New to the e-commerce industry? Still striving hard to find the pathway to boost and skyrocket your business? You’re at the right place. Initially, if you’re done with these initial steps with starting your online business including market research, selecting product niche, developing website, establishing a contract with the courier then it’s the right time for you to add these basic and essential features to your e-commerce store.
Social Media Presence
The backbone of any e-commerce store is its social media presence. It’s actually one of the massive sales funnel as an average Facebook user spends around 50 minutes scrolling up and down. It’s the best and most adequate marketing tool for any B2C business. Pre-ordering, the customer tends to determine the strength of your online store through your social media presence. The more likes and followers you have, the more reliable your online store appear. A single video with a $5 boost can reach up to 52,000 users (price may vary according to locations). Stay active on social media, post at least 3-4 times a week. For instant results, focus on the video advertisements, picture galleries and descriptive content. Videos have shown immense results which sometimes reach up to 50% of your audience. Introduce your new product or services through live video option on Facebook which sends direct notifications to all the users following your page.
Blog Page
Ever heard the phrase, “Content is King”? Yes, it certainly is. The more user friendly your content is, the more traffic you’ll be able to derive from Google. The search engine determines the authority of your website subject to various factors in which content is one of the basic pillars. As quoted by Neil Patel, “Write for Humans First, Search Engines comes Second”. Google will bring your website in search results “one time” if it is stuffed with keywords and poor content but users will bounce back, which will eventually increase your bounce rate, but your website will be dragged back in the search results Click Through Rate and finally your website will get penalized by Google for poor, copied content stuffed with keywords. Yes, content is king, but a king can punish you too. So, write good and informative stuff relevant to your industry, Include internal links of your products in the content and sell your products with your content marketing skills. Add at least 1 article per week on your blog page, share it on all your social media channels including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and any other which you can work on.
Banner
Yes, you read that right. You need to hire a creative designer or outsource your design needs to someone else. In a fast pace e-commerce world, you need to follow the trends accordingly otherwise your competitors will leave you behind. Believe me, the banner on the front page of an e-commerce store has a mass effect on the consumer behavior because a consumer judges a website through front page. The trendier it looks, the more it will appeal the visitors. Follow all seasons and cover every single event, from children day to father’s day. Change your banners on a website as well as social media networks before the day comes. For instance, start promoting your Christmas sales from 15th of December.
Address
The biggest advantage of an online store is that you don’t need to open a physical outlet and spend thousands of dollars in paying rent and decorating your store. But on the other hand you only need a small warehouse, a laptop and little investment for an online store (if you are starting with less capital). The buyer needs your location, for trust and particularly for returning goods. If you don’t have any physical address and you are working from home then just add the location of your place. Pin location on Google maps, Facebook, get your website registered on top directories, For instance, yellow Pages. It’s for search engines as well as for the humans.
Live Chat
Live chat is one of the most devastating trend which is rising day by day. Adding live chat increases the customer’s loyalty and their devotion towards your store. The websites which have added live chat have got numerous changes in their traffic, sales and revenue. It lowers your expenses and you wouldn’t need extra employees for the e-mail handling. Low down bounce rate of your website, therefore increasing sales as the live chat feature helps you to find out the pain point of your visitor. Increase your e-mail subscription list with live chat. It’s convenient for your customers as they don’t have to go through a long registration process and wait for the automated type of replies from contact department. A survey done by e-marketer.com reported that, out of 65% of users tend to return back and purchase from a website where live chat supported them.
Coupons
Who doesn’t love sales and bargains? Couponing is yet another vital feature which must be added in your e-commerce store. Coupons are quite handy tools to attract new customers and resist old ones. It can be one of the shiniest glitter to attract the customers either through e-mail marketing, banners, Facebook or any other medium you use including magazines, newspapers, or paid commercial advertisements as well. A coupon can attract thousands of visitors towards your website. Cherry on the top, coupons can help you to get good organic rankings even with brand mentions and links. Once you add a new deal, visit coupon sites and submit your coupon codes yourself. You can create a list of 100-500 websites and e-mail your new deals or coupons. Every website may not place your coupon but keeping good relations with the managers can get you on front page of the websites as well.
Smart Search
An average 13.8 % of revenue is through the smart search option. Around 30% of users use the site search box. Out of your 35%, you can easily cash up 20% of your visitors with the smart and customized search results. A visitor gets irritated if their selected item does not meet their demands. Add all the features including color, size, price, category, or any other feature. However, search option is the first feature which differentiates a physical store with an online store.
Email Subscriptions
For every $1 spent, email marketing generates $38 in ROI. The result is quite devastating though. Yet, e-mail marketing is one of the best tool to skyrocket your sales and since last 12 years, the perfect e-mail campaigns have helped companies to open the mouth of their sales funnel. Start building up your e-mail list today with the help of basic techniques. While running your campaign, try to make the subject line as appealing as possible, don’t make it spammy by any means, add images, be precise and don’t bother your customers by sending e-mails on a daily basis. If you aren’t getting results, then either change your e-mail marketer or your e-mail hosting provider.
Don’t Play With Your Products.
The biggest mistake which any e-commerce store can do is harming their valuable products. Never ever play with your products. Conduct an extensive research, use beautiful human models for online boutiques as your visitors can conceptualize themselves wearing or using that product. Another mistake which happens is with the poor quality images used. Even a single well captured image with “relevant alt text” can help you for organic rankings through Google image search. Be smart with your products, add description and titles of every product separately, no copy pasting, although it will consume your precious time but results will be unbelievably phenomenal. Optimize each and every product page separately.
SSL
Last but not the least, if you want your customer to visit your website then you need marketing but if you want them to buy anything, then you’ll be needing (Secured Socket Layer) SSL certificate. Basically it’s a certificate which allows you to add a secured payment gateway in your website. In order to accept payments from your customers, you need to pass certain audits which confirm that your site is secured and you are up to the mark of PCI (Payment card industry) standards. Once you are done with the encryption tools, you can simply apply for an SSL certificate and add it on your web. If you don’t, then get ready to get sued by your customers as their login, card and other information is easily accessible to the hackers.
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