How to Optimize Your Business Website for More Conversions

Do you know why digital marketers always want higher conversion rates for their websites? It is good for business. In digital marketing parlance, any action a user takes on your business website is conversion. Getting users to your website is one thing, getting them to take other actions while there is another. That is conversion. Such actions can be to make a purchase, take a survey, subscribe to a newsletter or sign up for an event or webinar. Marketers deliberately boost conversions on their websites through optimization. Conversion optimization is the process in which marketers take deliberate and all the necessary steps to increase the percentage of conversions happening on their websites. If your website is optimized, it makes the website more capable of enhancing user experience resulting in increased retention rate and lowering its bounce rate. This makes your marketing efforts more effective.

If you want to have a high optimization rate and more conversions, here is what expert marketers recommend you do.

Optimize Your Content

Blogging is about the most popular form of content marketing among marketers. You can publish highly optimized blog posts if you want to increase conversions on your website. Optimized blog posts can attract leads, customers and sales since the optimization helps out with organic traffic from search engines. By optimizing your blog posts, the chances of them appearing in search results increase. That helps to generate organic traffic. Organic traffic is more likely to take positive action on your website since it is from people who are genuinely interested in the products/services you are marketing. This, in turn, means more conversions. If you know how to, you can optimize your content yourself through SEO with the right keywords. If not, you can hire the services of professionals to help you out.
 
Boost Credibility with Testimonials

Business is all about trust. Most people do not like to patronize websites that do not appear to be trustworthy. Marketers deliberately boost the credibility of their websites with testimonials. When marketers offer high rate customer support, stay committed to their offers and deliver quality products/services to their customers, they generate good testimonials. These testimonials as user-generated content can help with more traffic and to build trust. Encouraging your users to rate and review your website on Google is one very effective way of increasing trust amongst your users. In addition, adding user-generated content on your social channels is a great way to showcase the happy and satisfied experiences of your users with your products/services. Good for trust building no doubt.

Offer Live Chat Options to Users

Live chats enable hands-on real time marketing. This is important because when users land on your website, most are always undecided. This is the stage they might have several pre-sales questions to clarify. One critical stage before they make buy decisions. By offering a live chat option on your website, it allows your users to reach out to you with their doubts real time. Live chats are a great way to help users make critical decisions on your website that can lead to conversions.

Use Very Clear, Call-To-Actions, CTAs

CTAs are hugely important when optimizing your content.  Good CTAs help your users understand your message better. They encourage and invite users to take the all-important actions on your website. It is one practical way of telling people what to do next to achieve what you’re offering. For your CTAs to work well, you must use clear and concise actionable verbs/words like Subscribe, Download, Click Here, Buy, etc. Such CTAs help to boost conversions and sales on your website because they encourage your users to do what you want them to do.

Helpful Tips for Using Videos to Sell More Online

Do you have an eCommerce shop? Do you want to sell more? There is some good news for you. By simply adding a marketing video to your website, you can improve conversions by as much as 80%. In modern eCommerce, business video marketing is becoming a dependable leads magnet for most marketers. Yes, it may be a truly crowded marketing environment out there on the internet but a robust video marketing strategy can help your brand to stand out and be noticed. If you are desirous to boost sales and increase brand awareness for your eCommerce business, these here tips will be of help. 

Make Your Videos Easily Shareable

If you make your videos easily shareable particularly on social media platforms, you can turn them into very effective ads. Videos posted organically on social media can be retooled for paid advertising for social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Videos tend to experience higher engagements on social platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest, and in almost all places where your eCommerce products might make an appearance online.

Use Only Videos that Answer Questions Directly

Addressing consumer concerns promptly and adequately with how-to videos is always a major business booster. Consumers always like to hold brands accountable. If you create videos to address their questions and pain points directly, you get more favorable responses from them. For best results, you can use how-to videos in your emails, share problem solving videos and product highlights on social media, FAQ videos, tutorials and how-to guides are also helpful to address consumer concerns.

Make Your Website Landing Pages Popup with Videos

Do you know that about 57% of consumers admit that product videos increase their confidence in a purchase? If you aren’t into marketing videos yet, this info alone is enough to quickly get you started on the use of marketing videos. Be sure your marketing videos pop up with your website landing page to easily attract visitors’ attention when they hit the site. Just get yourself some of the most commonly used product videos like, Tutorials videos, Explainer videos and Comparison videos. All these video types are really effective to help consumers through their buyers’ journeys.

Rev Up Your Email Marketing with Videos

Using videos as part of your email marketing activities can help give a boost to your eCommerce business. Even though not every email really needs a corresponding video, if you use videos which announce new product launches, new promos, price slashes and so on, they can help you to better connect with your customers. Anytime you have a human-centered brand story to share by email, sharing it with a video can be a powerful way to form strong relationships with your email recipients.

Keep Visitors Longer on Your Website

The longer you keep visitors on your business website, the higher the chances that they’ll take desired actions. Videos are a great way to keep visitors longer on your website. There is research evidence attesting to the fact that videos can help increase the time on site by up to 88%. When visitors stay longer on your website, it simply means stronger customer recall, better site stickiness, and ultimately, more sales. That’s great for your eCommerce business no doubt.

Share Personal Stories with Videos

Marketers can easily establish a personal connection with customers by using videos to tell their stories. You can spice up your “About Me” page if you use videos to tell your brand purpose well enough. In addition, if you can use a video to weave together an interesting narrative of your eCommerce business, you can thus create a foundational marketing asset you can use over and over again. That way, you can manage to increase the time spent on your website by potential customers.

Give Voice to Testimonials

It is usually a very daunting task to effectively market yourself online particularly if you are new in eCommerce business. You can weave your way around that by deliberately giving voice to customer testimonials. Using a testimonial video strategically in your marketing can offer multiple benefits for your eCommerce store. Some of such benefits include but not limited to establishing social proof, bolstering your credibility and centering your product/service as a perfect solution to a potential customer’s needs. A strategically placed testimonial video can help drive a hesitant buyer further down the funnel to a buy decision. 

5 Business-Boosting Digital Marketing Tips

No matter how experienced you are in digital marketing business, you still need digital marketing tips to boost your business. Digital marketing is an ever-evolving business in tandem with the deepening of the internet and the advancement in digital technologies. Some new strategies and tactics still emerge from time to time that serious digital marketers must keep abreast with. Digital marketers always look for great opportunities to boost their businesses. Some of these ways include changing their business models, marketing strategies, and adapting their businesses to the changes in consumer-behavior and shopping.

These here, digital marketing tips and tricks, are very handy in all these.

1. Have a Marketing Plan

You cannot have a good traction in digital marketing without a plan. Without a good plan, you may end up expending valuable time and money into marketing strategies that may not deliver good results. First, you must spare time to draft a detailed marketing plan to drive your business forward. This plan will emanate from a thorough market research of your business niche, your competition, challenges, opportunities, environmental threats, and changing technologies particularly Artificial Intelligence, AI, the economy and consumer behavior. The comprehensive insights gleaned from these sources will help you to design and build a strategic plan to meet your marketing goals.

2. Email Marketing Strategy

Email marketing may be “old school” marketing strategy but it is still hugely effective. To derive maximum benefit from email marketing, you must first build a credible email list over time. With the list in place, you can begin to send regular emails to the segmented list to boost your business. Doing so allows a marketer to target specific subscribers with communication they’ll find valuable. Such messages elicit better responses/results from the email subscribers. Even if you are looking to promote a new product/service or you are running a promo/competition, or even if you are just creating useful content for your customers, an email campaign helps you to reach your goals better and faster than many other digital marketing methods.

3. Create a Captivating Landing Page

The landing page of your website is the first port of call where online surfers first come in contact with your business. That is why it must be attractive and captivating enough to arrest their attention. What your landing page looks like is usually a key element of your digital marketing strategy. For this reason, marketers must ensure the landing pages of their websites contain very strong headlines, interesting GIFs, attractive products photos, a CTA, Call-To-Action button and a content body that strongly motivates visitors to make a purchase. It is with such an engaging and enticing landing page that allows the marketer to make better impact and sell well online.

4. Invite Testimonials/Reviews

Many digital marketers now know that there is a very strong correlation between the number of positive reviews and sales. The reason they can no longer afford to underestimate the power of recommendations to boost business. Reviews and testimonials from satisfied customers act in many ways to support the quality and suitability of products on sale to prospective buyers. Many buyers even make their buy decisions based on product reviews. It is smart marketing therefore, to if convenient, directly invite reviews after making a sale. Doing so helps marketers in very many beneficial ways to boost their businesses because products with positive reviews usually outperform products lacking reviews. Good reviews must however not be forced out of, or coerced from customers. It should always be a voluntary and free will thing.

5. Take Advantage of Social Media

Because of the huge popularity of social media, it has become a very effective tool for marketing businesses no matter the size of the business. Social media marketing is cheap, affordable, and easy to use for most digital marketers. You can directly target specific demographics with promos and campaigns on social media. Marketing info on social media can easily go viral within a very short while.  If you effectively combine social media and other digital strategies in your marketing plan, the results can be very quick and hugely encouraging. What matters most however if you want to market on social media is to be sure to always create valuable content for sharing on a consistent basis. If posting valuable content on social media frequently is too demanding on your time, you can take advantage of automation tools to help save time. These tools can release your posts at programmed scheduled intervals. Some of these automation tools can also provide key marketing metrics that help you to improve on the performance of your promotional efforts.

8 Ways To Improve Your Online Sales Performance

The main objective of online marketing is to turn leads into paying customers. Practically everything online marketers do online aims at this main objective. When the marketing activities are effective, it shows in the sales performance. There are many ways marketers boost their online businesses by simply improving their sales performance. What gets results is to have a credible plan then adopt effective strategies. If you can apply your online advertising strategies correctly, it can help boost your online sales performance. The bottom line is to increase online sales irrespective of whatever online marketing activities you have decided to use. What works and gets results is what really matters even though the online marketing space is highly competitive. To get the ideal recognition your products or services deserve, you must explore all viable ways to improve your sales performance. You can apply the helpful tips provided below to improve your online sales and boost revenue for your business.

1. Make Contact Information Available

Yes, a marketer must give customers a good avenue to make contacts easily. The reason leaving contact information on your website is hugely important. It is actually a very simple strategy but quite effective all the same. If you don’t have contact info on your website, it can indeed frustrate potential customers and push them away. Such contact info may include but not limited to social media handles, Skype, email addresses and even phone numbers. Potential customers and customers really need to have easy access to such contact info. As much as practicable, contact info should be on all pages of your website not just the landing page alone.

2. Use Only High Quality Product Photos

For effective marketing purposes, this is a given. The better the quality of your product photos, the more captivating they are. For this reason, your website layout should contain very good and tempting images of the products you are marketing. In digital marketing, presentation highly matters because it generates the very first impression on potential customers many of who can only spare fleeting attention to details. By using a variety of high quality images particularly in aesthetics and design, you can make a quick and better impact on your website visitors.

3. Engage on Social Media

Yes indeed! Social media now appears to be where everybody is. It is easy to engage customers and potential customers on social media. Out there, you can share to your friends and followers beautiful pictures of the products you are marketing and even “how-to” videos showing how to use the products. That allows for good engagements with your audience of potential customers because they can easily check out the links or tags of your products. This somehow helps to increase the awareness of your brand and generates more leads for you. In addition to this, social media influencers are powerful assets that you can collaborate with to reach even a wider audience. This collaborative effort with influencers can help direct their massive flood of friends and followers to your online shop. That translates to good business in the short and long term.

4. Promise Cash-Back Guarantees

This kind of promise helps your integrity and encourages buyers to trust you the more. Smart marketers are aware that risk aversion is possibly the most common reason why some customers are very reluctant to spend money online. Therefore, one great way around that is to give customers cash-back guarantees within a reasonable period if your product does to meet their needs. Somehow, this guarantee can allay some of their fears and encourage them to spend their money doing business with you. By offering cash-back guarantees, it helps to sway your customers’ buy decisions in your favor. That translates to more sales and more revenue for your business.

5. Use Only Captivating Ads

Yes, only captivating ads manage to arrest buyers’ attention better. Place your ads in such a way that they become the first things people get to see when they land on your website. The aesthetics of the ads and the quick messages they convey help this process. This means your landing page should have the same color scheme, design, and layout as your promo ads.  Such alignment and correlation helps to lure your website visitors to sign-up and actually purchase your products.

 
6. Market with SEO

The primary source of organic traffic to your online shop is by way of search engines. The reason you must optimize the shop for it to be indexed and ranked by search engines. Doing so requires some good search engine optimization, SEO skills though. SEO is a set of techniques used to attract, target, and bring in more traffic to your online shop. It is a way of cleverly using special keywords on the site to attract the attention of search engines. If well optimized by this method, SEO helps to boost the searchability and visibility of your online shop. If you regularly update the site with good quality content, it helps it to stay relevant and up-to-date. If this combines with a good site-loading speed, the ease of access to the site enhances a great deal. That is good for inbound traffic.

7. Engage Follow-Up Emails

Every customer likes to feel important. Follow up emails after every transaction do help that process of making customers feel important. It is shows that the seller cares and trusts the quality of the products he/she is selling. For this reason, your customer's journey does not necessarily have to end with just a purchase. Following up with emails to find out if the product met their needs and to request feedback from them is good for business. Therefore, if you genuinely want to boost your sales volume online, do not ignore sending real thoughtful emails to your customers following any purchases they make. If you can make such emails to contain recent offers, promos and even discounts, it can help you to increase your customer retention figures and boost sales.

8. Take Advantage of Customer Testimonials

Customer testimonials and feedback are very helpful to online businesses. They can help to improve your online reputation and branding as well as inbound traffic. Even with all the convenience of online shopping, many shoppers still get held back by legitimate skepticism particularly about product quality. This is one great reason social proofs or customer testimonials are very important for every online shop. If you allow the option of testimonials on your online shop, you are directly creating an effective communicative atmosphere with your customers. More so, if you take steps to verify such testimonials, they serve as social proofs for your audience to put more of their trust and money on your product(s). That translates to more sales and better revenue.

10 Vital Lessons on Ecommerce Marketing

If you run an ecommerce site, just pay attention to these lessons. They are mostly customer based and the persistent search for ways to improve on how to serve them better. For very huge ecommerce marketing platforms like Amazon, what drives their marketing efforts is their deep understanding of the customer and their relentless search for self-improvement. If you run an ecommerce site and you want to compete with giants like Amazon, study these lessons very carefully.

These here 10 lessons if faithfully applied can help any ecommerce site better serve its customers.

1. Seamless and Pain-free Transactions
 
Because of habitual constraints in online transactions, ecommerce by nature may engender a lot of customer constraints and pains. Shipping costs, damaged or missing products and return of unsatisfactory products are usually areas of concerns. You can mitigate some of these constraints by way of free shipping, free return-shipping of damaged and unsatisfactory products, money-back guarantees and convenience to drop-off returns at designated/convenient collection centres.


 
2. Know Your Customers Closely
 
To be able to deliver personalized service which many customers really like, you can get to know them deep enough by way of their behavioral data from your ecommerce site. This data is not too complicated to collect. With it, you can help to ease a customer’s shopping experience by way of suggestions and tips to help them make a buying decision seamlessly. That way, it is easy for you to position yourself to the customer as a sympathetic partner in his otherwise complicated shopping forays.

3. Leverage Your Customers to Get More Customers
 
“Word-of-mouth” remains a very powerful customer referral effort in aid of marketers. It usually comes from satisfied customers who are easily believed by other people. On your ecommerce platform, if you manage to make customer experiences unique and positive, such customers willingly and happily tell others. Before too long, the word gets around that you are the best there is in the business and many other people will be looking out to do business with you. The force multiplier from the “word-of-mouth” of your satisfied customers can do amazing things for your ecommerce business.

4. Allow Buyers a Wish-List Store

Habitually, many online shoppers do spend a lot of time researching products before making the decision to buy. By allowing them an onsite wish-list store, buyers can store in a list items they like, but are not yet ready to buy. That list simply means they have a deep interest in such items which maybe for lack of sufficient money or time not yet due to buy them, they are earmarked for purchase at a later date. Such list usually gives them the impetus to return to your site to do business at some later dates of their choosing instead of going elsewhere to shop.

5. Have a Membership Rewards Program in Place

Membership rewards have many variants such as paid subscription for prime membership, free and priority shipping or access to special discounted products. It is a good way to retain loyal customers. Rewards programs may cost the ecommerce site some money which is recoverable from the increased patronage from Prime members. It has been established that Prime members on average usually spend much more shopping than non-Prime members. That is a win-win situation for all parties.


 
6. Make Testing and Innovation a Priority

Out there on the internet, the competition is always very fierce for ecommerce marketers. The reason you must be really proactive if you want to remain relevant in ecommerce business. You must always think ahead, innovate and stay at least one step ahead your competitors. That is proactive competition which is a credible survival strategy in ecommerce business.

7. Use Mixed Personalized Recommendations

Every customer likes to feel important. Nothing boosts that feeling more than the ecommerce platform taking personalized interest in serving its customers. With customer behavioral and purchases data at the disposal of the ecommerce site, it is easy to make targeted recommendations to customers to help their buying decisions. You can make personalized recommendations not only based on recent purchases, but also for your next buy including a variety. This variety usually derives from your wish list, past browsing sessions, or recent buys encapsulated in your behavioral data. The ecommerce site can also entice you by showing you other products that could go with your past purchases or some new pieces in the same range you like to buy. That way, a customer may end up at times buying more than she earlier intended.

8. Simplify Regular Repeat Buys for Customers

If you want to retain customer delight and loyalty you must find ways to simplify repeat buys. Because of the many easily exhaustible household items needed month after month, you can encourage customers to have “standing orders” for some purchases. This gives these customers the advantage of buying these products at discounted prices and having them automatically delivered up at given times of the month without them having to make any fresh orders. That way, such customers don’t necessarily have to remember to stock up on such regular items. That is one great value-added service to customers and guaranteed purchases from the ecommerce marketer. 


 
9. Give Customers Wider Products’ Insights

Characteristically, one of the major drawbacks of buying online is that we cannot touch, feel, turn, or hold products. We can only see virtual images of such products. This limitation tends to slow down buying decisions. Many ecommerce sites are now providing for better and more detailed examination of products by using near 3-D images, image guidelines to sellers on close-ups and image insets by way of more robust literature and brochures which are very vivid in virtual space. All these tend to make online buying more distrust-free.

10. Deploy User Reviews Very Generously

There is research evidence that about 85% of online customers trust online reviews of peers. This is the reason why many people usually rely on the opinions of their peers and even social media influencers before making their buying decisions. Many marketers now regard customer testimonials as hugely important for any online marketing business. For effects, these testimonials are usually genuine and truthful and are neither coerced nor induced. The reason they’re easily believable. When these testimonials are made available right below each product on display for sale, they help to make customer buying decisions faster.