and how you can manoeuvre your product into the minds of your audience.
To understand psychographics better, check out HotJars article, Psychographics in Marketing.
Look at your competitors target personas
Understanding who your competitors are, and aren’t targeting can be very beneficial. This can provide you with information that you can use to create your own targeting strategy. You could potentially target the same people as your competitors and highlight your superior product, or you can target buyers that were forgotten by your competitors and focus your efforts in that direction. This allows you to identify and satisfy the needs of this niche market.
Make adjustments
Utilizing surveys and other metrics in order to fully understand your target personas will help you turn one time buyers into loyal, repeat customers. Find out what your current customers like/don’t like about your products and services by studying reviews and looking at other metrics through Google. You will be able to see who is visiting your site, and see if it lines up with your target market. If not, adjustments might need to be made. E-commerce businesses thrive through adaptation.
2. Focus on User Experience
Providing a positive user experience is key to the success of any e-commerce store. It helps build trust with the audience, increases organic rankings, and boosts conversion rate. Google’s new core vitals update set to be released in May of 2021 is putting more emphasis on user experience as a ranking metric for their algorithm, providing even more incentive for improving the usability and functionality of your website. Here are a few strategies and best practices for improving UX for your e-commerce site.
Use breadcrumbs
Just like in the fairytales you read as a kid, breadcrumbs in the context of UX help lead the main character back home. On e-commerce sites, breadcrumbs show users exactly where they are on the site at any given time, and provide clickable links to navigate back and forth between these pages. Not only are using breadcrumbs great for user experience, it helps with organic SEO, putting you in Google’s good books.
Check site speed
If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, you might as well kiss your e-commerce dreams goodbye. Site speed is an integral part of any e-commerce strategy, and often requires the help of a web developer to fix. Reducing image size, removing any add-ons or plugins you don’t use, and finding a faster hosting provider can increase site speed.
Speaking of site speed, our article Importance of Search in E-commerce highlights aspects of search engine optimization.
Ensure navigation is clear
Structure is key when it comes to building an e-commerce site. You should always build the site with customers in mind. Site navigation should be thought of beforehand and brainstormed with the team – we recommend taking a good ol’ pen and paper and drawing out a sitemap before publishing anything on the web.
Avoid layout shifts
A layout shift occurs when a user goes to interact with a page that appears to be finished loading, and then the buttons and page moves due to an error in loading process. There are few things more frustrating than moving elements on a web page and the last thing you want as an ecommerce business is to make it harder for a customer to click the “Add To Cart” button on your site.
Increase mobile friendliness
Online searches are increasingly being more prominently conducted on mobile devices. Making it easier for potential customers to navigate through your site on a mobile device while keeping the content readable and concise will not only help your rankings on Google, but will help increase online sales.
3. Optimize Email Marketing Processes
SEO is one way to bring new users to your site. Once those users are in the system, it’s up to you to keep them interested and engaged. The most effective way to do this is through email marketing. Your email subscriber list is one of your most valuable assets. Here are a few ways you can optimize email marketing for your e-commerce business.
Set goals
Email marketing is all about execution. To do it effectively requires a strategy. Before launching an email marketing campaign for your e-commerce site, be sure to answer the following questions:
– What is the anticipated outcome of this campaign?
– Which personas are we targeting?
– What type of metrics will be put in place for defining the campaign’s success?
Put opt-in forms in the right places
The only way to capture the information required to add a contact to a subscriber list is through an opt-in form. These forms must appear as natural, unobtrusive elements on the page. A few great places for opt-in forms include in footers, blog posts, on the “about us” page, on check-out pages, and as pop-ups.
Segment lists according to different audiences
Not all customers are the same. It’s likely that within your customer base, there are several sub-groups – those who only buy the most expensive products, those who buy in bulk, those who buy exclusively during holidays…etc. By segmenting lists according to elements like interests, location, and behaviour, your emails will have a much higher success rate, and bring in more traffic to the e-commerce site.
Abandoned cart follow ups
Follow up emails are the perfect way to help reinforce the purchasing decision of your potential customer. With a variety of reasons for cart abandonment, it is a great opportunity to offer solutions as to how you can ensure that they are making the right decision. Send an email reminding them of their forgotten item and provide other purchasing options that could supplement the product in question or that they might find more suitable to their needs. Highlight product reviews and testimonials in the email as well but avoid the classic salesman nomenclature. Consider also using an email flow that handles any objections the customer has in lieu of alternative product buying options to differentiate you from the competition. This could help you uncover any roadblocks that are consistently hindering potential sales.
There are many moving parts to an e-commerce store. Follow our e-commerce strategies and best practices and you’ll be one step ahead of competitors. To learn more tips and tricks for operating your e-commerce store, contact one of our team members today.
