3 mighty e-commerce strategies to turn your visitors into customers
Today, online sales represent 19,6% of retail sales worldwide. Accessible to all players, the number of websites is exploding and entry points are multiplying with social networks and marketplaces. For each brand, this makes it more complex to emerge. What e-commerce strategies can you put in place to emerge and finally turn your visitors into customers? Here is our answer.
Changing purchasing behavior
Depending on your sector of activity and your positioning, your targets will be different. BtoB, BtoC, BtoBtoC, your e-commerce marketing strategies must therefore adapt to this reality.
The challenges for e-tailers are numerous: how to generate qualified traffic on their online sales site? How to transform this audience into customers? How to optimize your digital investments and build customer loyalty? Yumens’ e-commerce marketing strategy consultants support their clients by managing their digital campaigns based on an ROI objective that takes into account their targets (BtoB, BtoC, BtoBtoC) and their business model, the life cycle of their customers, and the CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value, which is the total value of the revenue generated by your customers).
Measuring results to manage your e-commerce marketing strategies
Implement a web analysis solution
To do this, it is necessary to set up a web analytics solution that allows you to measure and analyze the precise performance of the website and marketing actions and identify the optimizations to be made: your data must be reliable, exhaustive, and have a sufficiently acceptable level of detail to analyze the results precisely.
Define your main KPIs
The analysis is based on the KPIs defined according to your objectives:
- The number of new customers;
- Overall turnover;
- The average basket;
- Conversion indicators: conversion rate, number of transactions, abandonment rate, etc.
- Retention indicators: frequency of purchase, CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value), churn rate, etc.
Analyze ROAS and ROI
This is the analysis of ROAS (Return On Ads Spend) which measures the effectiveness of advertising campaigns and above all ROI (Return On Investment) which takes into account all marketing expenses and your level of margin to enable you to make the right choices on advertising investments and to quickly know if your actions are profitable, taking care to dissociate the conquest of a new customer vs. a new purchase from an already acquired customer.
1. Generate qualified traffic
Whether in B2B or B2C, it is essential to define the typical profiles of your future customers (personas) to adopt a clear and relevant communication strategy. Even if the decision-making process is longer in B2B, targeting and knowing your targets (in B2B, company size, sector, function… and in B2C, gender, age, and location…) are fundamental to lay the foundations of efficient digital marketing. To generate qualified traffic that will enable you to win new customers, we advise you to focus on active searches.
Combining SEO and SEA
For a successful SEA strategy, you need to exploit the distribution on search engines of your Shopping Ads which will develop sales on your site, and the Shopping Action ads which will allow Internet users to buy your products directly on the Google marketplace without going through your site. For your SEO strategy, you have to optimize the content of your catalog, and faceted filters: you target specific queries of Internet users (eg black men’s tee shirt size M) which increases the conversion rate, you also automate the creation of new pages and their content when you have new products in an existing category and promote internal linking.
If your brand or your products are known, you should be present in the “notoriety” lexical field as a priority, both because it is essential to defend it and because it is the most profitable. If this is not the case, or if search volumes are still too low; you need to cover active searches based on the concerns and research expressed by Internet users and to which the content of your offer responds.
Marketplace
Identify the marketplaces that offer you the best visibility by creating your online shop to list your products. Your product sheets and therefore your product flow must be optimized for each marketplace. To increase the visibility of your products and increase your sales you have to create rich content and deploy display ads and sponsored ads.
For instance, we are in direct connection with about twenty marketplaces with which we have been working for many years. That allows us to have our product appear on the homepage for a few hours to a few days easily.
Social networks
Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube inspire your future customers and also generate qualified traffic to your website. Your customers can consult your product catalog directly, chat with you directly via instant messaging and finalize the act of purchase without going through your site (Instagram and Facebook Check-Out) or on your website.
We advise you to deploy your online shops on Facebook and Instagram (Facebook Shops and Instagram Shops). And thus offer a new mobile-first shopping experience to your customers. These online shops on Facebook and Instagram present all of your available products. Which makes it easier to highlight them in advertisements (Stories, Facebook Ads, etc.) and develop sales.
2. Turn your visitors into customers
A mobile-first e-commerce marketing strategy
It is essential to think about the ergonomics of sites first for mobile and then for the desktop, in order to be in phase with the uses and constraints of your future customers. The location of CTAs and labels will help simplify the ordering process by limiting the steps in the conversion funnel. Your site must be responsive to adapt to the consultation of each page on mobile, which provides a better user experience.
UX design for an easily accessible and efficient site
To ensure a better conversion rate, you must pay attention to the organization of categories and the ease of access to each product page. They must be well structured: the most important information appears first and is highlighted. The quality of the information is also crucial: make sure it is understandable, complete, and up-to-date. The performance of your online shop is crucial: it takes three seconds for a user to decide whether to stay or leave a site. Loading times should be kept to a minimum.
Collecting reviews
Gathering reviews on Google or review sites is a major reassurance, which will also improve your conversion rate. Consumers no longer rely on simple product prices, descriptions, or promotions. They want to know that the item they are interested in delivers what it promises. And even more, so that the seller is reliable. We encourage you to deploy solutions to encourage customers to rate you. Either directly on your website or through partners such as Trustpilot, Avis Vérifiés, or Google.
Continuous CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)
The analysis of the conversion funnel will allow you to identify the friction points that generate abandonment. In particular at the payment stage, and to qualify visitors at each stage (suspects, prospects, customers). And therefore ultimately optimize your funnel to boost your conversions. For example, improving your conversion rate by 25% from 1% to 1.25% will automatically bring you 25% more turnover.
You need to implement a permanent CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) process to identify possible optimization levers; based on A/B tests in particular. This allows you to continuously improve the business performance of your website. As well as the user experience. And also to better understand your customers and prospects.
A data-driven remarketing strategy
To retarget users who have come to your site but have not converted, you need to activate campaigns that combine search, display, and email retargeting. To be effective and obtain the best possible ROI (Return On Investment), your campaigns must be thought out within your conversion funnel. By using scoring to distinguish between cold prospects and warm prospects who are more mature enough to convert.
3. Optimize your digital marketing investments
Define an attribution model
Optimizing your investments means making the right choices and therefore knowing which traffic sources are the most effective. But also to what extent they are involved in the conversion process. The choice of attribution model (last click, first click, progressive, position-based, data-driven, or personalized) should be defined after a detailed analysis of the conversion paths used. It must be adapted according to your customers’ buying paths. The challenge is to identify the levers that govern your performance.
Marketing automation for engagement and loyalty
If your business and your products lend themselves to it, increasing the loyalty of your customers will give you the opportunity to go even further in optimizing your budgets. We know that retaining a new customer costs 10 times less than winning over a new one. But to retain them, you need to know them. “Do you know how many new customers you had last year? How many times did the same customer buy during the year? What is their average basket? What are their buying preferences?”
Analysis of this data from your CRM will enable you to classify your customers according to their buying habits and their position in the customer life cycle: based on RFA (Recency, Frequency, Amount) segmentation and scoring.
According to these segments, which take into account the life cycle of your customers (new, first purchase, repurchase, inactivity, etc.), you can implement actions to :
- Develop the average basket with cross-selling (offer products in another category) and upsell (offer products for a higher amount or a batch of products);
- Facilitate re-purchase by implementing workflows: welcome message, basket relaunch, promotional offer, sponsorship, and wallet (dematerialized loyalty card)… these are all actions that can turn your customers from one-offs to loyal customers.
Conclusion
Not all your customers are equally profitable. Some may have a high acquisition cost but in the long term will bring you a lot of profit. Knowing the Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) of your customers is a fundamental indicator – based on the average order value and re-purchase rate. That allows you to make decisions about how much you can spend to attract and convert customers. To get a global view of your customers’ CLTV you need to integrate all the data collected from all the points of contact with your brand. Whether digital or at the point of sale, via a call center…. This global vision can only be obtained by reconciling all your data within a unique customer repository (RCU) which will allow you to activate a 360° relationship marketing plan with your customers and prospects.
These e-commerce strategies will help you to turn your visitors into customers. If you are unsure out to put in place these e-commerce strategies in intern, you can call for an expert. Powerlab is a company that specializes in e-commerce, you can contact us and tell us about your expectation and needs. We will be glad to help you.
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