2016 should be the year to nail down your e-commerce strategy. The digital space your business operates in will only become more competitive in 2016,  so here’s a few tips to step up your digital game:
Treat e-commerce transactions like a first date.
There’s nothing more awkward than hours of silence on a first date. The same goes for e-commerce transactions. Simply sending out tracking details and a receipt during the post-purchase process is a few rose petals short of a romantic evening. Use a customer’s first purchase with you as an opportunity to send off your welcome email and begin telling your story. As we’ve covered this month, people connect with a good brand story and getting your customers on board early can set them up to become pioneers in your community.
Your highest customer engagement will always be in the days following their purchase. Setting up simple automated emails can open up a world of untapped opportunities. Keep in contact over the long term too, for example: if a customer purchases a pair of runners it’d be great to send them a follow up email a few months down the track when those kicks have seen some mileage. In this automated email, you could use personalised content to ask them about their experience with that product and whether they’d like to write a review.
Make checkout a smooth experience
Have you optimised your checkout process? Many factors can influence a customer’s actions during checkout, so understanding what to look for and how to optimise is key to improving your conversion rate. To make the process a breeze, keep checkout elements to the bare essentials. After all, it’s a sale not a survey. Be aware of cart abandonments and why they are occurring. Re engage customers who dropped out of the checkout process with personalised cart abandonment emails. With the right timing and offers, you may pick up more lost sales than you’d expect with these emails.
To really make your shopping cart sing, personalise the process as much as possible. Simple gestures like thanking a customer for returning, inviting them to join your social media community and being transparent about order processing times all go a long way to providing an checkout journey.
Woo your visitors back with remarketing
Remarketing, it’s commonly misunderstood and often underused. However, it can be quite simple to implement effectively. For the uninitiated, remarketing seamlessly serves ads to users who have visited your site within a defined period on third party sites such as Facebook. Â
Assuming that the better half of your visitors leave your site without converting, give them a good reason to come back while they’re burning time around the internet. Apply good doses of subtlety and intuition to your remarketing efforts and serve up messages that are relevant and interesting. Simply throwing up images of the same products your visitors were looking at is a waste of your time and budget. Think outside the box and implement offers that are appealing. For example, remarketing is a fantastic opportunity to remind customers to to redeem coupon codes or tempt them back to your site with an incentive.
Watch from afar
Nobody likes a stalker, but session recording tools like Hotjar and mouseflow help you to build a better understanding of your customers and how they use and navigate your site. Knowing how users are interacting with your site is crucial in optimising for higher conversion rates. These mouse tracking and heat map tools can also debunk many of the assumptions you might have held about how people experience your site. Every user interprets and navigates a website slightly differently, so it’s best to get some hard evidence on which to base future optimisations and overall website strategy. Â
Don’t be afraid to show your colours
More often than not, your e-commerce store will be one of many websites that a customer visits. Don’t be afraid to tell people who you are and what you stand for. In getting your message across, be careful not to leave it up to a written copy alone. Use photos and videos that help to foster a relationships with your audience. Passion if used for the right reasons can be a powerful tool and you’ll always win your customer’s trust and affection.
Got any questions or need any tips and advice, then get in contact with us today.