10 Ecommerce Marketing Tactics That Desperately Need Your Attention

1. Split testing product pages and working to improve conversion rate. A good conversion rate is crucial to having a higher sales volume. And one of the smartest ways to improve conversion rate is split testing (or A/B testing) your product pages. When you can’t decide what headline or page layout will perform better, test two versions and let consumers make the decision for you. A/B testing tools evenly divide and send your traffic to the two different pages and then you can look at your analytics to see which page produced more conversions. In regards to what you should test with your product pages, I recommend:

• Headlines
• Page layouts
• Navigation
• CTA phrasing and size of buttons
• Media used (i.e. if a video or written content perform better)

2. Simplifying site navigation.

Every site visitor should have a good user experience. If they don’t, they won’t buy from you or ever come back to your site. The key to a good user experience is making it stupid simple to navigate to any section of your site. All pages should be no more than three clicks away from the home page for starters. Have your friends and family navigate through your site and let them tell you if it’s simple or confusing (you know they’ll be honest with you). When you make it easy for consumers to get what they want, you both get what you want—a new item and money.

3. Creating an ongoing product review collection process.

Reviews give you credibility. Credibility gives you more sales. Customers trust reviews they read online almost as much as they’d trust their best friend giving them a personal recommendation. In fact, 55% of shoppers say that reading online reviews is a part of their buying process. Product reviews also improve your search rank, and the higher up you rank for something on a search engine, the greater your chance of increasing clicks and traffic to your site. Hands down one of the easiest ways to get people on your site to ultimately buy your product is having an ongoing collection of positive product reviews you highlight on your product pages. Get more reviews by selling awesome products, having great customer service and asking for reviews!

4. Recreating product descriptions and beefing them up.

[Source: fitbit.com/charge]

Fitbit understands good product descriptions and layout. But sadly, too many ecommerce sites, especially when starting out, underestimate the impact quality content has on boosting conversion rates. High-quality images are needed, but so are high-quality product descriptions. Consumers see the images, but search engines don’t. Some of the simple tricks to writing product descriptions that sell are using keywords, making them unique and actually writing to sell. Never use descriptions from the manufacturer—search engines will penalize you. Creating your own unique ones and beefing them up ensures you don’t have duplicate content and is just better for your SEO efforts.

5. Sending shopping cart abandonment emails.

The average online shopping cart abandonment rate is 68.81%. That’s high and keeps good retailers from too many sales. So what can you do? You resolve any hesitation a consumer has or remind them that they left an item in their shopping cart by sending shopping cart abandonment emails. Convince them to return to their cart and buy by making it easy for them to do and giving them an incentive to purchase, like maybe offering a discount on their next purchase. Or, you could be bold like this company and show a picture of a cute puppy.

[Source: shopify.com]

I mean, who could say no to that adorable face.

6. Managing and nurturing your email list…better than you are now.

Good email marketing strategies help any kind of ecommerce business generate sales. Part of having a good strategy is knowing how to manage and nurture your email list. Email marketing’s goal isn’t to get you sales—it’s about creating and developing relationships (which then get you sales). This is where nurturing comes in. With lead nurture emails you can “soft sell” consumers, but mostly you want to nurture your relationship with each subscriber by educating, entertaining and telling business and customer stories. As for managing your email list, it’s important to make sure you’re sending emails consistently and sending the right kinds to the right people. No one likes getting spammed at the end of the year with holiday products and sales when they haven’t heard from you the last 10 months.

7. Turning top-of-the-funnel browsers into leads.

Maybe a consumer just stumbled onto your site. Or maybe they know they’ll need a product like yours in the near future, but aren’t looking to buy right that very moment. But who says you can’t turn them into a lead while they browse? If you have a compelling digital asset, like say a guide or eBook pop up, whichever works best for your industry, you can generate a lead even if they aren’t ready to purchase. Once you turn them into a lead, you can use other tactics to nurture them and eventually convert them.

8. Putting a twist on influencer marketing.

Industry influencers already have an engaged audience. Why not tap into that existing audience? Utilizing influencer marketing aligns you with a well-known influencer—in your case, it could be high-profile bloggers—as well as their audience. So don’t be shy. Reach out and find some who are willing to share your content and feature your items in a blog post or video review they share with their social followings. Other unique things you can do are offer affiliate commissions and discount codes for their audience.

9. Staying on top of technical SEO issues.

Ecommerce sites are often plagued with all the technical SEO issues you could ever imagine. Things like ugly URLs, 404 pages (since ecommerce inventory is always changing these happen more than you think), homepage redirects, stacked redirects, metadata, etc., which hinder your site’s SEO performance and keep it from converting. If you’re an SEO guru, then you probably already have all this under control. But I’m going to assume you aren’t, in which case you should hire a marketing agency to handle the technical SEO side of your website to ensure you have good search rankings and good user experience.

10. Installing the new Facebook pixel and retargeting your heart out.

If you haven’t heard of the Facebook pixel, read on. This cool tool lets you put a single pixel across your site to report conversions, build your target audience and gain insights into how people use your ecommerce site. After installing it, you can easily measure cross-device conversions, optimize ads to ensure they’re being seen by those most likely to take action, run relevant and timely Facebook ads based on products shoppers have checked out on your site and automatically build audiences to retarget. Facebook’s one-pixel solution makes conversion tracking and remarketing so easy, so start using it right now. ]]>