Last week, we looked at different ways of maximizing your website as an e-commerce business. Today, we will look at other ways that help you understand how best to maximize your website. Let’s get started!
Let’s start with your reviews.
As a human being, when you go to order products from Amazon, more likely than not, you take your time to go through reviews before making a buying decision. Why, then, do most business owners expect their visitors to make a buying decision immediately when they land on their website?
You have the responsibility of convincing a visitor to become a customer, and one sure way to do this is through reviews.
Your reviews shouldn’t be hard to find or buried somewhere. They should be on your product page, and some can be featured on your homepage. People trust other customers and will often believe a testimonial over your own story. A product with 47 four-star reviews will outsell an identical product with zero reviews almost every time.
Secondly, something else to do to maximize your website as an ecommerce brand is to use promotions strategically, not constantly.
Here’s something I see ecommerce businesses get wrong all the time; they run sales so frequently that their customers stop believing the prices are real. Everything is always “on sale.”; that 20% off banner has been sitting at the top of the site for six months straight.
When everything is a deal, nothing feels like a deal, and strategic promotions work because they create genuine urgency. If you must run sales, here are a few you can take into consideration:
- Flash sales: a steep discount that runs for 24 or 48 hours only. Use a countdown timer on the page so visitors can literally see time ticking down. Urgency feels real when there’s a clock on it.
- Seasonal promotions: tie your sales to moments that make sense: Back-to-school, Mother’s Day, The holidays, Summer clearance. These feel natural because customers are already in a buying mindset during these periods.
- Bundle deals: “Buy any two, get one free” or “Add this to your order for just $X more.” Bundles help increase your average order value without slashing prices across the board.
- Free shipping thresholds: “Free shipping on orders over $75” is one of the most effective tactics in ecommerce. It nudges customers to add one more item to their cart instead of paying for shipping. Simple, and it works.
The next point is to always put a system in place to capture, at the very least, your visitor’s email. Do not let a visitor leave your website without capturing some form of contact information. What if you never see them again? That’s a potential lead gone.
Visitors are leads, and your job is to nurture them properly and convert them into paying customers.
A simple, effective way to capture emails is to offer something in return, a discount on their first purchase, or even a helpful PDF related to your business.
When visitors sense a genuine exchange of value, they wouldn’t hesitate to give you their email address. You can then proceed to build a strong email list which you then nurture and nurture until they become buying customers.
The bottom line is that your ecommerce website has the potential to be the hardest working member of your entire team, and when it’s set up correctly, it sells for you around the clock while you focus on running the rest of your business.
But it only performs that way when it’s built with intention. When every page, every product listing, every promotion, and every email is working together toward one goal: turning visitors into buyers and buyers into loyal customers.
If your website isn’t doing that right now, it’s not a traffic problem. It’s a strategy problem. And that’s absolutely fixable.
At PBP Web Design, we help ecommerce businesses build websites that don’t just look good but sell. Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to get more out of the site you already have, we’d love to take a look and share some ideas.