eCommerce has, over the last two years, seen some of the most accelerated growth of all industries globally. With lockdowns, restrictions and stay-at-home guidelines impacting the way customers shop and companies do business, digital retail has become a preferred option.
Whether you are looking to enter the eCommerce market for the first time or you want to grow your existing brand, there are a number of key things that you need to keep in mind. 2022 is most certainly the year that more companies will be focussing on business scaling rather than simply business resilience.
With this in mind, we took a look at a few ways that you can start driving traffic to your eCommerce website and converting it to sales. Let’s get started.
Enhance Your Customer Experience Journey
Customer experience management, or CXM, is one of the most crucial, yet most overlooked aspects of an eCommerce company. The customer experience is the journey that you create for your visitors from the moment they enter your site all the way till after delivery of the product. It incorporates all of your efforts including the UX design of your site when you are creating it to the way you engage with your customers.
The right CXM strategy can deepen your customer loyalty as well as heighten the conversion rates on your site. It is also crucial to develop a more engaged community by strengthening the voice of your customer (VoC). By creating an experience that surprises and delights the customer at every single touchpoint, your customer journey can be optimized for ultimate success.
Besides your initial UX design, you can improve upon your feedback strategy to hear what your customers want and need. You can consider using a CXM platform to carefully measure various metrics to improve upon the entire customer journey. Lastly, you can automate various operations in order for you to focus on developing other avenues of the brand.
Extend Your Reach
It is all good and well having a great website and regularly posting on social media, but in order to really start driving qualified traffic to your site, you need to start spending money. We have seen hundreds of clients who tighten their purse strings when it comes to social media and Google ads.
The fact is, you are stagnating your growth considerably. Once you have created a great site, have incredible content going out and know what your marketing strategy is, you will want to start expanding that.
To start off, you can simply put a budget behind some content that is organically driving traffic and engagement on social media. Or, start putting a budget behind some Google ads so that you can target some of those necessary keywords and shoot your SEO rankings up. If you are not confident you can do it right on your own, enlisting the support of a professional PPC agency can help you develop a pay-per-click strategy that converts.
Pay Attention to Your SEO
Now that we have touched on it, let’s go a little more in-depth into the world of SEO. The first step is to do regular keyword research for your brand. You will want to know what the strongest keywords are that are associated with your particular brand. You will also want to know what is trending and what your competitors are ranking for.
The next step is to do an SEO audit of your site. You can usually get this done affordably, or even for free with certain sites. Here, you will see if your site has a site index, whether any 404 pages are impacting your score, if you are missing or duplicating meta descriptions, and if your word count needs to be improved on vital pages.
Using this information, you can go back to your own site and rework the content on the various pages to ensure that keywords appear in the right places and that there are enough on each page. A simple tool like Yoast is a great addition to your WordPress site and can help you increase your SEO ranking considerably.
Strategically Plan Your Content
We also touched on content earlier, but need to emphasize how important content is for the success of your brand. Content includes everything from your daily marketing, such as social media, emails, and blog posts, as well as all the content that appears on your website.
All of your content that goes out needs to include the relevant keywords, but it also needs to inform and educate your customer. The more your customer learns and understands aspects of your brand, the more they will learn to trust you. Let’s look at the product descriptions as an example. They will need to provide as much information as possible.
Your social media posts will need to be visually stimulating, but also informative about your products. Teach your followers as much as possible about your industry. Soon, you will become an authoritative source, and you will have a large, loyal following that can potentially turn into paying customers.
Bottom Line
Keep up to date with what your customers need and want at all times. It is also important to keep an eye on the various metrics on your site. If traffic starts dropping off or decreasing, there may be a need for a slight adjustment or change in strategy.
