Grow business online from the comfort of your physical location. With more and more people choosing to shop online rather than on the High Street these days, there’s never been a better time to take your business fully online, selling products and services via an ecommerce website. Grow Business Online after reading this Beginners to Expert guide. Are you looking for online business for sale? We will help you with that in this post or explore this link.
Your business – 24/7 open and always present.
Everyone wants to grow business online but very few people take actual steps towards the fulfillment of their goals. Ecommerce websites not only widen your reach beyond the physical location of your business, they also mean you can trade 24/7, helping you connect with the growing number of customers who prefer to do their shopping online. A good ecommerce store will not only attract and convert customers, it should also help bring you repeat business.
Once you’ve sold something to a customer for the first time, they will be familiar with your business offering and quality of service, and have the confidence to buy more from your website in the future. And while every enterprising business wants to find new customers, it’s no secret that selling more products to existing customers is a lot simpler, and a much more efficient use of marketing budget. Whether you already have an ecommerce website or you’re considering one, it’s important to get your strategy and marketing right in order to have the best chance of success. A well-designed ecommerce store with a secure and user-friendly transaction process is your foundation, but that won’t bring in sales on its own. this is mandatory to remember to grow business online that the quality of your product will paly an important role in your online business growth.
Ensure Website is visible to the right audience
You also need to ensure your website is getting found by the right audience, which involves driving traffic to it from all the platforms where your potential customers tend to spend their time, be that in search engine results, on social media, third party websites or apps etc. And once you’ve got that traffic to your website, you need to ensure you help your visitors make the decision to buy from you and complete their purchase, by providing all the information they need upfront such as delivery timescales, shipping costs and your returns policy etc. This free guide aims to take you through five key topics which should help make your move into the world of ecommerce a success.
Grow Business Online with optimized product pages
You might assume the homepage of your website is the most important as it serves as your online shop window. However, with eCommerce sites, that’s not always the case.
This is because many visitors will land directly onto one of your product pages, especially if they’ve been using a search engine like Google, Yahoo, Yandex or Bing to find what they’re looking to buy. Someone looking for a specific product, e.g. “Airfix Spitfire plane model kit”, is going to be a lot closer to making a purchase decision than someone using more generic terms like “model kit”. By focusing your efforts on the needs of your most interested audiences, you are likely to see much better conversions and sales outcomes.
Another important factor that also comes under the category of optimization is the importance of good reviews to grow business online. It is mandatory to acknowledge the strength of good reviews and vice versa. there are several online regulatory bodies that provide a platform to rank all your products and services for the benefit of general public.
Key Product Page Elements.
Follow these key elements to have a good strategy to grow business online.
A relevant title
Your page title will typically be the name of the product itself, but include details like the brand name and color if those are likely to be words your customers might use when searching online.
A unique description
If you’re reselling another company’s products, try to write product descriptions using your own words, in a way you think will best engage your audience. Generic descriptions provided by manufacturers won’t help you stand out online or reach the specific audience you’re targeting. A good description will highlight the key features (perhaps using bullet points) to help a customer decide to purchase. Remember to grow business online, stay unique in the crowd. Never copy anyone’s identity or you will lose yours.
Mobile-optimized images
While it’s key to use good quality photos of your products (including from multiple angles and showing close-ups of specific features), it’s also important to optimize these for web use. This means saving them in the right dimensions to display on your website, at the smallest file size possible – without compromising the overall image quality. This will help your website load time, boost your SEO, and use less server storage space. You cannot grow business online with slow and under optimized pages and images.
Clear branding
As some customers will never visit your homepage, make sure your company branding and ethos is well presented in your website header and footer to give customers the confidence to purchase from you. Be clear on how to grow business online. You must have a business plan in order to become a truly successful business online.
Powerful branding & user experience to grow business online
Your eCommerce store could score more visibility in Google search results by creating dedicated landing pages for the brands and types of products that you sell. Clear business strategies define how you are going to grow business online amidst growing challenges. These are few of the very important factors to grow business online as a brand.
Brand pages
Big brands have their own loyal fan base, so giving potential customers an easy way to browse all the products relating to that brand will be a big help when they come to visit your website. The content you’ll want to put on your brand pages will be for the most part, similar to those on your individual product pages i.e. a relevant and keyword-rich title, good quality imagery etc. However, you’ll also need to provide a more in-depth description of the brand itself. This should include some details on the brand, its ethos, product range, and unique selling points, along with links to the main product lines you stock. This is a great opportunity to tap into a range of relevant keyword search terms! Using our earlier example of Airfix models kits, you’d have an opportunity to write about aircraft, vehicles, ships, figures etc. all on the same page, with links to all the relevant products that you sell conveniently listed out underneath. Consider improving your appearance as a brand to grow business online.
Category pages
Similarly, you may be selling a number of items in related categories. Category pages enable you to group these products together, and they can be very powerful in helping boost your search engine rankings for these particular keywords, as well as making it easier for customers to browse your product range. Similar to the above example, you could have category pages for toy vehicles, dolls and board games containing products from multiple brands or suppliers. As with brand pages, treat this as an opportunity to introduce the category, its products and key features that customers should consider when browsing or purchasing items in that category, and then link through to the whole range of products.
Offers & Coupons
You may want to offer brand- or category-specific offers such as a 10% discount for first-time customers, or seasonal promotions for Black Friday, January sales etc. This will ideally have prominent placement on a brand or category page where your audience can quickly identify all of the items available in the offer in a single view.
Grow Business Online by making use of conversational commerce
By now you will appreciate that one of the key characteristics of an ecommerce website is that it will have a lot of pages! There’s your standard home and contact pages, but also individual product pages, as well as brand and category pages to help your content surface in search engine results.
With all these pages, it’s important to keep your focus on user experience, and a growing trend is the use of on-page chatbots to help your customers through their shopping experience. This is widely referred to as ‘conversational commerce’. Through conversational commerce, businesses can provide answers to frequently asked customer questions, help them with their buying decisions, and give customer support as needed; all of which helps connect businesses with their customer base like never before. The ultimate goal here is to mirror the personalized, consultative experience that customers expect from a shop assistant in a physical store, and effectively deliver this online.
Chat or messaging functions can either be served up via an integrated chat window or carried out using third party messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or iMessage. These conversations can either be manned by human operatives, or by an AI-powered chatbot that is programmed with the necessary information to help visitors throughout their shopping experience journey.
Successful conversational commerce in action to grow your business online
Let’s say you’re looking for a birthday gift for a friend. You head to an online gift shop, and start browsing. You may click around the website, either not seeing anything that meets your brief, or perhaps you’re spoilt for choice! Either way, you need assistance. Then a chat box pops up in the bottom right hand corner of your screen – “I see you’re looking for a gift – can I help?”. You respond: “YES!”.
Over the next few minutes, you discuss your friend’s preferences in the chat window. The chatbot – or human assistant refers to the shop’s catalogue and makes a few suggestions by posting links to them in the chat window. The outcome is that you find the perfect gift for your friend, and you complete your transaction there and then! But think about how that could have gone without the conversational element. You may never have found that perfect present on your own, and left the site out of frustration. But because you had that consultative connection with the business in real time, you made a purchase. You’re happy, the business is happy – it’s a win-win!
Less cart abandonment & improved sales are key factors to grow business online
It’s a fact of life that many people will put items into their online shopping cart, and then abandon it without completing the checkout process to purchase them. Let’s take a look at how you can reduce the amount of abandoned shopping carts on your eCommerce website.
Create an abandoned cart recovery email campaign
This is an effective marketing tactic which uses manual or automated email sends to remind customers who have visited your website but not completed their online transaction to return to your site to do so. When a visitor adds items to their shopping cart on your website, they should be prompted to enter some contact details including their email address. This means that if they subsequently drop out of the purchasing process, a recovery campaign can be triggered. Bear in mind that you will need to have the appropriate permissions from the user regarding data protection and cookies. A good abandoned cart recovery campaign will comprise a series of emails to remind the recipient of the products they were interested in, and prompt them to complete their purchase.
Each email should include details of the products left in the cart, with a handy link taking the customer straight back into the checkout process so they can easily complete their order. The series is customarily three touchpoints, with the first assuming the user simply forgot to check out, and sent within a few hours of their visit. A powerful way to round off this series is to include a discount coupon or incentive with the final email. This is a proven method to help convince customers that they’re getting a good deal before writing the lead off. It’s good to remember there is no single right way to set up an abandoned cart recovery campaign, so you could experiment with sending the emails at different times and with different offers or formats to see which works best with your customers.
Building relationship with e-mail marketing
Cart abandonment campaigns are just the start of how you can use email marketing as a powerful tool to drive sales for your eCommerce store.
It plays a key part of any online marketing mix, as it’s a great way to keep your existing customers engaged with your brand, informed of your latest news and primed for repeat online business. The challenge with email marketing however, is that it requires you to store your customers’ personal information securely and in line with the rules of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) including obtaining suitable permissions before capturing and storing customer details, and then contacting them with a range of communications.
Once you have permission, it’s a good idea to send a welcome email to your new contacts. This is an ideal opportunity to introduce them to your business, point them towards your latest products and any relevant support resources, and let them know what to look out for from your business in the future.
Key product page elements.
Develop the sense of welcoming and appreciating your victors to run a successful business online. This comprehensive list of making your customers fall in love with your interactions will help you grow your business online.
Saying “Thank You” – Perhaps the most obvious point here, but your customer has just committed to hearing more from your business, so it’s a good idea to thank them for doing so.
Talk about your business – To help build a lasting customer relationship, include some information about your business and why you started it. This will help you seem more personable.
Include incentives – A common tactic to help create repeat business is to offer free delivery or a money-off discount, or to promote a seasonal time-limited offer to increase urgency and drive sales.
Keep at it – Let your audience know what your ongoing email schedule is likely to be. If you’re going to be sending a weekly or monthly newsletter, it’s best to set that expectation upfront to reduce spam complaints later on.
Clear branding – As some customers will never visit your homepage, make sure your company branding and ethos is well presented in your website header and footer to give customers the confidence to purchase from you.
Ask them to whitelist you – On the subject of spam complaints, internet service providers (ISPs) tend to filter out many emails from reaching people’s inboxes, so if you find this is an issue, ask your customers to add your email address to their Safe Senders List to reduce the chance of this happening to you.
Get ready to take your business online
An eCommerce website is all about efficiency: you need to target the right consumers to visit your online store, deliver an excellent user experience which drives sales, and have an aftersales process that builds engagement and repeat business.
It plays a key part of any online marketing mix, as it’s a great way to keep your existing customers engaged with your brand, informed of your latest news and primed for repeat online business. The challenge with email marketing however, is that it requires you to store your customers’ personal information securely and in line with the rules of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) including obtaining suitable permissions before capturing and storing customer details, and then contacting them with a range of communications. Once you have permission, it’s a good idea to send a welcome email to your new contacts.
This is an ideal opportunity to introduce them to your business, point them towards your latest products and any relevant support resources, and let them know what to look out for from your business in the future. We hope this guide has helped you understand some key areas to consider as you get started. There are of course many additional techniques you can look into as well, such as running Pay-Per-Click ads (PPC) to drive more traffic to your website, using customer reviews and testimonials to promote your products, and creating videos to showcase your flagship products. Yell is more than happy to help guide you through the end-to-end process of setting up an affordable ecommerce store for your business.
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