Consumer Shopping Habits Have Changed: Is Your Business Ready For E-commerce?

Any business that doesn’t have an easy-to-use mobile site is going to suffer when it comes to online sales. Additionally, if there is any difficulty in the checkout flow or payment processing, you can be certain that many customers will abandon the sale completely. Effectively, that’s like closing the door of a brick and mortar store, just as someone is trying to enter!

Since we know that turning customers away is never the intention, it’s time to make sure that your business is set up to properly service online shoppers. You could be effective using social media marketing and SEO marketing to grab people’s attention, but your website could be wasting your efforts if customers can’t easily shop.

E-commerce Checklist For Success

Focusing on inbound digital marketing is all well and good, but part of that strategy needs to include making sure your sales funnel functions effectively from start to finish. Online shopping gives businesses tons of opportunities to encourage customers to add on items, come back for sale items, and learn more about items you sell that pair well with the products they already want. Here are some top strategies and tools your business can use to capture potential online sales.

• Make Wish Lists Accessible – make it easy for customers to add items to a wish list that they can return to later. Wishlists also give you the opportunity to remarket to those customers and remind them about items they saved.
• Have Your Digital Content Ready – plan ahead of time to create images for your social media marketing, ads, or email campaigns designed to drive sales.
• Plan Out Your Ad Copy – audiences see a lot of advertisements, especially leading up to key seasons like summertime and Christmas. While click-through rates for ads can be higher during peak seasons, you still have to plan ahead to make sure your content grabs their attention. Take the time to be ready with SEO marketing and plan out your ad your budget accordingly.
• Have A Cart Recovery Campaign – adding things like extra reminder emails, different offers, improving copy, and varying the calls-to-action, can make a huge difference in getting those people back to your site to complete the sale.
• Use A Zero-Gain Sale Item – is there an item you can sell at cost to generate traffic and pull customers in? Once they’re on your site and looking around, you’d be surprised at how often this leads to significant sales.
• Save Time – if customers can bypass entering in credit card, shipping, and billing information and simply checkout with a username and password, they’ll be more likely to complete the purchase.
• Have Very Noticeable Calls To Action – ensure your online store visibly displays “Add to Cart” and “Checkout” buttons that are easy to find.
• Offer Free Shipping – Shipping costs tend to be the number one reason for cart abandonment. Providing free shipping has been proven to lift revenue. If you aren’t able to always offer free shipping, consider changing it up from time to time and using free shipping as a way to boost your sales.

Building E-commerce And Online Strategies That Work

Consumers are spending more time online shopping than ever before and they are spending nearly as much on mobile devices as they do on desktops. Is your business missing out on online sales? Even if you think your e-commerce strategy is effective, when is the last time you tracked your efforts and results? Examining results is the only way you’ll learn what worked and what didn’t. Need some help? Measure Marketing can help you use your online sales information to strategize and develop a stronger inbound digital marketing and sales strategy. There is no better time to start boosting your sales revenue, so contact us today to get started!