You built it but will they come? There are proven strategies for growing e-commerce sales including website design, offer placements, digital marketing, conversion optimization, and making sure your post-sale support from order fulfillment to customer support and email and social campaigns are timed and targeted to help drive additional sales. To drive more traffic to your site and increase conversion rates, e-commerce vendors cannot overlook any part of the customer journey. Exemplary customer experiences will keep your customers coming back to your site to order more of your products.
Website Design Should Guide Your Visitor Through Your Site
From your landing page to your checkout page, each aspect of your e-commerce site should be designed to appeal to your customers’ tastes and create a balance between a fun shopping experience and a clear path to conversion for your customers. Here are a few best practices to implement when designing your e-commerce site.
Landing Pages Are Like Billboards
Your landing page should be streamlined and visually uncluttered to invite visitors to explore your site, introduce visitors to your products or services, and show what’s unique about your business and products. On their initial visit, most visitors are just checking out your store and products but your design can make them want to come back.
Clear CTAs Should Be Easy To Find And Stand Out On Your Page
Clear calls to action (CTAs) can help encourage them to accept your offers and increase conversion rates. On your optimized landing page, effective CTAs such as a “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” button will stand out by using bright colors and shapes that are different from any other design object on your landing page. On content pages, a clear CTA button may be as simple as an invitation to “Read More.” With a few words, you can also lead your customers to take advantage of value-based offers on your landing page or website.
Create A Sense Of Urgency
Time-sensitive offers create a sense of urgency. According to HubSpot, a 2019 CXL study revealed that CTAs that create a sense of urgency on your e-commerce site increase conversion rates by 330%. Using time-sensitive offers such as “Only 4 Left” or “Offer Expires in 24 Hours”, or slightly changing a CTA from “Shop Here” to “Shop Now”, create a sense of urgency that prompts your customers to move on with their decision to purchase products from your e-commerce site.
Simplify Your Checkout Page
In keeping with clear and easy-to-navigate e-commerce sites, one-click checkout pages shorten checkout times by as much as 90%. Streamlining your checkout process to skip the “View Cart” page and go directly to checkout, via a “Buy Now” button reduces cart abandonment rates that often occur when customers are asked to create accounts instead of allowing them to check out as guests.
Green-Bar SSL Adds A Sense Of Security
Displaying a green bar SSL encrypts your customers’ information, protecting it from hackers and scammers. A green bar SSL displayed on your website’s checkout page has proved to provide a 42% increase in conversions when tested against a site without one.
Offer A Variety Of Payment Options
While you may not be able to offer every payment type that exists on your website, it’s important to offer methods that are best suited for your customer base. At the very least, offering the top three payment methods for your sector has been shown to increase conversion rates by 30%. Also, if you deal with higher-end items, you might want to offer financing on your checkout page.
Product Reviews
Because online shoppers read other shoppers’ reviews of products they’re interested in purchasing, allowing customers to leave reviews on your product pages, right next to your product images and description shows your trustworthiness and drives purchasing decisions.
High-Quality Images And Concise Product Descriptions
Your e-commerce site needs to contain high-quality images of your products, showing a good selection of shots taken from many angles. Including a zoom feature also allows your customers to get a better picture of what your product looks like before they commit to purchasing from your website. Likewise, direct, concise product descriptions targeted to your customer base’s tastes can help expedite the decision process. You might want to include a “Read More” button for product descriptions that require a more detailed explanation.
Optimizing For Mobile
Mobile devices are on a trajectory to outpace other web traffic worldwide. Keeping your e-commerce site simple with fewer distractions is especially important for smaller screens on mobile devices. Mobile-optimizing your e-commerce site is crucial for fast load times even on slower Internet connections! These simple considerations can make the difference between customers converting via their mobile devices or opting for a competitor’s site instead.
Social Presence
Including social media platform links on your e-commerce site is critical to successfully market your e-commerce business. From setting up and developing your social media pages to executing social media calendar strategies and social marketing campaigns, you can better target your audience at important steps in their shopping journeys – before, during, and after conversions at the appropriate frequencies. Optimizing your social media marketing campaign is a crucial element of your marketing initiatives, along with other forms of advertising, including promotional product giveaways, email marketing, video marketing, and traditional print, radio, and TV marketing techniques.
Partnering With A 3PL Fulfillment Company
When your optimized website works to increase sales and the orders continue rolling in at increased rates, most e-commerce companies find themselves in a position where they need to expand their warehousing facilities and step up their fulfillment operations to meet online shoppers’ demands for free shipping and shorter delivery times. Did you know that over 60% of all e-commerce companies rely on a trusted third party logistics company to securely store, pick, pack, and ship their orders? Here’s why:
- Warehousing: Storing your inventory with a 3PL allows you to distribute your inventory across a network of warehouses that distribute your inventory according to order frequency and geographic demand for faster deliveries and lower shipping costs. Avoiding leasing warehouse space and the nightmare of staffing your own fulfillment facility is enough incentive to outsource your orders to a 3PL such as Phase V Fulfillment.
- Fulfillment Operations: Working with 3PLs also streamlines your fulfillment processes by way of automating your fulfillment operations and leveraging the skill and accuracy of experienced fulfillment personnel. 3PLs will save you money on shipping containers and supplies, optimizing your packaging to minimize shipping costs along with resourceful shipping logistics experts who are adept at handling a variety of delivery options and reducing shipping costs with additional discounts from carriers.
- Advanced Data-Powered Technology: To help drive more sales, advanced warehouse and inventory management systems that 3PLs use are essential to keeping your inventory optimized and lean. With real-time inventory data, you can plan for demand, so that you have enough inventory on hand to fill orders and not so much that you require additional warehouse space and wind up with deadstock that ties up capital. With the data analytics available through your 3PL, you can set up alerts to notify you to reorder inventory in time to avoid stockouts and awkward backorder situations.
- Returns and Exchanges: Customers return products for any number of reasons and 3PLs have systems in place to handle exchanges and returns in a timely fashion.
Driving more sales to your e-commerce website involves optimizing every aspect of your customer journey, from the look and functionality of your website and your social media activities to making the most of your marketing strategies, getting your orders to your customers on time and accurately, and implementing customer support that provides for fast turnarounds for returns and exchanges.
Contact Phase V to learn more about how we can help drive more sales on your e-commerce site!
