This is a guest post by Lucy Reed from Gigmine.
You can create a beautiful e-commerce store with a fantastic product, but without customers, your business will fail. That’s why no matter what type of e-commerce store you run, your shoppers need to be your top concern. From the first click, here’s what you need to do to attract and retain customers for your e-commerce store.
Building Your E-commerce Site
An excellent e-commerce website is effortless to use. Pages load quickly, navigation is intuitive, and customers can browse and buy in a few easy clicks. While it’s possible to DIY an e-commerce website, using a reputable website builder is a better way for novices to develop a problem-free site.
An e-commerce site also needs branding. Define your target market — these are the people most likely to buy your product — then tailor the design of your website and the tone of your content to appeal to that demographic. A focused target market requires research but leads to much better ROI than trying to sell to everyone.
Optimizing the Sales Funnel
Once you have a functional website built, it’s time to pay closer attention to your sales funnel. The sales funnel what takes customers from their landing page to check out. Keep in mind that most e-commerce website visits start with content or a home page, not a product page. To maximize conversion rates, make sure every page on your site leads down the sales funnel.
A sales funnel starts with awareness — this is when a customer first enters your website or sees an ad on social media. From awareness, your goal is to develop customer interest, then customer desire through branding, content, and calls to action. Once shoppers want your product, the final step is convincing them you’re the right place to buy. E-commerce stores lose a lot of customers in the checkout phase, but you can retain more by making checkout easy, using a trusted payment processor, and following up on abandoned carts via email.
Maintaining Customer Interest
Now that we’ve covered how to convert first-time customers let’s talk about customer retention. Unless you’re selling an item customers buy routinely, like pet food or razors, you can’t count on first-time shoppers returning for a second purchase.
Social media and email marketing are excellent tools for encouraging return visits. You can offer discount codes, advertising sales, or share click-worthy content to bring followers back to your site. However, if the inventory is the same every time, customers eventually get bored and stop clicking. Find ways to keep a constant flow of new inventory to your store, whether via new styles of existing products or new product categories that complement existing stock. This approach is straightforward if you’re a wholesale clothing retailer — you can incorporate new trends or rotate inventory according to the seasons. However, other product categories may require you to get creative.
Are costs holding you back from expanding your inventory?
Especially for handmade and small-scale producers, research and development costs can be a significant hindrance to expansion. Before writing off the possibility, see if your customers are willing to help. Small business owners can’t always access traditional forms of funding, especially when first starting, but crowdfunding can be a highly effective way to raise capital and form a deeper connection with existing customers.
Anyone can build a basic e-commerce website and list a few products, but success in e-commerce takes much more than a little bit of web-savvy. If you want to cultivate loyal customers, you need to exceed customer expectations at every step of the sales experience. Only then can you build a reputation that keeps customers coming back for more.
Lucy created GigMine to help others dig up sharing economy opportunities in a user’s area, all in a single location, so users don’t have to jump between multiple sites. It’s a new and improved way to get a gig job!
Image via Rawpixel
From time to time I publish guest blogs on topics of interest to me that I think my readers will also enjoy. You can submit ideas to me at jeffslater@themarketingsage.com
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