Whether digitizing your brick-and-mortar store or following the now popular dropshipping or affiliate stores, you will launch an eCommerce site. However, generating traffic on your site is not an easy process. For this, you can either go with the organic promotion which takes time, and yields returns for a longer duration, or you could run your ad to immediately get sales.
It is needless to say that Facebook boosts, Google ads, and banner ads, are some of the popular ad campaigns these days. However, we often come across people who, despite doing everything correctly on their ads, don’t see sales. What they fail to realize is that running ads is the way to bring visitors to your site. For conversion, there are other things that need to be aligned.
Please don’t confuse this post with conversion rate optimization, below are the pointers of what may be causing the leak of your visitors from your site.
1. Check the links
One of the most common mistakes is not checking all the links. Check all the category links and product links. If you have posted some blogs on your site, to link back to the products, make sure that the links are correct. And if you have promoted your products off-site, check those as well.
2. Look through the eye of a first-time visitor
After looking at the e-commerce site hundreds of times, we simply don’t see the issues that seem like a blunder to any first-time visitor. Sit down with some of your pals and ask for honest feedback. You need to understand what the first-time impression of your site is. For this purpose, you can even create professionally done landing pages for different product categories, if doing so for individual products is not possible.
3. Identify and Fix site speed issues
Even if you find your site speed normal, most of the visitors may not. It depends upon a lot of factors but the most common ones are script compressions, server locations, and image size rendering. There are various tools that can help you optimize your e-commerce site speed. You can use the Google Page speed insight tool to guide you. If the technical side is not your forte then you can hire some developer to fix it for you.
4. Manage conversion path
What are conversion paths or funnels? Let’s put it this way. The journey that a visitor covers after landing on your site till the checkout page; from your homepage to the product category page to a single product page and through the checkout page. Give some time to this. Your product category is important for SEO. Your images should allure the visual traffic. And, your product descriptions should entice logical shoppers. This will be a process but you should keep thoughts about this when you initially launch your e-commerce.
5. Test payment gateways
It is not an uncommon practice to use multiple gateways. However, if you yourself don’t go through the conversion path and test the checkout process, you won’t know what kind of experience your buyer will go through. We’ve often found that the sites are developed and the sandbox account is still used for the payment gateway. What a loss! Further, make sure to use multiple payment gateways to make it easy for your customers to pay for their purchases according to their preferences.
6. Setup analytics tools
Immediately after launching your e-commerce, you may start boosting your Facebook Post with the target to bring in more site visitors. Though Facebook Insights gives how many click-through events took place, you also need more information for future purposes. So it is only wise to set up Google Analytics or other analytics tools. If you want to see the session recording of the visitors on your site, setting up tools like Hotjar is also a great option. After viewing a few sessions, you’ll definitely know what to change in your site for more sales.
7. Your product reviews on & off-site
The purpose of your e-commerce site is to host your products online. And the purpose of launching ad campaigns is to grab the attention of potential buyers for those products. So, when you have someone’s attention, they will try to know more. Exactly, they want to know about the experience of using those products. What gives that idea? Reviews. The impression of others using your product is valuable if good and can be scary if bad. So, try to make the best use of your customer reviews, within your site. Also, don’t miss to perform a quick check about your business review off-site in trust pilot and sites alike, if you have been operating for some time.
8. Social profiles
Where do your potential customers mostly hang out? You should have an idea about that, but having an idea only isn’t enough, you need to make your presence there. You should understand the lingo and culture of those social platforms. Along with that, though maintaining multiple social profiles may be a bit tough, you also need to maintain your brand voice. It is better to handle this with some social media planner tools like Hootsuite or something similar.
9. Study the competition
This needs to be a continuous process. You need to occasionally check the promotions that your competitors are running. Is it the price discount on products? Or, is it free shipping? They probably introduced a product bundle. Has the price of similar products gone down? What strategy are they using and is it working? Keep a keen eye on these questions before launching your ad campaigns.
10. Few articles on your niche sites
Consistent practice of posting a few articles will go a long way to increase your sales. But more than that, posting product unboxing experiences or detailed product reviews will help the visitors understand that you have used the product and are confident to sell it. Most of the time, people try selling products that they themselves haven’t used. Avoid misrepresenting your products by using them yourself or getting honest reviews from your close ones, and post those as articles on your e-commerce.
Bonus: Cookie, refund, shipping policies
Cookie consent and different law compliance is not something that you can ignore. Your e-commerce site generates data and you will use it at some point. So, better stay on the safe side from the very beginning. At the very least, implement GDPR and other such law compliance systems. This will also create an impression that you are in the business for the long run. Online buyers are concerned about receiving the product as they expect, so create a refund policy to ease the stress of your buyers. Further, your shipping is a whole different story, however, try to keep your thoughts about prompt flawless delivery.
Happy Selling.
Signing out…
Peace!!!