Retailers have a golden opportunity to secure additional customers online in significant volumes, but are you giving your website visitors the best possible experience
We’ve provided the following tips to help streamline your ecommerce site and boost online sales in 2016.
1. Invest in your customer journeys
This has to be your starting point. By putting aside personal prejudices and removing thoughts of what is just easy for you to do, you can truly understand what is the next evolution in your digital business.
By understanding your customer personas and walking through the value you provide at each point in the buying journey, you can fundamentally understand what improvements are needed. By periodically returning to this understanding you can make this a continual cycle of development.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Do you know where your visitors are coming from
- Do you know what they want, and how they should get to your stores checkout
- Do you know what theyre really doing on your site
Take some time to think about your visitors intent and how good a job you do in providing them with what theyre looking for.
2. Understanding your customers’ mobile journey
Whilst understanding all shopping journeys is key, understanding mobile usage specifically is very important for most companies. Mobile has taken most people by surprise because tablets and smartphones are able to give an almost desktop experience.
Mobile traffic recently exceeded desktop traffic for the first time. Today, it is essential that every ecommerce website is mobile-friendly, easy to read and have key call to action or selling points near the top of the page. The site should load in three seconds or less, even on a smartphone, and all navigation should be easy to click on.
If your site doesnt meet these basic expectations, then new visitors will simply hit the back button, never to return.
However, your mobile users may well want something else. Do they just access your site to check stock availability before a journey Do you have stock availability on your site Are they just checking your range not intending to buy Depending on how your users want to use mobile you may want to re-orient the experience.
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3. Create a roadmap and stick to it
We are all too often blown along the road of progress by whichever initiative has the most wind behind it. By understanding what your customer values, you are a lot more secure in what you should pick from a deep list of possibilities. A strategic ecommerce and omni-channel plan backed back a roadmap is an essential for anyone trying to make real impact.
By binding together initiatives into packages or releases you make a co-ordinated impact for the customer. For example, you may want to change your technology to implement a new rewards system, but it may flounder without changes to staff behaviour, incentives and communications.
Continue reading on the next page for the final four steps that detail strategy, cross-selling, testing and trust-building.
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4. Ecommerce technology to follow strategy
If you really want your website to succeed, it is important that you invest in good technology. Functionality such as price tracking (so that you are always offering the best deal), multi-channel marketing, real time support and product recommendation services are a must-have, as are good order tracking features, and loyalty schemes.
As ecommerce websites become ever more commonplace, competition is increasingly fierce. Companies that offer the smoothest and most personalised experiences for all shoppers are those that will ultimately succeed.
But with so many new technologies it is hard not to knee jerk into buying new technologies to avoid competitor threat. We also see new website platforms being bought on the justification of just needing something new. It is important to commit resources to developing your technology but it should be driven by your roadmap or customer journey and the value it can create.
5. Cross-sell products with conviction
Whilst a lot of focus is put on conversion, building average order values by getting more or higher value items into the basket is crucial to ecommerce profitability. We have witnessed poorly thought through manually driven cross-selling and highly mechanised cross selling technologies that create illogical links for the customer.
Which approach is the best for you depends on your product set, how generic it is, how much it associates and how much you can really understand what your customer might buy next.
If you sell products that go together well, you should cross-promote them. Offer a phone case to go with your mobile phones, cartridges to go with printers, and shorts to go with t-shirts. Its as simple as that, but it’s something that will greatly improve your advertising ROI, and the average order value for your store.
Amazon manages cross-promotion particularly well, and even tracks past orders, and products that customers have viewed, offering recommendations based upon those metrics. John Lewis has also become a master at cross-selling, and has a high average cart value as a result.
Cross-promotion doesnt have to mean selling other products, either; it can include selling value-added services. For example, Amazon offers a wrapping service, and promotes this on the check-out page, as well as promoting its own credit card.
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6. Testing
Your site must work well, and be reliable, otherwise you will lose customers. Make sure that you test absolutely everything. Dont just make sure that the site works when you use it pay someone else to try to break your website.
Focus groups and user testing will reveal an awful lot about how your site really works, and will identify problems that you may never have thought of.
7. Strengthen customer trust
Online shopping is fast becoming the norm, but that doesnt mean that shoppers blindly trust online stores from which they have never bought before.
Use services such as TrustPilot to show that your company has a good reputation, and try to build trust from day one. Collect customer feedback and allow ratings on products from verified buyers.
Offer product guides to help people with technical or complex products; make sure that you have a good warranty service and honour it. Build a reputation as a reliable, innovative and honest company and you will build a loyal following.
Richard Blanchard is director at ecommerce consultancy Transaction Partnership
