Ecommerce Foundational Principle 1 – Traffic > Conversion > Relationship
Traffic.
Your website needs traffic. Without targeted traffic your site will get lost in cyberspace gathering virtual cobwebs! Sure, over time, someone will stumble on your website. Some visitors may even buy your product or service, or subscribe to your email newsletter list or blog; however, the numbers will be pitiful.
How do We Get Traffic and Thousands of Visitors per Month?
Strategy.
Because the majority of web searchers use the Google search engine (approx 80%), it has the market share majority with regards to web traffic. The sole purpose of the Google search engine is to send these web users to appropriate and matching sites. This is where your site needs to be. Being in the top 10 is vital – anything under this and your traffic potential plummets. So build your website so that it’s Google Friendly!
There are many other different ways to get hordes of ready-to-buy traffic to your new site such as Pay Per Click advertising or social media marketing. However, it makes sense to start with strong foundations and a long term free/organic search engine traffic strategy in mind.
Conversion.
Once you get traffic (visitors) to your website, you have to do something with them. Are they taking action? Are you converting them, monetizing them, getting them to subscribe to your email list or selling them your products?
What is your Call to Action or Most Wanted Response? Let’s be clear – with an ecommerce website, you want the sale! As a minimum, you need to capture their email address or get them to click your Adsense advert (publicity that you can put on your site to make you money) when they leave your site—this is a ‘monetized’ exit click.
Average conversion rates in ecommerce suck. Approximately 0.7 out of every 100 visitors will buy your product. Your website must have clear text, images, navigation, a clean design and a simple call to action (“add to cart/shopping basket”). Visitors must easily understand what you want them to do. If not, forget it – just one ‘CLICK’ and they are gone to your competitors!
Strategy.
A clean, simple yet professional site design, based on a fast, functional and familiar layout. Navigation and structure with clear instructions and content. These are the things to help you to increase your desired conversion rate – anywhere from 1% to 4% overnight. Do the math – if you’ve been selling one product per day at $100, then overnight after making some subtle design, navigational and conversion changes you could increase this to $400, without spending a cent more on marketing.
With your conversion strategy, you need to take your site visitors by the hand from site entry to exit (with a sale) in as few steps as possible and as fast as possible, with as little resistance as possible.
Resistance can come from many areas such as poor design, poor content and poor navigation, in addition to poor product descriptions and common issues of poor trust and negative security. There are many other areas of resistance that can also hurt success, such as your checkout process, which we will look at later in Step 2.
Relationships.
This is not an essential component to making a sale (on the front-end) or making an ecommerce site work in the short term. However, Statistics suggest up to 35% of customers will buy from you again if you offer them a further product—once they have already ordered from you. It is obvious that this simple strategy alone could supercharge your profits. This is back-end marketing.
Building relationships or communicating is all about providing your visitors with good, useful, reliable content, advice, information and tips and tricks, and of course, product offers mixed in. You can even personalize your emails to match your customers’ buying habits by adding their name into the email and promoting products based on their buying history. This is personalization.
Strategy.
After a sale or after subscription to your opt-in email newsletter list or RSS feed, it is imperative to communicate with your customers and communicate often. However, if you only provide low quality regurgitated content or attempts to sell your product or service too hard, one simple click of the ‘unsubscribe’ link in your email, and your customers could be gone forever.
So, talk to your customers. Offer a newsletter, an RSS news feed, ask them questions via surveys. Run competitions, get them to follow you on Facebook and Twitter and give away freebies. Your customers will see you as an expert in your product category, market or niche and will hang on every word you say, resulting in more sales!
