1. Reduce those "Abandoned Carts"
As consumers browse around for the best online deals, it is not uncommon for them to place something in their carts, get distracted, and leave your website. Marketers can re-engage these shoppers at a later stage with a strong "abandoned cart" strategy that includes targeted ads, reminder emails, incentives and other promotions and offers. For example, if consumers have already given their email addresses, send them a reminder within 24 hours offering a 10% discount if they complete their order. Alternatively, try intent-based, "wait, don't leave" messaging, which provides an immediate incentive for shoppers to purchase now rather than leave your site.
2. Optimize your site for mobile users.
This is essential for any site, but especially an e-commerce platform; otherwise your site will be nearly impossible to navigate. Give your users a slick mobile experience, either through a responsive design, a specific mobile design, or an interactive app that allows for a better mobile experience.
3. Identify and Address "Leaks" in Your Conversion Funnel
One must remove unnecessary steps in the path to conversion. Marketers should focus on conversion funnel optimization as it can impact 100% of the orders coming through a site. Is it really necessary to require account creation during checkout? Guest checkout functionality can increase conversion rates from 3 to 10%. Do you require shoppers to fill in both billing and shipping information? Can you remove all non-required form fields? This will minimize the amount of information consumers must enter, thus increasing their speed to checkout.
4. Customer Reviews
We all know how important word of mouth is when we make a purchase, whether at a local store or online. In fact, 92% of purchase decisions are triggered after a positive word of mouth recommendation either from family members, friends, or past customers.
Enable customer reviews on your product pages and also highlight them right at the point of purchase, just when the customer is deciding whether to buy from you or not. This is a great advantage to have by your side.
5. Secure your website with an SSL Certificate
If you are collecting ANY sensitive information on your website (including email and password), then you need to be secure. One of the best ways to ensure this is to enable HTTPS, also known as SSL (secure socket layers). In addition to providing an extra layer of user security, it also provides a significant ranking signal to Google and is a trust factor to your users.
6. Optimize your website speed by reducing the size of your images.
It's important to have high-quality images on your product pages, but don't go overboard. Having too many high-quality images on one page can slow down your site, which is bad for SEO. Instead, reduce the size of your images, or build a feature that allows users to "zoom in" to see a larger version. This will keep your load speeds in check while still giving your users the quality they need to see.
7. Optimize your site's internal search functionality
Ensure that every internal search finds the right product - even people searching with misspellings, synonyms, hyphenation or spacing errors. This requires tweaking meta-data within your e-commerce solution. By handling this through meta-data, you won't create pages loaded with incorrect or misspelled words.
These 7 strategies (if done correctly) will boost your sales, and if the above is a too technical, consult your current web developer for assistance or get the experts in online marketing to assist. Fast Forward Marketing is a specialist online marketing agency with over 15 years knowledge and experience. They can assist in generating more sales and ranking your website on the first page of Google and other search engines.
This article was published in partnership with Fast Forward Marketing.
