Set Specific Goals and Plan to Achieve Them
As an e-tailer, it’s likely you have very clear goals for your business. Whether you’re focused on increasing new visitors to your site, improving your conversion rate, boosting average order values or you are interested in bettering your email marketing or retargeting ads, you stand the best chance of achieving goals for which you’ve made a plan.
Thinking Outside the Search Box
Most retailers specifically focus on improving their conversion rates. To do this, there are a number of different approaches one can take. For example, decreasing the page load time and getting that page fully rendered in a flash will improve the customer experience and, in turn, lead to increased customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. If you’re not sure where to start, there are a number of testing tools on the market that will help you identify pain points on the site as it relates to tech capabilities.
SLI Systems can help in a number of ways. For starters, it can cache customer images to deliver them to the user on the edge. If you only have one image size and you are rendering this client-side sizing correctly via CSS, this may not be the most efficient approach and could impact the page load times. Resizing and caching could prove beneficial.
Is yours a data rich website with a large number of facets? If so, displaying all the facets too soon can hurt page load times and therefore, your conversion rates. By displaying facets intelligently, you can better the customer experience as well as reduce page load times. From a technical perspective, one good approach is to nest the facets and show them in groups. For example, you can decide not to show facets D, E or F, until facets A, B or C have been selected. SLI offers a solution called Smarter Facets. It can automatically optimize the faceting information returned by the search index. The goal is allow more efficient and intuitive engagement with the left-hand navigation of the results page.
Email Marketing & Retargeting
We spend a lot of time analyzing data and making adjustments to get content and products in front of our customers.
Depending on the size of your business, you may have a fully vetted, omnichannel marketing platform or you might be working with something more simple. Either way, you are going to need to inject content and/or product, and you need to make sure it’s directly relevant to the customer considering a purchase. Does your ecommerce tool set do all it can to get you the information you need to do that?. For example, are you gleaning all the actionable intelligence you could be from e-mail messages? Need an API response showing the most popular items for “casual sneakers”? We can handle that. Are you set up to integrate an API response? We can help. And once we’ve used every possible way to get a customer on the path to purchase, we can create specific landing pages to make the most of the encounter.
Social Media
If you notice a purchase pattern that lines up nicely with your social media efforts, be sure to stay active in that space and tailor your marketing efforts to those demographics. Younger mobile shoppers need the shopping experience to be fun and worthy of sharing on social media. If you can meet the expectations of that demographic, you are more likely to convert and pick up new users. Does it make sense to gamify the shopping experience? You know your audience better than anyone else, and we can help you make your ideas a reality.
Learning Recommendations
Whether you are setting up new mail drops, retargeting campaigns or loyalty programs, we need to be mindful of the information that we are sending out. If your site sells furniture and you know that a customer recently purchased a sofa, be sure to adjust the algorithm to not show sofas, as they are less likely to convert. Instead, consider which “also bought” or “complimentary items” might make sense for that shopper.
Basics
Is your search box easy to find?Do you have top menus that open too quickly on mouse hover, and may cause frustration?
Are your alignment scripts or banners loading at the wrong time, causing the screen to shift around?
Are all of your products on the site? Check your catalog and make sure your items are showing up. It’s an easy fix. And after all, customers cannot buy what they cannot see.
Is your checkout process quick and easy?Can you process orders over $1,000.00 USD? Years back, we saw a site that had some coding preventing a valid checkout. Are you set up to seek out and troubleshoot these kinds of issues? Not many retailers are.
Bottom line
Beyond the search box, there are so many ways to make searching for wanted products easier for shoppers. The main obstacle is that many e-tailers are resource constrained, and don’t have the time or expertise to find the best solutions to their ecommerce challenges. You may have the best business goals in the world, but without the bandwidth to focus on them, those goals easily fall by the wayside. It doesn’t have to be like this. In fact a very specific plan can be to get expert support on your most urgent business goals. The most successful brands are those that can focus on what they do best, and partner with experts in ecommerce solutions to make sure they’re able to convert more, sell more and help customers have a reliably positive encounter with their brands.
