Making E-commerce Easy

In the world of Ecommerce, it is still early days for remarketing and that’s exactly why you should make it a part of your web marketing strategy today. Remarketing is at the stage where online text ads were 8 years back. It’s about to get a lot more competitive.
Remarketing is nothing but being able to market to a potential customer who has been to your website, browsed around, looked at stuff, and then just moved on without buying anything.
I’ve listed out some of the ways in which web marketers can do this today.

Google and remarketing
A year ago Google introduced Adwords remarketing. All it does is that it allows you to show ads to users who’ve previously visited your website as they browse the Web. Its like a moving banner that keeps following your users, teasing and enticing them to buy the product that they looked at. Pretty powerful stuff no? You bet.
Note: Its important that you’re smart about the keywords you use in the remarketing ads. They need to be related to the products or categories that user was interested in, and not generic site adwords.
Well as a web marketer, the one thing we know is that different customer segments behave differently, and in the end it is all about experimentation of marketing techniques on your set of visitors and to keep fine tuning the method that works. So try this out and spend more money on it if it does give a positive ROI for your business.

When you combine your keyword campaigns with remarketing, you might see higher conversions for your campaigns overall.

Abandoned carts
Start being pro-active about potential customers who abandon their carts. Chase after them with limited time offers, valid for a day or two, to get them to complete their purchase.
As always, monitor the progress of this activity and its use by the customers. If you find the customers are using this purposely, reduce the time period to a tighter period.
But this is one thing which has a massive impact in my experience. As a lot of the shoppers are such bargain hunters that they might not jump ship to your competitor if you give them a little discount. Make sure the discount is churned out of your marketing / customer acquisition budget.

Notification of Changes
Basically you need to track what products users have seen. So wouldn’t it be great as a user, if you could get notified about price changes (or other changes) about the products that you’re interested in? I’d love it.

So start tracking those visits, store the products viewed against those customer names, and send them details of it every time something changes in the product of their interest.
Should do wonders to brand and product recall, and improves chances of purchase!!

Favorites or Wish List
An old technique but still effective. Send out reminder mails if the wish lists are not being accessed for a while. Can also double up as a gift registry, which is a nice feature to have nevertheless.

Viewed products
Customers like it when the site they are on lets them know that they care enough to see what they have been viewing. It’s the closest you get to customer service reps in the aisles in the retail outlets. Add recommendations to that feature and you get a very strong marketing combination that is very enticing, easy to notice, and difficult to ignore.

Email Remarketing
When sending out email campaigns, if we record the user’s clicks on the mail, and record the corresponding products that they have viewed, that’s very useful information to have.
Secondly, it also helps to know what the customers don’t click on, as a general feedback into the mindset of your customer set.

Increasing traffic is not enough to ensure high sales for an ecommerce website. The key is to monitor and increase the conversion rate. Here conversion rate refers to the proportion of people who decide to buy a product from among all those who visit the site.

Click stream Analysis
One of the most crucial criteria’s to success in bettering your conversion rate is to first do a click stream analysis. The click stream is the route for visitors to navigate the site, from the point of entry to the point where they make the purchase. Analyzing the flow of clicks, you can streamline the buying process to achieve greater efficiency. This analysis can identify problem areas and optimize site to generate more sales.

SEO
One of the most important is the positioning of the site between the results pages of search engines. This is where SEO (search engine optimization) skills come into play. Focusing on certain keywords and reach a privileged place among the search results of those terms is essential to increase the number of visitors who come to the site, which will have direct impact on sales volume.

Design of the site
Take care of these aspects is essential to prevent the reader from leaving the site. For example, the contents should be relevant to aid decision making. Monitor the pages where your traffic is dropping off, and tweak or re-design those pages until the performance improves.

Smart Email Campaigns
Make sure your email campaigns doesn’t advertise your site in a different light than what it is. Make sure you take the strong points of your site and highlight those. If done well, this can be a major boost to your conversion rate.

A/B Testing
Make sure to use A/B testing as much as you can. Basically this allows you to have two or more versions of the same page and you can test out which performs better. Google provides a fantastic free A/B testing tool as part of its Website Optimizer package. More than anything else, you no longer need to make huge bets on designs and layouts. Try a few, and stick with the designs / layouts that work best for you.