The world of online retail is still showing considerable signs of growth on a global scale and, despite trends predicting a slight decrease in percentage growth for 2019 in comparison to previous years, there’s still scope for eCommerce businesses to upscale and take their share of the market.
In this post, Jon Leighton from digital marketing agency, Land Digital, will be sharing some expert tips on how to upscale your online business effectively. From honing in on customer’s online experience to upselling products, this piece will provide a solid foundation for ensuring your online retail business realises its full potential.
Optimise Customer User Experience
Customer user experience, or UX, is becoming an important part of online marketing strategies – ensuring site users have a positive, seamless and simple shopping experience.
In terms of upscaling your online business, this could be a great way to make your site and products stand out against competitors.
But, in order to maximise your potential in this field, your website should cater to both desktop users and the growing number of smartphone shoppers.
1) Make your website responsive
With figures reporting that over 45% of online shoppers are using mobile devices to make purchases, having a responsive website that is adaptable for use on smartphones is key to ensuring you don’t lose sales through a complicated or awkward buying process for on-the-go shoppers or limit your market reach by only catering for desktop users.
2) Make it easy to navigate
In terms of the overall design of your site, it pays to take some time to research other successful eCommerce sites to see how they cater to their customers’ needs.
Certainly, your site should be easy to navigate regardless of the device your consumers are using (and simplicity is often the best approach here), but other considerations also include font size, style and colour as well as text and visual ratios.
3) Create clear categories
With homepages, ensure there are clear directives to different product categories and special offers that can be accessed with a single click through.
On product category pages, keep the layout minimalistic to avoid it looking overcrowded and messy – using thumbnail images here can work brilliantly to give an instant visual of your products when accompanied by a short description and, of course, the price!
3) Give detailed product descriptions
Beyond the main category pages, it’s also essential that product pages provide the user with all the information they need on specific items.
This doesn’t necessarily need to be a lengthy description, but take the time to think about the key details your customers need to know, such as colour options, size, weight, materials and shipping options.
With this vital information readily available and easy to find, customers won’t have to look elsewhere.
Harness the power of quality content
Tying in with the user experience is the importance of uploading fresh, quality content to your website.
1) Give users what they’re looking for
From your homepage to product pages and blog posts, it’s vital that each piece of content is unique, engaging and specifically tailored to your users.
This will eliminate the risk of being penalised by Google search algorithms for duplicate content, but more importantly, it increases your relevance for specific search terms and ultimately improves your site’s UX.
2) Add a call-to-action
Providing visitors with all the information they want or need in one place is a sure-fire way to win more visitors, but coupling this with compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) that command consumers to do something will work to bolster your online marketing efforts.
Whether it’s ‘join today for 10% off’, ‘exclusive online deals’’ or ‘free delivery’, using instructive language across all your website content and social media marketing can be a highly effective way to convert visitors into paying customers.
Just be sure to optimise your CTA potency with short, sharp messages that get straight to the point, as the current on-demand economy shows that consumers are becoming less patient – looking for instant gratification and information.
3) Optimise your content
No solid content strategy would be complete without the use of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) that uses targeted keywords and search terms within the content to increase search ranking visibility.
However, the secret here is to be selective about the search terms you include.
Take the time to carry out research to identify which key terms have the highest volumes and the greatest relevance to your products and naturally integrate them into the content on specific pages.
Avoid a blanket approach here using the same keywords on all pages, as an over-optimised site packed with keywords or irrelevant terms will go against you in Google search rankings.
This is because the latest algorithms recognise spammy content that’s stuffed with keywords and, instead, gives higher kudos to sites with well-written content that’s unique and relevant to provide the best possible search results that will in turn, deliver the best user experience.
Practise the art of upselling
With customers visiting your site and heading to the checkout, why not take the opportunity to see if you can up your sales revenue with some subtle and savvy upselling or cross-selling? The art of upselling on your ecommerce store is a brilliant technique for growing your business with minimal effort.
In most instances, customers are already heading to the checkout and willing to spend their cash, but with a little persuasion, you could make that spend even bigger – which can accumulate into a significant amount of sales revenue over time.
1) Ensure suggested products are relevant
When implementing an upsell or cross-selling strategy, it’s essential you ensure the additional items or higher grade products remain relevant to the consumer’s original needs. Think about Amazon’s ‘frequently bought together’ prompt and how that entices shoppers to consider purchasing other related items, even when they hadn’t searched for them.
2) Offer added extras
Also, consider other upselling techniques like ‘free delivery on orders over $20’ that can easily lure consumers into spending a few more dollars with the satisfaction that they’re saving money on delivery charges.
3) Be mindful of the user’s needs and your product margins
With any upselling strategy, always be sure to keep the user’s needs in mind and, of course, the profit margins – this is particularly important with 2-for-1 offers or free delivery options, as you want to make sure these attractive offers actually deliver value to your business’ bottom line.
When it comes to upscaling your online store, there are a whole host of considerations to take into account, but we hope these expert insights will give you the right base for building a solid online marketing strategy that will optimise your consumer’s experience, engagement and ultimately their spend.
Author bio:
Jon Leighton is the Director of Land Digital, a full-service digital agency providing made-to-measure marketing, design and development solutions to help businesses in the UK to solve their commercial problems.
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