How to Use Metrics Data to Optimize Your E-Commerce Store

First step in optimizing your e-commerce store is to identify the important metrics and to collect data relevant to the metrics. Once you have the information/data, you can then take the next step to optimize your store. Optimizing your e-commerce store is one vital technical step to boosting its performance. Here’s what you can do using the right metrics data to boost the performance of your e-commerce store.

Enhance Website User Experience

You can enhance the user experience on your website by deliberate efforts. Technically, user experience (UX) is an important element of converting website visitors to buyers. This experience is vital for repeat visits as well. When customers visit your store’s website and they had a good experience, that experience does not only encourage them to buy from your store, it also encourages them to make repeat visits and purchases. You cannot get this benefit if customers are frustrated on your website. This frustration comes about by way of slow load times occasioned by complicated and messy designs on your website. If this is the case, your marketing spend may continue to lack good ROI. For a remedy, you can use advanced marketing analytics solutions. With the help of these tools, you can get up-to-date insights into the user friendliness of your site. Such metrics can be used to optimize your website for better results.

Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

Shopping cart abandonment is a significant element of e-commerce business. Keeping shopping cart abandonment rate low is always a very huge challenge for many e-commerce business owners. The lower the cart abandonment rate, the more business the e-commerce store does. The right metrics can help business owners to keep cart abandonment rates low. What to do? You can diligently monitor customer activity on your e-commerce website to enable you identify pain points in the customer journey. This done, you can then take the right technical measures to make the customer journey smoother. This helps to cut down on cart abandonment. Just some small tweaks here and there are what you really require to make shopping easier for your customers. Whenever cart abandonment rate is high, it means there is some friction somewhere particularly at the checkout stage. You can remedy this by simplifying the process. You can also offer multiple payment options, in addition to sending reminder emails with marketing incentives like discounts and token gifts.

Personalize Marketing Strategies

In today’s hugely competitive e-commerce business environment, only smart marketers survive. Personalized marketing strategies help most marketers to survive the business environment.  The one-size-fits-all marketing strategies are clearly less effective today. With the help of modern tech tools, it is now possible for marketers personalize their marketing efforts just at the click of a button. This is however effective if the marketers fully understand their audience. The right metrics are handy to help with that. This is mostly by way of segmentation marketing. Smart marketers can track customer behaviors like repeat purchases and cart additions then tailor their email and ad campaigns with the help of the metrics. If you want to survive in today’s e-commerce world, personalization is no longer an option in marketing efforts. It is now an utmost requirement since most customers now expect businesses to know what they want even before they do.

Leverage A/B Testing

You can gauge the effectiveness of your marketing through marketing metrics. The best technique for doing so is through A/B testing. This technique is also known as split testing. With A/B testing, e-commerce business owners can try different marketing strategies and monitor their effectiveness. A/B testing is an especially valuable tool for e-commerce businesses because it allows business owners to see exactly how customers are interacting with their websites and the products they are selling within the websites. Business owners can even leverage AI to predict winning variations and to optimize faster for better results.

4 Smart Steps to Set Up E-Commerce Analytics

You must make sure your business has a solid foundation if you want to effectively harness the power of e-commerce analytics. Analytics can only be effective if it manages to combine the right tools, has clear objectives, and actionable strategies. Such analytics effectively begins with integrating key platforms and ensuring seamless data flow across all your e-commerce business operations. Here are 4 smart steps you can take to make it happen.

Step 1: Set Clear Goals

If you want to make the most of your e-commerce analytics, you must begin by setting clear, measurable goals. Right from the outset, you should decide whether you want to boost sales, reduce cart abandonment, or increase customer retention. Such specific objectives will help you focus on the data that matters most to your progress. It is such data you must diligently track to know how well you are doing. Significantly, well-defined goals act as a roadmap to chart your progress. These goals help to align your efforts and ensure your analytics strategy supports the business priorities you earlier set out.

Step 2: Choose the Right E-Commerce Tools

To achieve your set goals and objectives, you need the right e-commerce tools.  These tools will help put actionable insights for optimizing your business at your fingertips. The most popular, most preferred and commonly available of these tools are Google Analytics tools. These tools are versatile tools that help to track website traffic, user behavior, and conversions. They help provide detailed insights into where your visitors come from, how they navigate your site, and which pages drive the most engagement. Google Analytics tools are particularly very handy to provide a robust and free platform to monitor your e-commerce website performance. Data from these analytics tools help the business owner to understand customer journeys in-depth and to make the right marketing decisions as needed.

Step 3: Diligently Track Events/Activities

With your goals well set, you can begin to track relevant events that provide insights into your customers’ behaviors. You must pay particular attention to events relating to specific actions that users take on your website. These are suchlike events as clicking a product, adding items to the cart, or completing a purchase. If you diligently track these events, it helps you to bridge the gap between your goals and actionable insights. This is made possible because these events manage to reveal how users interact with your site and where they might encounter friction. If for instance you have a goal to reduce cart abandonment, you can diligently track events like “Add to Cart” and “Begin Checkout” to pinpoint where users are dropping off and identify potential causes. By directly addressing such issues as identified, it is possible for you to create a smoother customer experience. If you are able to do this correctly, it helps to improve your overall conversion rates.

Step 4: Deploy Your Data to Good Use

Even though collecting valuable analytics data in your e-commerce business is hugely important, deploying such data to good use is even more important. You can deploy your analytics data to good use by using the insights to identify trends and areas for improvement. If for instance your data shows a high drop-off rate at checkout, you can remedy this by streamlining the process a bit as well as adding some trust signals. At this point, you can even offer some percentage discounts that could help encourage completion of the process. In the same vein, if you notice a particular product page getting a lot of traffic but low conversions, there is definitely something the matter. In this kind of scenario, you can then choose to optimize the page by adding better images or making the descriptions more compelling. This is where A/B testing becomes hugely important. A/B testing enables the business owner to routinely compare different strategies and seeing what resonates with the audience. The key is to continuously test and adjust your marketing strategies based on your A/B test findings.

7 Best Organic Marketing Tactics for Robust Online Marketing

Ambitious marketers usually take to organic marketing because even though paid marketing may give them quick results, organic marketing gives them sustainable and long-term results. Doing things right on the internet is what helps organic marketing to be successful. No matter your marketing destination, be it B2B or B2C, you must follow the right protocol to get the right results in organic marketing.

Most online businesses are always in search of viable ways to attract traffic. They are always in search of more users to visit their websites through organic search. If your organic traffic is good, you stand a very good chance of getting more leads and subsequently more sales in your online business. Through organic marketing, you can directly appeal to users genuinely interested in your content, products and or services. For this reason, marketers must know what their target audience is searching for online and how to make it available to them. Marketers can only achieve this by using a combination of technical SEO and content marketing strategies.

If you too are an ambitious marketer and you want to use organic marketing tactics to achieve some very good results, the following tips come in very handy.

1. Create High-Impact Quality Content

Good content remains indispensable in any viable organic marketing strategy. What brings traffic to your website is largely through the content you posted on the internet. So, once you are able to correctly identify the keywords your audience is searching for, good marketing dictates that you publish the right high-impact content that they find informative, educational, and engaging. If the content is keywords-rich, it helps search engines to rank it higher in their SERPs. That means good organic traffic back to your website.

2. Create Target Personas

Understanding your target personas is one of the keys to your organic marketing campaigns. No matter the type or size of your business, target personas should be the foundation of your marketing strategy. You can accurately distill your organic personas if you find the answers to questions like:
What questions are your customers asking?
What exactly are your customers searching for online?
What kind of content topics are they interested in?
What kind of products/services can meet their needs?
If you find the right answers to these questions, you can essentially create and target the right persona to market to online. Marketing to the right target personas helps to increase marketing efficiency and consequently more sales. There are reliable online platforms for persona insights that are great to help users search using the right search query to get the right persona targets.

3. Carryout Comprehensive Target Research

Once you identify your target personas and the type of information they are looking for, you can then redirect the research to be more specific by going into the relevant categories. In there, you can directly conduct research to find out the exact keywords that you want to target. For effectiveness, the best keywords to target must be directly related to your products, services or your niche industry.

4. Have a Robust Link Building Strategy

This strategy must involve both internal and external link building with a deliberate focus on long-tail keywords since they are more valuable for your online business. External link building entails trying to make other websites link to yours while internal link building entails placing links to websites in your content internally. When your link building strategy is robust enough, it will ensure that more people find your business through organic search. Quality links are therefore crucial for making sure that your target audience finds your content.

5. Improve your Website Page Speed

One of the main parameters for ranking your website by search engines is its page loading speed. The faster it loads, the higher the quality of the website in the eyes of search engines. You should therefore ensure that your website never loads slowly. Under no circumstances, should you allow your site to load slowly unless you do not want to win and retain customers who do business with you on the website. Most online shoppers usually abandon websites and go elsewhere on account of slow loading alone.
 
6. Focus on Page Optimization

Page optimization is also an essential factor in organic searches. If your webpage is well optimized by SEO, it becomes search engine-friendly and that helps its ranking in the SERPs of search engines. Since landing pages are essential gateways to generating leads and making sales, having such pages well optimized greatly helps that process. To have a good SEO on your website, you can DIY by creating eye-catching headlines, A/B testing your content as needed, showcasing the benefits of your products, good onsite CTAs, mobile-friendly, fast loading and highly secure.

7. Tactically Leverage Social Media

With presently about 4.55 billion active-users worldwide, social media has become undeniably a powerful tool for B2B business marketing. Aside its huge popularity, it is also effective in boosting organic marketing efforts for your business. Once you are able to create accounts and get your business on the most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and the likes, it can help keep your business tops in the minds of your customers and even potential customers. If you can regularly create high-impact and good quality short blogs on social media together with your links, it can help drive traffic to your website. You can in addition directly create unique on-brand posts to promote your business. Search engines particularly Google do take note if you do this. If your social media posts manage to show up on organic searches, that means good organic traffic to your website.