Are you ready to venture into online sales?
Whether you are a brick-and-mortar store and looking to set up an online store or completely planning for a virtual storefront, your ultimate aim is to capture the internet sales by providing some captivating shopping experiences to your online audiences.
Let us walk through the 10 killer tips to get an eCommerce website in 6 months for attracting and retaining customers to your online store.
- Fix your business goals
Did you define your eCommerce business clear enough to stand out in this pool of online retailers?
If no, then let’s start with this.
To create a high-quality eCommerce website, you need to define your business goals that would cover:
- What will your business do for your customers?
- Why would your customers buy from you?
- The product that you are intending to sell.
- The target market your product is intended for.
- The demography you have planned to target.
- User-friendly and intuitive web design
Though you have the best product in your niche and you own a lethargic website, your online presence is ill-fated. As per Kissmetrics, 93% of the customers give priority to the website design while making a purchase.
You have less than 3 seconds to present your business. Therefore, your plan to attract your customers and make an impact on their decision to make a purchase should surround the demography and goals you had defined. To get a perfect and profitable eCommerce store, it is ideal to hire an eCommerce web designer who can help you to customize your website catering to your needs with the latest web design trends.
Your website should have a web design that would:
- Captivate visitors
- Higher-engagement with full-width images and minimal text
- Uncluttered and comprehensive “About Us” page
A customer is interested in you if he/she visits your “About Us” page. This page is an opportunity for you to prove that your product is unmatched.
Your “About Us” page should clearly mention:
- What you are
- What you do
- What you offer to your clients
- Testimonials, achievements, and any social proof will be an advantage.
You shouldn’t miss this unique window of opportunity as it may help in bringing in customers to your eCommerce store.
Another important factor in this page is the “Contact Information” that you need to provide to your clients. This information should be clean and clear and easy to locate on the page and throughout your eCommerce website. The “Contact Information” should include:
- Contact email
- Address
- Social media channels
It is better to keep your “About Us” page clear and comprehensible with minimalist design.
- Offer unparalleled customer support and service
You need to assure your customers about the consultation, support, and troubleshooting they would receive before and after the purchase. This will help in conversions and convert your potential buyers into loyal customers.
There are various types of customer support like:
- Live-chat Support
- Social media Support
- Email Support
- Phone Support
- Interactive Voice Response
- Omnichannel Response
One of the most comprehensive and common customer support is the live-chat support that works 24/7 with the potentiality to increase conversions by 10% or more.
To provide easily accessible and hassle-free customer support on your eCommerce website,
- Offer support throughout the buying process
- Encourage new buyers and enhance their first shopping experience
- Enhance the shopping experience of returning customers.
- Your chat support features should be visible from the homepage so that buyers are aware of the services they will get from you.
- Offer multiple payment options
Every customer has a preferred choice of payment. Therefore, you need to provide multiple payments options that they can choose from and make a purchase easily.
Though PayPal reigns as the most preferred online payment solution, other popular options for your eCommerce business can be:
- Square
- Stripe
- Apple Pay
- Pro Merchant
- Payment Depot
- Google Pay, and many more.
Also, other methods of payments can be:
- Credit/Debit cards
- eWallets
- Mobile Wallets
- Bank Transfers
- Cash on Delivery (COD)
- Prepaid cards
Some actionable tips for your eCommerce website while integrating payment solutions:
- Seamless purchases by permitting sellers to create accounts on your eCommerce store and save their information.
- Offer a wide range of payment options to your customers.
- Craft your list to outreach
eCommerce business growth involves a lot more than your customers. You need to pitch to individuals who can help you to reach a huge customer base under your target segment.
Sellers should network with the right groups that will allow merchants to create a buzz of the products and reach a wide range of customers.
You can reach:
- Writers at publications
- Industry bloggers
- Influencers on social media
- Like-minded entrepreneurs
It is worth reaching to these groups as they can quickly spread the word about your product.
All you need to do is use tools like Buzzsumo and Voila Norbert to get influencers in your industry and they could provide value to reach out.
- Never demoralize your competitors
You need to be in the customer’s shoes if you want to make a killer eCommerce site. A customer will browse through various online stores in search of the lowest prices and best deals for an online shopping experience.
Keeping an eye on your competitors and what they are doing to attract customers on their website will help you to figure out the businesses for making the customers return repeatedly and attract new buyers. Here are some actionable tips that you should follow while tracking your competitors’ websites:
- Keep track of the online stores that are similar to your online business.
- Search for products that are similar to yours on major marketplaces.
- Check the design of your competitors’ website, whether it is more intuitive and user-friendly.
- Find out why buyers are getting attracted to their stores.
- Check what kind of return policies they have on their stores.
- Check if they are offering free shipping or only paid options.
- Use email marketing
One of the most common and easiest ways to build a relationship with your customer is email marketing. With email marketing you can:
- Send messages to the target segment
- Custom emails addressing specific needs.
Since email marketing encourages sales and boosts profits, there are plenty of opportunities to use email marketing that would appeal to buyers’ interests.
All you need to do is collect the emails of buyers and check if they would like to receive messages from you. Getting email addresses from your buyers is simple. You will get from the checkout process, or through a pop-up window while they browse, or maybe during registration.
For using email marketing you can:
- Use an email marketing tool like Campaign Monitor. This will help you to track message success, the number of times the message was opened, and the most frequently clicked links.
- Check which customers have unsubscribed your email list. Try to get information from their buyer’s profile and infer the reasons to prevent any other cancellations in the future.
It is true that you won’t get a 100% positive response from the buyers when you pitch for subscribing to your email listing. But, you will definitely get a set of potential buyers who will be interested to know more about your brand, offerings, deals, and will respond to your email marketing.
- Offer easy refund and money-back guarantee policies
There is always a risk in online shopping with a limited return policy. Since the product, the customer is buying, can’t be seen in-person, they have to rely on the product description. If the products aren’t satisfying their requirements, and if the store doesn’t have any return policy, they are definitely going to abandon the website.
Being a seller you can build trust by simply offering generous return and money-back guarantee policies where you allow your buyers to return an item if the item failed to match their expectations, in case of damage, or if they have changed their mind. This action will depict that you want to provide value to your customers.
With a money-back guarantee, you provide your customers with a back-up option in case if they don’t like the product. This flexible payment policy is definitely attractive for buyers who don’t want to take risks with their products. This policy will, in turn, will bring more customers and transparency while making a purchase.
- Try, track, and iterate
If you want to improve the growth of your online business, you need to monitor the progress consistently.
Using a tool like Google Analytics, you can track your selling activities and customer behavior like product sales, number of page visits, number of shopping cart abandonment, and so on.
You can also create segments on Google Analytics for data-driven insights on your prime group of buyers. With the ‘Enhanced eCommerce Tracking‘ feature, you can get a wide range of websites on your seller activity.
Analytics will help you to strategize on customer engagement more effectively and boost purchases.
Conclusion
Online stores provide merchants with the freedom to craft every element of their eCommerce store to provide user-friendly and engaging customer experiences. A seller can set up his online store professionally with the help of an eCommerce development company and frame the interaction between the buyer and the product on your terms rather than following any marketplace policies.
With the above 10 killer strategies outlined in this article, you as a merchant will become more aware of how a customer perceives a brand and how you can put this research into building your dream eCommerce store. Building an online store by catering to the demands of the customers gives a competitive edge over the others in the market.
