With almost mid-way into the year 2016, many online businesses may be struggling to keep up their pace in the competitive market. Here are three of the best E-Commerce must haves for the year.
With time, technology is evolving and so are consumers’ needs and aspirations. Their demands and expectations for relevant and rich online experiences are also escalating. The high expectations of consumers have pushed the businesses to do better and bigger. A website has become one of the most powerful means to attract and delight customers today. The E-commerce retailers are striving to engage customers anyhow, running a mad marathon for customer acquisition and retention.
Having said that, to start and maintain an E-commerce website is not a simple task, especially when there is a hoard of online businesses competing and sharing thin profit margins in this hyper-competitive market. Therefore, even the tiniest bit of guidance and help goes a long way in giving your business that much-needed extra edge. And when this help comes in the form of tools that helps in making aspects of your business more competent, it turns into a boon. To make an E-commerce site stand out and experience continued success, it is important to be prepared for any upgrade or revamp when it comes to the evolution of consumers expectations.
So, whether you are just starting with an eCommerce website or are a professional, there is always something left to do to increase your sales. To get a head start, let’s take a look at a few tools that work perfectly behind the scene to help you run a successful online business.
Analytics System:
Once you have launched the website, the most important thing to invest in is analytics system or tools, depending on the business requirement. Without a proper analytic system, your E-commerce will be like driving without any directions. There are three main analytic tools that you need to concentrate more on, they are conversion rate, traffic, and average order value. Each analytics tool is built to meet a specific requirement and therefore, choose and utilize them according to your budget and requirement. It is advisable to try out certain analytic tools before deciding on putting them on your website.
Analytics system has become an indispensable tool for marketers and commercial websites as it provides a detailed data on the number of views your website received, track visitors’ behavioral patterns, progress graph of your marketing or social media campaigns and also signals problems on a particular web page that need immediate attention. However, these data collected will need to be interpreted by web analytics who will get the idea of how things are trending with your E-commerce website.
Bigger businesses require robust and expensive analytic tools while small and medium businesses there are many cheap options available while choosing the tools.
Multi-Channel Marketing:
While designing an E-commerce website, many retailers usually end up assigning most of their budget and efforts in creating a great website but they fail to focus on how to drive traffic to their website. However, others put too many efforts on just one source of traffic like search engine optimization. The problem is that your website can only help you accomplish milestones, but in order to establish a larger picture, you need to develop a multi-channel marketing strategy. Multi-channel marketing encloses several features of image and brand building.
To drive an effective multi-channel E-commerce, retailers need to take advantage of the diverse platforms available today which will help strengthen your marketing efforts. Try clubbing social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter with strong advertising and digital ad campaigns on Youtube; this multi-channel trick will surely manage your marketing and bring in traffic to your website.
There are multiple E-commerce channels such as direct traffic, which comprises email and affiliated marketing as well as direct URL navigation; drawing traffic from search engines on pay per click basis; comparison shopping engines (CSE); marketplace sites that allow you to offer your items for sale; mobile and smartphones browsing; engaging social media like Facebook and Twitter; and so on.
Stay Connected Via Email:
Without a doubt, email marketing is the best and powerful tool that can generate sales for your E-commerce business. This automated workflow allows you to contact your customers with personalized electronic mails. Email marketing tools help in building your customer loyalty and help tremendously in driving leads. According to a study, marketing via email accounts for more than 7% of all E-commerce transactions, hence making it the second most effective marketing channel.
There is something called behavioral-triggered email marketing which has the capability to divide customers to the best distinctions, and therefore, there’s no surprise that email marketing continues to grow in effectiveness.
Email marketing is about building relationships and trust. It is a simple yet relevant way to target your prospect customers at the right time. It can also be a useful tool to automatically alert consumers about your marketing campaigns and offers. Also, keep experimenting with the timing of the email. This strategy works best when set up as an automated personalized email that’s scheduled to customers a few days after they receive their product.
Through email, you can send a gift card, rewards and discount offers to your customers to keep them coming to your website again and again, or simply improve your checkout conversion rate. One of the best strategies to encourage them is to offer a competition-based incentive via email. So whatever may be your reason, don’t underestimate the power of email marketing and utilize it to your best advantage.
Final Touch
So, that was our take on the three best E-commerce tools that make life a lot easier and profitable for online retailers.
thank you for such an effective post