7 Tips for Effective Selling in Your E-commerce Store

Your e-commerce store cannot grow if you are unable to make good sales out of it. Yes, online, the competition can be really fierce but marketers make sales even amidst huge competition. If you want your e-commerce store to grow, you must devise viable and sustainable strategies to make good sales out of it. No matter what selling methods you decide to use, make sure you formulate a good your sales pitch. These here 7 tips can be of help to you in that quest.

1. Invest in Your Website

Making people comfortable shopping on your e-commerce website helps the site to build trust. Paying good attention to the design and the operational capabilities of the site is therefore hugely essential. You must endeavor to optimize your site’s user experience to enhance this. Make sure the site is responsive across both desktop and mobile devices. The storefront designs should be sufficiently eye-catching to “arrest” user’s attention. The site must in addition be easy to navigate. You can streamline the sales process with intuitive navigation, clear CTAs, and a user-friendly checkout process. A professional-looking website design helps to bolster your business’ credibility and foster trust. This helps with good sales too.

2. Offer Practical Solutions

Your e-commerce website must offer practical solutions to shopper’s problems. Therefore, from your landing page to your product descriptions, the copy across your website should draw in prospects based on their needs. It should clearly highlight how your solution can help solve their problems. This is why you must concisely explain what your product will do for your customer and what problem it solves. This can entice them to make their buy decisions.

3. Provide Personalized Recommendations

To effectively sell out of your e-commerce store, you must make efforts to know your customers and their needs. This way you’ll be sufficiently equipped to sell them what they need. Deliberate personalization is the strategy you can adopt to help you out. Personalization makes your customer’s shopping experience more enjoyable and engaging. It helps to increase the chances of upselling and cross-selling additional offerings. To take advantage of this, you can always display your recommended products that are complementary or related to products the shoppers have already searched for on your product pages.
 
4. Leverage Visual Assets

Even if you are not a professional photographer, you must ensure your visual assets are top quality. Your products photos and videos must therefore be very clear and crisp. Quality of your visual assets counts a great deal to attract customers to your e-commerce store. The reason it is really crucial for products descriptions. As much as practicable, you should use close-up images of a product’s texture or a video of a product/service in action. This helps your customers to better understand the sales pitch. 

5. Deploy and Use Digital Marketing Tools

There are a lot of valuable tools out there on the internet that can help you in your marketing efforts. If for instance you want to attract new customers, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a technique of placing popular and carefully selected keywords within your website content and metadata is quite handy. SEO is free and helps you to attract highly valuable organic traffic and good site rankings. It is one powerful tool that can help improve your site’s visibility. You can also leverage email marketing campaigns to stay in touch with your customers and nurture the relationship. Emails are handy to make product recommendations, promote new products, offer targeted or site wide promotions, and follow up with customers who abandon their shopping carts. Additionally, if you use retargeting ads, you can reach shoppers who earlier visited your site but didn’t make a purchase. When these shoppers come across these ads as they surf the web, the ads can potentially encourage them to return to your website and complete their purchase.

6. Analyze, Test, and Optimize

Do not ignore testing and analyzing marketing results if you want to make good sales out of your e-commerce store. Fact is, there’s always a lot of competition for a buyer’s attention on the internet. By regularly analyzing and testing your marketing results, you’ll be equipped with valuable data and insights to help you make informed decisions about your marketing strategy. If and when necessary, you can change your selling techniques for better results at any time. This is why you must run A/B tests regularly to compare how different pricing or ads positioning affects buyers’ purchasing decisions. You may even choose to experiment with a new software solution for SEO, and testing will you with the right decision. The whole essence is to try to keep a keen eye and monitor your sales data very well. This can help you to improve your sales process for existing customers and attract new potential customers as well.

7. Highlight Customer Testimonials

It is always a good marketing strategy to highlight customer testimonials alongside the products you are selling. You can highlight reviews and customer testimonials on your site to win credibility with potential buyers. Customer reviews is huge validation for your products, and good for social proof as well. This is why you must endeavor to follow up with customers to encourage them to leave reviews of their purchases. You can even occasionally use incentives like discounts on their next purchases to attract customer reviews/testimonials.

Caution: Do not unduly worry even if not all reviews are positive. Yes, if reviews are positive, they are ideal for your business. But, negative reviews on the other hand help to provide you an opportunity for improvement and to show you’re committed to ensuring satisfied customers. You must therefore publicly respond to negative reviews and promise improvement to show you really care about your products and your customers. 

8 Vital Elements Your E-commerce Business Website Should Have

If you run an e-commerce business, the main function of your business website is to help attract and convert the right customers to your business. The website serves as your first point of contact with potential customers. Because it is often the first thing a potential customer will see, creating a solid and attractive website is hugely important to the success of your e-commerce business. If the website has the right elements, it helps to establish your business’s credibility and showcases its products and services in the best light possible. Here are 8 of these vital elements your e-commerce business website should have if you expect it to effectively serve the purpose for which it was created.

1. Website Hosting Platform

Reputation and versatility play a vital role in deciding the platform to host your e-commerce business website. When building your e-commerce website, you can consider the following solutions:

WordPress.com: This is a longtime blogger favorite because of its free plan, versatility, customization and monetization options.
 
Wix: This is particularly useful because of its scalable solutions for retail and service industries, the reason it is a top pick for small businesses. Wix supplies lead forms, marketing tools, and built-in web chat among its small business attractions.

Whichever platform you decide on, what matters most are the customization and personalization options available in the platform and its ability to align with your skills level and business goals.

2. Homepage

As a vital element for the effectiveness of a website, the homepage is your first opportunity to tell your website visitors all about your business and why they should care. To make this happen, your homepage should be sufficiently attractive and welcoming to visitors. It should start with a compelling headline that speaks to your ideal customer. Your home page should have good aesthetic appeal with high-quality photos, videos and graphics that visually explain to visitors what your business is about. It should include a more general description of your business offerings. The page should be well set up as to be able to create a lasting impression on your website visitors and capable of helping someone new to your business to begin to really know, like, and trust you.

3. About Page

If well set up, About Page is one of the most visited pages on a website. Before people agree to do business with other people, most really want to know exactly who they are doing business with. Many want to get a sense of your business story and the people behind the business. The About Page readily provides this info. So, the page should ideally outline how your business started and your business mission. Short bios of the people behind the business are usually some ideal provisions in the About Page. The page should briefly explain the types of customers you serve and the benefits your business offers them. Your bragging rights and how your business stands out among others should ideally be included in your About Page.

4. Services/Products Page

This is the page that outlines the products/services your business offers. It should ideally include product/service descriptions and which consumers they are best suited. You should include pricing information and clearly explain how customers can make a purchase, vital info that encourages potential customers to take the next step forward to do business with you. If you are selling physical products, it is advisable to include high-resolution photos of each product to allow your customers have a vivid idea of what they’re buying. Good products photos on a website have been known to help convert even first time website visitors into customers.

5. Contact Page

This is readily one of the most important elements on a website. Your contact info on the page helps to make it easy for current and potential customers to get in touch with your business any time of the day 24/7. Vital contact info you need on this page is, your business address, phone number, social media handles and email address. You may also like to include your business hours so people know when they can expect to hear back from you and when to have a live chat with you.

6. Invitation to Join Email List

On your e-commerce business website, email marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with potential customers and grow your business. You must therefore endeavor to give your website visitors an opportunity right on your website to sign up for your email list by making a provision on the website to encourage all visitors to sign up. Giving away a highly informative free eBook is a great way to get visitors to sign up with their email addresses if they want to receive the eBook. Using your email, you can start sending out regular marketing messages to people on your email list. Email is ideal marketing tool you can rely on to quickly notify customers and potential customers about new products arrivals, discounts, promos and price adjustments.

7. Testimonials Page

Many buyers usually rely on the testimonies of previous buyers to make their own buy decisions. This is why a testimonials page is a very important element to have on your business website. On your Testimonials Page, always include testimonials from happy customers. These testimonials showcase how well your product/service had helped solve a problem for previous customers. If feasible, it is advisable to include a name and photo with each testimonial to prove they are real people. Doing so usually helps to create more social proof.

8. Other Purposeful Site Elements

If your website is a multi-page site, each component opens on a separate page. Whereas if the website is a single-page site it takes visitors direct to the appropriate section of the website. But you can add additional elements to add additional information to the site. Doing this can improve your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, enhance customer experiences, and reduce operational costs. You can always leverage your business website’s purpose to provide this additional information. If you have clearly identified goals, it can help you determine how adding more website content supports your objectives. It is for this reason you may choose adding additional pages to your business website. Pages like:

Blog: Since some Content Management Systems, CMS and e-commerce platforms offer text editing tools, you can blog effectively on your website. To attract good traffic, you must however commit to a consistent and manageable posting schedule of high quality customer-centrist posts on your blog.

FAQs: On this page, you can compile a list of frequently asked questions into a user-friendly online document. This can be quite helpful to your site visitors and restricts them from contacting you directly. You should regularly update your FAQs based on customer support and survey responses.

Shipping Information: This element helps you to explain timelines, fees, tracking information, and relevant details so shoppers can feel confident and comfortable making purchases from your business.

Press Mentions: This element helps your business with good public relations. You can thus use it to showcase media mentions, upcoming speaking events, charity drives, community service or local awards.
 
Return and Refunds: To avoid negative reviews and back-and-forth emails, you must have a transparent return policy and step-by-step details how to go about it on your website. This helps good customer relations and retention.