Sales Slumping? 5 Things You Can Do With your eCommerce Website to Get Back on Track
Give Your Online Store a Boost with These Digital Marketing Tips and Tricks
Fall is coming fast and you know what that means—holiday season is just around the corner.
No, it’s not too soon to start gearing up for the biggest quarter of the year in the retail world—and this is doubly true if your online store sales have been lackluster lately.
Here are 5 things you can do to help get your sales momentum going again and give your team a head start on end-of-year mayhem.
Complete an SEO Audit of Your eCommerce Website
What comes first, the sales or the traffic? Nope, this is not a chicken-and-egg situation. You need to attract visitors to your site before you can effectively sell to them. An SEO—or search engine optimization—audit can help you figure out where the opportunities are for attracting more visitors and, in turn, boosting revenue.
Moz has an excellent breakdown of all the steps required to conduct a solid SEO audit. From crawling your site to exploring traffic patterns (via Google Analytics, for example) to assessing performance and monitoring for duplicate content, Moz has you covered when it comes to effective self-auditing.
But does this all seem like a little too much to try and tackle during this busy time? Fear not! At efelle creative, we offer an impressive array of SEO services—website audits included. We not only complete audits on your behalf, we schedule presentations with your team to discuss keyword research, competition analysis, your current SEO standing, and more. We provide you with a document of recommendations and can chat with you about any onsite implementation work you’d like help with.
Our SEO experts are some of the best in the business and know exactly what it takes to make your eCommerce website stand out from the crowd. Reach out to us today and let’s chat about how professional SEO services can be the difference maker for your business.
Create a Landing Page for Your Flagship Product or a Product You’d Like to Promote
Are you launching a new product line or wanting to boost sales of one specific product? Consider building a landing page centered on promoting that singular product or product set.
Landing pages typically consist of a single web page and feature long-form copy, limited imagery, and one repeated call to action—in the case of an eCommerce website, this call to action would most likely encourage users to “Shop Now” and link off to the product detail page for the promo item in question.
Landing pages are often an important part of a good conversion rate optimization strategy. By intelligently driving traffic to your landing page (the insights from the SEO audit mentioned above will come in handy here), you can create a sales funnel wherein your visitors can make decisive choices about your product without their attention being diluted by other areas of your website.
Relatedly, you can use A/B testing to assess the effectiveness of each landing page. Let’s dig into that a little deeper now, shall we?
Use A/B Testing to Collect Data
A couple weeks ago we posted about A/B testing—a process you can use to gauge the potential success of two or more marketing strategies.
A/B testing is a particularly smart tool to employ in the eCommerce world. You can use it to discover the best positioning and messaging for new or featured products. Does adding a promotional video to a landing page boost conversions related to that product? Does font size make a difference? How about one masthead image versus another? All of these questions can be answered with some strategic A/B testing implementation.
As an example, for one past client our team designed and built out two very similar landing pages for a single product. The only difference? The masthead for one featured a graphic and bullet point information about the product while the masthead for the other featured a video. We drove ad traffic to both landing pages in equal measure and used analytics to assess the click-thru rate to the product from each page.
Offer Product Subscription Options to Ensure Recurring Revenue
Another strategy we recommend to our eCommerce clients is offering product subscriptions—fans of the our blog will note that this, too, is a subject we wrote about recently. (Check out our post here: Does Your Online Store Offer this One Crucial Feature that Generates Recurring Revenue?)
Product subscriptions give your customers the ability to automatically reorder your products at regular intervals. For example, if you sell a consumable good like bags of coffee or a multivitamin, you may give your customers the opportunity to receive these goods on a monthly basis—their credit cards will automatically be charged and their order processed.
Consumable products aren’t the only ones that can benefit from subscriptions, however. If you run a clothing store, you could start up a quarterly subscription service that sends subscribers curated boxes of featured products. There is a huge push toward this kind of service right now—Birchbox, Fabletica, Ipsy, MM.LaFleur, and Loot Crate all receive their primary source of revenue from subscription-style services (and those companies are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this trend).
Established eCommerce platforms like BigCommerce make it easy to add subscription functionality to any eCommerce store. We personally recommend investigating Rebillia—a third-party application that integrates seamlessly with BigCommerce. Not only does Rebillia’s platform make product subscription management a breeze, their customer service is second to none.
Jump on Board for a Website Redesign and Launch Your eCommerce Business into the 21st Century
Has managing your website, your products, your pricing, and your promotions become cumbersome? Is your site’s design—that looked great five years ago—feeling a little lackluster or a little less modern than it used to?
Maybe it’s time to relaunch your brand and get noticed again. At efelle creative, we are experts in the eCommerce sphere. We’re Elite-tier BigCommerce partners and have over a decade of experience in building award-winning online stores for our clients. We design and develop websites that convert and attract the right traffic. Best of all? Our team is just a phone call away. Hit us up at 206.384.4909 or reach out via our online form. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!