A big part of learning to sell online is rolling up your sleeves and learning as much ecommerce marketing tips as possible so that when a buyer is looking for something, your product and listing is what they find. For the context of this post, I will focus specifically on ecommerce marketing tips for your website or shopping cart to help make sure once you drove traffic to your site and found a potential customer interested in your products you do all you can to convert that traffic to a sale.
In my opinion the hardest part of ecommerce is generating traffic. If you have traffic then you are down to pricing, product page optimizations and brand reputation to get a sale and that is a much easier challenge to solve in my opinion than how to get traffic in the first place. So if you are having traffic to your website but not seeing the sales you would expect, let me start my congratulating you as you have already done the hard job and now it is time to be more surgical to convert that traffic to sales.
4 Ecommerce Marketing Tips To Increase Traffic To Sales
- Abandoned Cart Improvements – Abandoned carts is when you were able to drive traffic to your website, the customer found products they were interested in and added them to their cart. They processed to the checkout flow but for some reason they dropped out and did not convert. These are your warmest of warm leads and should be your top priority to solve for as they were very close to buying but didn’t. In a recent study, you can see the results of why people decide to drop from checkout flows after starting the process:
This gives you a checklist to work on to improve your checkout flow. Do you have any costs that show up on a buyer near the end of their journey? Is your shipping and handling charges scaring away your sales? Do you have a low touch easy way for someone to get in and make a purchase without too much red tape? You can see these are the top reasons why someone will drop from your flow and should be your focus on improving this within your website to optimize your checkout flow.
2. Get Emails if not sales – Again you have done the hard work of driving traffic to your website and maybe the potential customer was not ready to make a purchase but likes your brand and products. You should make it really easy and obvious for your traffic to sign up for your email marketing. If you have a blog on your website, make it easy and obvious to subscribe. If you have a newsletter, make it front and center to sign up. If you have neither add a new way for your traffic to hear from you in the future and that you will send out coupons and updates as you add products to your website. Email marketing is one of the best ecommerce marketing tips you will come to love.
Email marketing not only serves to help you get the initial sales from customers by keeping in touch with them until they are ready to make their first purchase but you can continue to email the customer after their first purchase to try and grow your business on increased repeat sales. Email marketing is typically inexpensive and not time consuming for you to add to your options to grow your sales with more ecommerce marketing. Your emails as you send them should drive your email subscribers back to your website to make a purchase through discounts, calls to actions, and events. Now you do not want to spam your leads or they will unsubscribe from your list and you will lose their contact but when you do send the emails, make sure you are using it as a tactic to drive growth.
3. Use support as a sales weapon – Sometimes buyers have questions about your products, refund policy, returns, shipping or your brand in general. While ecommerce is harder to create a personal relationship with your customer you need to try and the best way is through offering a great support experience. An ecommerce marketing tip for support includes having live chat on your website. This way as you drive that traffic to your site, you can communicate with them directly to field questions and make the sale.
Offer support contact information and as many ways for the potential lead to get in touch with you as needed. Customers want to feel supported so that if they buy something and it does not show up when it was suppose to they can get a hold of someone about the issue. If they can’t get a hold of you they lose confidence in your support of them as a customer. Be available and you will boost your customers confidence which will result in more sales.
4. Make sure your site shows great on all devices and browsers – You may be getting traffic but no sales and the reason is that so much of your traffic is coming from mobile devices and perhaps your website does not show well on smaller devices. You may find that you always use one browser to look at your website and work on it but if you load it up in a different browser there are some user experience issues that would scare someone away. The key to this ecommerce marketing tip is the understanding that so much of ecommerce is done via mobile devices. Everyone is on the go and making purchases while they are waiting someone and playing on their phone.
Work on your website to ensure it works great on various devices and browsers to remove that barrier from your sales funnel. Regardless of how your site shows on the device it will count as traffic so again if you are seeing the traffic but not sales this is a really solvable problem especially if it is a mobile or browser related issue.
I hope you are able to use the ecommerce marketing tips to make the surgical improvements to your website to see that more of your traffic results into sales. If you are not seeing the initial traffic in the first place, then that is your first problem to solve as that is the key ingredient to ecommerce.
