The success of your ecommerce business depends upon a solid, reliable website that your visitors like to use. Your products should be easy to find and your website easy to browse. It should project a strong credible brand to your visitors so they feel comfortable shopping there and will quickly decide to stay and shop rather than hitting the back button to see one of the other stores on Google.
Once your website is running, the next goal is visitors.
Overall, about 40-60% of visitors come from search engines, 20-40% from other websites (with FaceBook & Twitter growing rapidly), and 10-30% are return visitors. These percentages can vary widely depending upon your marketing strategy and the types of products or services you provide. Your strategy should be the dominant presence in your particular market segment.
- Identify your online target market and how they find your products or services on the Internet.
- Analise your competition on the web. Take an Internet field trip and search for your type and brand of product. Make sure your offerings are competitive. Look at variety, shipping options and cost, guarantees, quality of images, supporting documentation, pricing, promotions, credibility etc.
- Determine the sales cycle and market to it. Marketing only to people who are ready to buy leaves out those early in the buying cycle who are in the research phase.
- Plan for continuous improvement. Use a data analytics package like Google Analytics to collect data from all your visitors. Use this data to identify and prioritize areas for improvement. Focus on conversion rates (number of sales per 100 visitors). Note that a good conversion rate is 4% (four sales or leads per hundred visitors). An improvement to 5% equates to an increase of sales of 25%.
- Start simply. In the beginning, your site and campaign will not be working to full potential. Spend only what is needed to get the data you need to optimize your site and campaign. We highly recommend a paid Google Adwords campaign to start with enough budget to generate 3 to 10 sales per day. Use the data from these sales to fine tune your website. Then expand to other sources.
- Start to optimize the content of the important pages of your website such as the home and category pages. Utilize data from the Adwords campaign to determine best phrases and keywords.
- Diversify your sources of visitors. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. See Many companies have rocketed to success on first page ranking of one search phrase only to loose it all to a Google algorithm change that relegated them to page three.
- Sources of visitors:
- Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo (both paid and organic/free)
- Product comparison sites like Google & Bing Shopping, Shopzille, Price Grabber, Shopping.com
- Social Networks to connect with your market like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin
- Harness the power of bloggers for referrals and evaluations. Partner with them to reach their readers.
- Build your network of partner sites for referrals, generate press releases.
- Build affiliate networks to incentive others to sell your product and services. i.e. ShareASale, Commission Junction, LinkShare.
All of these sources have a variety of services to utilize, both paid and free. Paid services have quicker results but result in lower margins. Free services are slower to develop but have the best margins. Optimizing the paid and maximizing the free sources is the goal to maximize sales and profits.
Turn your online store into a sales machine! Design a marketing campaign that takes all these factors into account.
