Your website is live. Your products are looking good and ready to sell to your customers. Everything is prepared to go with your new e-commerce setup. There’s just one more step remaining.
You need people to actually visit your website. And, well, you also need people to buy from you.
You need sales, and you need them now. How can this be done? Luckily, there are various simple steps, techniques, and tweaks you can make to ensure that visitors won’t only visit your e-commerce website but purchase your products and services as well. Let’s look at some tips to attract repeat customers to your business.
It sounds simple, but it’s sometimes easy to overlook one lousy plugin or misconfigured contact form that has been turning away prospective customers. Before going live, make sure all aspects of your website are in working order. 404 errors and broken links are not the first impression you want your website to make.
This includes both desktop and mobile viewing devices, as different screen sizes and resolutions can significantly impact how your site looks on other devices and browsers. You want to make sure that it is suitable for all prospective customers no matter what device they are using. Make sure your theme is mobile responsive, so that all elements of your site dynamically adjust to fit any device your visitors are accessing your site from.
eCommerce is highly visual in nature. Nothing is more of a turn-off than low-quality images that are small in size, blurry, or not appropriately centered. It looks unprofessional and does little to inspire buyer’s confidence. It is crucial to make sure that your images are high quality and, if possible, taken with an excellent (ideally professional-grade) camera.
Once you have that done, make sure your images are not too large for their intended use-case. Finding a standardized size to ensure that your pictures are not too large to slow down your website is critical. It’s always best to have multiple file sizes for your photos categorized for web/email, print, and even icons.
On-Page SEO and Content Marketing are two of your best tools for ensuring that your target audience finds your site. By building effective SEO into your site’s text, you significantly increase your chances of being found online via search engines, as they parse your content for keywords and phrases that are deemed relevant to the queries they receive. Including these keywords strategically in your headers, meta descriptions, body text, and meta tags all help your chances of being noticed by the almighty algorithm.
Think about your audience, about the social media platform (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.), and use that platform to promote your website in a strategic manner. Create posts designed to give your followers on their respective platforms relevant and helpful information and entertaining posts.
If you create a blog, link it. If you create an ad on your respective platform, make sure the link goes to your online store. While social media is excellent at reaching out to your followers, making sure that they are always going to your website, in the end, should always be the goal.
Believe it or not, email marketing isn’t going anywhere anytime soon – it is a fast and easy way to promote your upcoming events, sales, and new products.
There are a variety of ways to get new visitors to sign up for your mailing list. This can be done through a standard signup link, a free giveaway, or for everyone who orders through your online store. Obviously there are rules and regulations about the manner in which you collect user information, so ensure that you are doing so ethically and legally.
As we all know, bad customer service can turn away a customer forever. In the age of social media, negative word of mouth and reviews can be devastating towards future sales.
To ensure that you are offering the best customer service on-and-off your website. Ensure you and your team are aware of the products, return policies, potential shipping issues, and proper communication channels. Attempt to never leave a client without an unanswered question or problem regarding a product and strive to deliver as much information as possible whenever possible. Even if there is an issue, customers will often return if they are taken care of properly.
Excellent e-commerce website design isn’t an accident. At BHirst Media, we understand all the pieces that need to come together to create a fantastic, effective website. And we know how to help optimize your existing website to make it work harder for you.
Maybe you have a good e-commerce website, but you need to optimize for SEO. Or perhaps you need a whole new website and aren’t sure where to begin. We offer custom website development that will ensure that you get a great website that works for you.
You don’t have to try and do this alone — let us help. Check out our website design, development, and website care plans today.
