How to make your E-commerce Website Work for You

Technically, your e-commerce business website is the front door of your e-commerce business. It is where internet users first get in contact with your business. It is practically the first point of call after someone Googles a keyword related to your business. Your e-commerce website is where potential customers first learn about your business. It is where they get to learn first-hand who you are, what you do and how the products/services you offer are better than anyone else’s. That’s where business owners get to build their online presence that will determine whether they succeed or fail in the business. 

Your e-commerce website is thus so significant to the success or failure of your e-commerce business that you cannot afford to treat matters related to it with levity if you want your business to succeed. Therefore, if you are desirous to make your website really work for you, you must carefully choose a platform and host, get a suitable domain name and choose a template making sure it is search-friendly before launching the website. These here user focused design tips can help your out when planning the website:

Know Your Audience: You can only do this by way of research. You should try to conduct a thorough research to understand the needs, preferences, and behaviors of your target audience. This way, you’ll get to know what type of website you can design to meet their needs.

Design and Aesthetics: In the website, you must ensure that its design is consistent with the brand identity of your business. You must use size, color, and spacing to highlight important elements in your website to guide users through your content. Choose legible fonts and appropriate font sizes. Try to maintain good contrast between text and background to enhance the appeal of the website.

Functionality: A functional website is always user-friendly. The functionality of your website can therefore not be overemphasized. You must regularly test your website for bugs, broken links and other functionality issues.

Accessibility: Ensure your e-commerce website is accessible by following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Doing so helps to make sure your website is accessible even to users with disabilities.
 
Mobile Friendly and Responsive: These days, over 60% of internet users do so via mobile devices. If you don’t want to miss out from this huge data, you must design your website to be mobile-friendly and responsive.

Performance Optimization: A fast loading website is a user friendly website. You must therefore design your website to have fast loading times. You can ensure this by optimizing your images, use efficient coding practices, and leverage browser caching to reduce loading times.

Analytics and Feedback: Be sure your website has real time performance measurement tools to enable you know how well your marketing campaigns are going at all times. You can use popular analytics tools like Google Analytics to track visitor behavior and site performance, real time.
 
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): If you take care to use well researched and selected relevant keywords throughout your content, it will be SEO compliant. Try to avoid keyword stuffing though because the website can be penalized by search engines for keywords stuffing. Always provide valuable, well-written fresh content that answers users' questions and engages them. You can then use meaningful meta titles and descriptions for each page to improve search engine visibility for the content.

Compliance: Because the internet is a worldwide phenomenon, if for instance you are operating in the EU or dealing with EU citizens, you must ensure full compliance with GDPR and other regulations particularly as they affect use of ads and consumer data.

Clear Call-to-Actions (CTAs): CTAs are great marketing gimmicks. You must ensure the CTAs on your website are visibly clear and compelling enough to drive user actions.

Legal Compliance: Since the internet is a worldwide phenomenon, legal requirements are rarely uniform across countries and geographical regions of the world. For this reason, try to always ensure your website has clear, accessible privacy policies and terms of service.  

Security: Since hackers and other cybercriminals operate freely everywhere on the internet, you must think security at the design stage of your website. Always make sure your website uses HTTPS to protect user data. Make sure to improve its search ranking with SSL Certification.  

How Digital Marketing Tools Benefit E-commerce Stores

Marketers depend heavily on digital marketing tools to help them create campaigns to promote their brands, services and or products, online. These tools are some software that helps marketers to become more effective and efficient in their marketing campaigns through real-time insights into the campaigns. Marketers use them in marketing campaigns for quantifiable results, automated tasks and audience insights to enhance their marketing strategies. They are also very effective to improve targeting and reach which help to enhance marketing campaigns. Following are some of the top direct benefits e-commerce stores derive from the use of these tools.

Content Management (CMS): If you use CMS tools, you can you create, manage, and distribute high-quality content very widely on the internet. The right content management tool helps to make it possible for you to easily draft, edit, and publish content in one location and make it widely accessible to others on the internet.

Landing Page Builders: If you want your website landing page to capture leads easily, you must make sure, the landing page is compelling and easy to navigate. This is because when users click on your link in an email, social media post, or any other digital platform, it takes them to a landing page of your website. You need good landing page builder tools like Leadpages and Unbounce to build great landing pages to serve this purpose. These tools are very versatile and easy to use. Tools like Leadpages for instance have a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor that can help you out even if you do not have coding experience. Its A/B testing capabilities and optimized templates enable marketing teams to create high-converting landing pages to capture leads. Unbounce lead builder tool helps marketers create high-converting landing pages that match their targeted keywords. It further optimizes conversions with A/B testing to identify the most effective landing page variations.

Email Marketing: Effective email marketing tools help create, send, and track email marketing campaigns. Tools like Klaviyo can help you design professional-looking emails through a customizable template builder and as well helping to manage subscriber lists. Some of these tools aside from being very easy to use and customized, they can be designed to pull in your products, discounts, and images automatically, and even help to segment your marketing emails with built-in segmentation tools.

Pay-per-click Advertising (PPC): With pay-per-click marketing, marketers are only required to pay when a user clicks on their ads. For PPC ads, you can rely on a platform like Google Ads that lets you create and optimize ads that appear on Google search and partner websites. You can also try popular social media platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and X if you want to target specific demographics. These platforms have very effective in-house tools you can easily use.

Design: Website design is very important if you want your e-commerce store to be effective. You can thus easily use design tools to create visual content that is appealing and attention captivating. Popular tools like Canva, a digital template editor, and Adobe Photoshop which can help you whip up valuable assets like infographics and illustrations for social media. You can rely on Canva’s brand kit integration to maintain visual consistency across campaigns while Adobe Photoshop, on the other hand can even go beyond basic editing to do wonders with your marketing photos. It is very handy for color correction, blemish removal, and background changes. This allows marketers to fully customize various assets, like infographics and website banners for effective marketing purposes.

Analytics Reporting: Marketers rely on analytics tools to track and visualize data for their digital marketing campaigns. With the most popular of these tools, Google Analytics for instance, marketers can easily see traffic sources, user engagement duration, visitor demographics, and much more. These data are helpful for marketers to better understand their audience, what ads they gravitate toward, and their products preferences.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO tools can help your website to appear on search engine results pages (SERPs) and capture organic traffic. Tools like Google Search Console are helpful for marketers to understand how their websites perform on Google. Ahrefs digital marketing tool for instance is great for conducting keyword research. It helps marketers to identify high-volume, low-competition search terms that align with their businesses. The tool is also great for uncovering broken links on your website. It provides insights into your competition, including what keywords work for them and how much traffic they get as a result.

There is also Semrush which is yet another versatile SEO tool. It is a keyword research platform that equips digital marketers with a varied SEO toolkit making it possible for marketers to identify high-volume keywords, analyze competitor strategies, and track their website's ranking over time. The tool helps in auditing on-page SEO to ensure content is search-engine friendly and also offers tools to track backlinks.

Social Media Marketing (SMM): You need the right tools to make social media management (SMM) more efficient. These tools are helpful to schedule social media posts and analyze performance. Tools like Buffer or Later are quite handy in this quest. Even though popular social media platforms like Facebook and X let you schedule posts ahead of time, an SMM marketing tool can help create content consistency across different social media accounts.

While Buffer tool is quite helpful to curate high-performing content, customize posts for each platform, and schedule them for optimal engagement times, it also offers analytics to track clicks, shares, and follower growth, providing insights to optimize social media strategies and maximize campaign reach. Later tool on the other hand has a user-friendly interface that allows marketers to schedule posts across multiple social media platforms. You can also use Later to curate visuals with built-in editing tools, preview posts before publishing, and adapt captions to each platform.
 
Project Management: If you use an effective project management tool, you can efficiently plan, manage, and execute projects collaboratively. This is exactly why digital marketers like to use tools like Asana and Trello to plan content calendars, track progress, assign tasks, and brainstorm ideas. Asana for instance has great features like Kanban boards and progress tracking which enable marketing teams to stay on the same page and easily identify bottlenecks. The tool acts as a digital command center for busy digital marketing teams, streamlining project management by enabling marketers to create tasks, assign deadlines, and collaborate on campaigns.