You’ve set up your online store, carefully selected and tested products, advertised on select social networks and the Google Network. The design and navigation are user friendly. The products are presented with quality pictures, video presentations and informative descriptions, but visitors still leave the store without buying or leave the collected products in the basket.
Not only are you losing customers, you are also losing return on investment (ROI) percentages. End the negative trend by using 3 strategies that can help you improve online sales:
1. Content Marketing – Provide potential customers with relevant and useful information
Content marketing means creating and distributing content in various forms in order to gain followers, increase the number of visits to the online store, and build a brand image.
It is inextricably linked to SEO factors, so follow the principles of quality and relevance when preparing. Ask your users what their most pressing problems are, and where their biggest frustrations occur. Observe how your competition communicates with its users. Participate on online platforms (Quora, Reddit) and solve users’ problems by answering their questions. Explore the relevant podcasts, where as a guest you would present on concrete examples how your offer solves the user’s problem. Provide users with quality content related to the report of your offer, in the form of e-books, guides, videos, templates, infographics, etc.
Ensure that users find the products and information you promise in your online store. This is made possible by links between content within the home page or links from other web platforms (guest posts on other websites, social media posts, newsletters) that lead to the page with the content the user is searching for. Make sure your website has a quality search bar that will return relevant results based on the search words entered.
A refined content marketing strategy is a long-term investment that pays off with rich interest in the form of trust, loyalty, and recommendations from your customers.
2. Building a Customer Intelligence Base and Personalized Advertising – Accept the help of artificial intelligence
80% higher conversion rate, 55% higher ad performance,and 35% higher averageorder value are the results of using state-of-the-art BEX technology on our clients’ online platforms.
Analyzing large amounts of data (so-called Big Data) with the help of artificial intelligence and mathematical algorithms can also help you create profiles of your users (impatient, discount hunter, researcher) and sales strategy based on their past purchasing decisions, increases the relevance of your online store offer and improves customer retention rates.
The acquired data of the behaviour of visitors to your online store is a key starting point for the preparation of personalized advertising, which helps you reach potential and existing customers with relevant ads, increasing conversion rates for current and future customers and optimize advertising costs.
With direct access to 14 million anonymous profiles from the Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian markets in BEX’s database, you will be able to establish direct communication with each individual web visitor anywhere online and show him ads that are in line with his occupations. This will also increase the effectiveness of your online advertising.
3. Automated sending of online notifications – an effective tool for personalized online offers
According to the online platform SalesForce, 62% of users expect online retailers to send them personalized offers.
Automated sending of online notifications enables a high level of personalization of offers in the form of notifications or a sequence of messages that start to be sent after fulfilling a certain condition: abandoned cart, completed purchase, recently viewed product, wish list, etc.
The average CTR (clickthrough rate) of such campaigns is 17.3%. Discount coupons in this personalized form of communication reach a CTR of 21%, while the CTR for product notification in an abandoned cartreaches 20%.
The highest CTR, as much as 26%, comes from the implementation of XML extraction, which enables the display of images and graphics, records the remaining stock of items and adjusts the content of notifications (e.g. there are only 5 pieces left in stock]. Or: Similar products you might be interested in: [product 1], [product 2]…).
Check your numbers and prepare an action plan
The E-Commerce Germany portal reports that 40% of online store revenue is generated by return customers, with only 8% of all customers returning and making a purchase. The rate of abandoned baskets is almost 70%. The attention retention time is getting shorter and today that number is 8 seconds. That’s all the time you have to convince a visitor to stay and potentially make a purchase.
The number of online purchases has been growing in the last year due to of the pandemic, so don’t delay. Comprehensively analyze the current situation with analytics, user experience, abandoned basket rate, conversion rates, ROI, etc. and prepare a strategic plan to improve the business of your online store.
Bonus tip: offer the option to purchase without registering. The application for registration in the online store is responsible for as many as 28% of interruptions in purchases or abandoned baskets. Offer them the option to purchase as a guest.
