In days when global spending is down its important to maximise all revenue streams. One such place where modifications can have dramatic, cost effective, and in some cases overnight success is in e-commerce.
When times are hard and everybody is looking to save money, it is important that if you have an online presence, that you are making enough of it, and if it’s an e-commerce store that all your efforts to combine your various strategies are working together.
When looking at your e-commerce strategy one of the first places to look is how many unique visitors you have coming to your site. This is always something that can be maximised, take a look at your e-marketing campaigns to see what area can be improved. Are you well placed for your target keywords in your search engines of choice? If not, you need to analyse the search engine optimisation of your site. Check with your SEO agency what they are doing with regards to link building, page quality, social media and competitor analysis. If you don’t have an SEO agency or expert in your company perhaps you should consider employing one of these.
Online advertising is a great avenue to look at, but it is essential to be able to monitor its effects, if the traffic it drives does not convert, it is money down the drain – it is essential that any online advertising campaign is tracked to monitor sales conversions. When monitoring your traffic you need to see where people are arriving at your site, you may be surprised, search engines don’t just send visitors to the home page. Check that any popular ‘entrance pages’ have your products available to sell, don’t force the user to hunt down what you offer, because invariably they will not.
Once your visitor has your products in there basket you need to be analysing the ‘purchasing funnel’ you will always have ‘drop off’s’ as they go through the process off adding credit card details, shipping address and postage etc, but these are all avenues that can be maximised. Perhaps the user feels that your site does not appear secure, so they drop off at the credit card section, perhaps they drop off when postage is charged – consider waiving it, or perhaps there are just usability hurdles stopping your visitors converting their interest to your bottom line. Consider multi-variant testing and see how even the smallest changes can have dramatic effects, whilst minimising any risk from making changes.
If everything is looking good, try cross-selling to maximise revenue from sales, if someone is buying a camera, they will probably be pleased to be shown cases designed for that camera size, and maybe to incentivise the sale you could add a multi-buy discount to encourage them to add the extra item now instead of later.
When things are a bit desperate you could even consider opt out strategies for extras, for example if someone is buying a car, have the added alloy wheels option selected automatically making them have to physically remove the item. Be careful with this strategy though, profit may rise but customer satisfaction will probably fall.
Take a moment to review your website, and if there is a weakpoint, try something new, you may be surprised by the results.
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