eCommerce Sales drive people to shop online more than ever before, and your eCommerce site should provide a positive customer experience, similar to what your customers would expect when visiting your brick-and-mortar store. Some eCommerce sales sites use predatory or deceptive tactics to boost sales, but it is not a sustainable practice. Customers will quickly start looking for alternatives after a negative experience with an exploitative online retailer.
Try one of the following four ethical strategies to boost your eCommerce sales.
- Cultivate Strong First Impressions With Stellar Visual Design
- Create a Solid Paid Advertisement Campaign
- Develop Stronger Content
- Create a Better User Experience in the Checkout Process
Cultivate Strong First Impressions With Stellar Visual Design
In the first days of the internet, a company’s website was little more than a digital business card, typically including basic content about the company and its contact information. Today, it is impossible to overstate the importance of the impression your website makes on potential customers. Modern online shoppers are incredibly discerning. They take time to research products and brands before completing purchases and typically look for some kind of guarantee that what they’re buying is a quality product.
Modern customers are wary of online retailers, so showing your authenticity is crucial to gaining and keeping potential customers’ trust. Investing in solid website design with strong aesthetics that resonate with your brand is the key to making a good first impression. Consider an overhaul of the visuals on your eCommerce site, remove filler content, streamline site navigation, and try to think of how you would want your site to look and function from the customer’s perspective.
Create a Solid Paid Advertisement Campaign
Search engines reign supreme when it comes to online advertising; if your brand doesn’t appear on the first page of search results when a user queries Google or Bing for relevant keywords, you’re hemorrhaging potential sales. Developing a paid ad campaign is more intuitive than many marketers realize, but it still requires a good amount of research into your target customer base, their needs, their interests, and how to capture their attention with well-crafted targeted ads.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a constantly evolving process that requires you to navigate the major search engine’s algorithms, set your keywords, and develop website content that allows you to maximize your search result page performance. This can take quite a bit of trial and error, but the work will be worth it when your eCommerce site starts appearing in more relevant searches and ranking higher on search result pages.
Develop Stronger Content
Content is still the king when it comes to maximizing your presence in search results. If you think you are failing to reach customers who would resonate with your brand and your products and/or services, consider tightening the content you publish to your eCommerce sales site. The customers visiting your site could be considering purchases, and the content you publish could encourage them to either buy or click away.
Search engines reward websites that publish new content on a regular basis. Evergreen content relevant to your company is valuable, but regularly adding polished content to your site will attract potential leads and help them recognize the benefits of doing business with your brand. A few ways to bolster the content quality on your website include:
- Removing dead links. No matter what strides you make in improving your content, dead and broken links will only hurt your SEO efforts.
- Updating old posts. Revisit old pieces of published content to ensure the content is still relevant. You can also add revisions to older content to let customers know you’re keeping track of your content and want to provide the best experiences possible.
- Considering new types of media. Have you published video content to your eCommerce site? Video content can display and demonstrate your products, offer insight into your company culture, and help your potential customers resonate more strongly with your brand.
Polishing the content on your eCommerce site and keeping it consistently updated will help attract more potential sales to your eCommerce site, and the visual design and functionality of the site will shape customer experiences. Customers will also take note of the effort put into your content, which boosts the overall appeal of your eCommerce site. Aim to provide a positive experience from a customer’s first contact with your brand all the way through the checkout process and beyond.
Create a Better User Experience in the Checkout Process
Is your eCommerce site easy to navigate? Can a customer easily locate desired products, find the shopping cart, and decide shipping options with ease? Many web developers and eCommerce site owners become wrapped up in the business end of running a company and lose sight of the customer’s perspective. The visual design elements of your site must create a powerful visual image to the customer and also allow ease of use and an intuitive online shopping procedure.
Ultimately, Imagine Monkey believes that user experience is the heart of eCommerce. Customers tend to stick with the brands that have made the best impressions on them, so taking time to deliver stellar user experiences to everyone who visits your site is absolutely worth the work. Contact us today for more information about stunning UI and UX design techniques.
