As an eCommerce manager, one of the primary challenges you face is getting visitors to your site. Even more vital (and difficult of course) is getting targeted traffic, which you count on to convert into sales. Running pay-per-click ads on Google Adwords makes collecting targeted traffic easy, but such ease means your competitors are probably doing the same thing. If you want to generate more targeted traffic than your competitors, you’ll need to take advantage of Product Listing Ads.
Google Analytics provides you with an abundance of information on visitors to your site, but if you want more meaningful and comprehensive visitor interaction data, you should seriously consider advanced tagging.
Everyone knows about Black Friday and the Christmas shopping season. With few exceptions, it is generally the most active time of the year for eCommerce sites, but what about other holidays? Most eCommerce stores have at least one other holiday. Think of it as a secondary holiday that drives traffic and sales. Somewhere in Google Analytics, there is data pointing to a secondary holiday spike.
Blue Acorn usually handles considerably large clients, but let’s say that you manage a mom and pop eCommerce store with niche products. Most likely, visitors to your site are there because they need something special they can’t get on Amazon. You do solid business, but you’re hardly pulling in millions of customers, not to mention their hard-earned money.
The easy answer is to increase the conversion rate for the customers you do have, but maybe you don’t have the capital lying around to spend on an eCommerce solution. There are still ways you can mitigate the risk your customers feel and bolster the conversion rate without spending a fortune. Here are seven inexpensive ways to get you started.
Last week, my fiance set forth onto the internet to find the very best screen protector for her brand new phone. After two grueling hours of research on forums and fansites, she found the most highly-recommended screen protector, a product exclusively sold on the manufacturer’s website. When I realized the site was a Magento store, I started paying particular attention. She navigated the site easily, but then, having added the product to cart and prepared to checkout, she stopped and exclaimed, “I don’t want to go through this checkout! I’ll just buy something on eBay instead.”
To quote Veruca Salt of Roald Dahl’s classic , “I want data and prizes, analytics and surprises of all shapes and sizes, and now. Don’t care how, I want it now.”
Loyalty to your brand can be hard to come by, but when it does, it’s important to not let it get away from you. It’s actually something we’ve written about before. There are a couple of ways to make sure you’re getting the most out of your loyal customers. This article describes two ways to do just that. One is a traditional and proven method. The other is a new and untested, but promising, strategy.
In Designing a Landing Page, Part I, we discussed the use of certain confidence builders on a landing page in order to persuade your visitors to answer your call to action. With input from our fictional client, Orange Walnut, we were able to construct a mockup that combined their vision, the confidence builders we selected, and the best practices that we’ve developed over the years. While client preferences and best practices are a great place to start, they are just that, a starting point. The most important step in designing a landing page involves the tools and steps used to optimize it.
With a landing page, funneling visitors down to a call to action requires focusing their attention and building their confidence in the product. While the precise method of this funneling will vary, it will ultimately involve identifying some key, confidence-building elements and then placing those elements along an intuitive path.
