Showing posts with label ecommerce software. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ecommerce software. Show all posts

Tuesday, 20 November 2012

How to reduce your bounce rate in time for Christmas

You may sell the greatest products in the world at the most affordable prices, but the sad truth is customers visiting your site don't even get as far as looking specifically at a product, they simply land on the home page and then bounce straight back to their search results.

Depending on what your website is, whether it's a blog, ecommerce store or any other type of site, your average bounce rate is going to be considerably different. It is thought that a good bounce rate for a website is between 40-60%, any higher than that and you need to seriously begin to look at your website as a whole.


While this can't be attributed to one specific reason, there are a number of factors that make up a high bounce rate and a number of things you can do to solve these issues. 

Customer navigation

One of the main causes of a high bounce rate is customers just simply not knowing where to go from your home page in order to find what they are looking for, often resulting in them giving up altogether and leaving the site. Your website should be clearly laid out with categories and headings, to help lead a user to where they wish to go. 

If you run an ecommerce store, sometimes having too many products on a page makes your site seem cluttered, resulting in a customer finding it difficult to locate the specific product they are looking for. To solve this you could try segmenting your products into specific categories, making it easier for customers to find the product they wish to purchase or possibly including less products on a page. However, you need to always bear in mind that a customer needs to be able to make a purchase from your site in either 3 or 4 clicks from when they landed on your home page. While segmenting your products into categories is important, you do not want to put them into a whole host of sub categories as a customer will soon get frustrated if they have to click sub-category after sub-category to find the product they want. 

Look at your website's design

If a number of users are landing on your page and then bouncing straight back, it could just be a case of them finding your website unattractive. If you have a high bounce rate of around 70-75%, you may want to look at  giving your website a complete overhaul in order to give it a new lease of life and lower that all important bounce rate. When deciding on a new design for your website, you need to make sure you always take into account your overall brand image. Changing your colour scheme will have a large effect on how customers relate that website to your brand. If you don't wish to reinvent your brand image, you need to make sure that your new website still employs the same colour scheme but just simply varies in it's design. 

If you are looking for an affordable and professional website design, be sure to get in touch with us at eSellution as we can create a bespoke website, tailored to your own personal requirements for only £500 + VAT. Get in touch with us today at Sales@ecommercesoftwareltd.com to get yours as it really is a great way to boost your site ready for the Christmas rush. 

Check your SEO keywords

It may just be the case that you have a few keywords either in your page title or the page itself that don't really relate to what it is that your website provides. These keywords are then causing users who have no interest in your site to land on the page after searching for that specific keyword. Due to them not having an interest in your site, they are going to simply bounce back to their search results page. While you may not think that one wrong keyword can cause too many problems, you should look at your keywords just to make sure they aren't the cause of an unwanted high bounce rate. 

Offer an incentive

Try offering something that encourages users to click through to another page on your site. If you run an ecommerce store, this could involve having a banner ad on your home page advertising the latest products or a specific promotion that you have on offer. When the user then clicks on this banner, they are then taken to the page that contains the products advertised. While they may still not choose to buy, having them go through to another page on your site ensures that your bounce rate will begin to slowly creep down. 

Note the time of year

Some times of the year you simply always have a high bounce rate than you do at others. For example, while you may have a higher number of sales over Christmas than you do at any other time of the year, this is most likely down to people are frantically visiting various sites in order to find the best deals on presents for their friends and family, many people are going to jump on and off a number of sites as they compare products and prices. This is nearly always going to result in an inevitable higher bounce rate than what you would normally get. To see if it does have anything to do with your site itself, you need to monitor your bounce rate over a longer period. If you still have the same high bounce rate well into the new year, you then need to look at other areas of your site to try and remedy the problem. 

If you have never looked at your bounce rate, either check the tools within your ecommerce software to monitor traffic and sales or use a free monitoring tool such as Google Analytics. 

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Friday, 16 November 2012

How to improve your business with inbound marketing

When running an ecommerce store, getting customers to become aware of your store is the hardest part. Many people, when they set up an ecommerce store, think they can just set it up and leave it there for people to visit without them having to do anything. Sadly, this is far from the truth.

We at eSellution tell our customers that having an ecommerce store is like having a bricks and mortar store that is miles away from the high street, down a small darkened street that no one ever goes down. If no one knows your store is there, no one is going to visit. One of the ways to increase public knowledge of your store is through inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing allows you to not only increase traffic, but also turn these initial visitors into strong sales leads. Depending on the size of your business there are a number of different things you can do to help improve traffic to your store.

Search Engine Optimisation

The bread and butter of all websites and something which is a must if you are to achieve the levels of traffic that you will need in order to be successful. However, depending on your budget, there are varying levels of SEO that you can undertake. If you don't have much to spend on SEO, the basics you can look to cover are to make sure your products and your pages are all optimised to provide the best search engine results. This includes:

  • Ensure all of your titles have keywords included that a user will search for. Generally you want your keywords to be within the first few words of the product title as these are what a user will search for. The closer your product title matches a users search engine query, the higher up the search results your product is going to be ranked and the more traffic your website will achieve.
  • Place meta tags on your products and your categories. Just like optimising your product titles, you need to place all of the meta keywords and phrases that are to do with your business and the individual products you have on sale. This should be very straightforward to do no matter what ecommerce software you are using. When selecting keywords, you want to choose words and phrases that has had the most search engine queries in the last month. You can find this out either by using a keyword tool such as the free one provided by Google or simply by typing a keyword into the search engine search bar and looking at the related search phrases that are popular with users.
  • Place keywords related to your business through your page content and in your page titles. When Google crawls across various websites, they pick up keywords in order to relate those keywords to a particular search engine query. For example, if you sell womens clothes, you should have keywords such as womens clothing, womens dresses, etc. That way, when a user enters one of these keywords or phrases into a search engine, your page will be shown as a result.
Even after you have made all of these changes to your site you need to be patient. In order for your pages to be ranked by a search engine such as Google, you need to have those pages crawled by search engine spiders in order to pick up all of the keywords and phrases to do with your site and then have them indexed within the search engine. It usually takes between 4 and 6 weeks before you begin seeing results in search engine queries. 

Blog

Following on from carrying out SEO for your business, a blog is a great tool for not only increasing your search engine ranking through backlinks, but also drawing in an audience and then converting them into customers. When creating content for your blog, you should look to write about anything to do your ecommerce store. Users will then visit your article in order to read about that particular subject. You can then place links on the page giving these readers information about how they can access some of the products you have on sale. While not all of these users will visit your online store, you will get a few who will take a look at the products you have on sale.

In terms of backlinks within your articles, you should place hyperlinks on keywords in your article to pages on your site that relate to that particular page. For example, if you wrong womens dress in your article, you may create a backlink from those keywords to the page on your store that has the womens dresses you have on sale. 

Social Media

As we have stated in the past, social media is the best tool to allow you to regularly engage with your customers and other followers. To ensure you help them create an active interest in your business which results in them visiting your store and possibly making a purchase you need to:

  • Post content on a regular basis including links to your ecommerce store
  • Answer any questions your followers may have
  • Post images of various products you have for sale
  • Tell your followers about any promotions you are running
  • Make each of the users you engage with feel valued, building up that initial relationship that will hopefully develop into them becoming a customer.

Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click is a marketing tool that some businesses use to help drive traffic to your store and increase your overall conversion rate. It works by having adverts about your business appearing on search engine queries to do with specific keywords that are related to your business. In order to have your advert appear, you must bid on these keywords, the higher you bid, the higher up the search results page your advert will appear. If a user is interested in your advert, they can then click on it and be taken directly to your site. Based on the price you have bid, you will then pay Google or whatever provider you are using for the cost of the click. You can also set a limit for how much you want to spend each day. For example, you may only want to spend a total of £10 a day with a cost per click on 50p. Once your ad has achieved 20 clicks for the day, the advert will be disabled from the search engine until the next day The benefit of this is that you know the people who are adverts are appearing to will have an interest in the products you have on offer as they have searched for keywords related to it. 


Get your free ecommerce store now: http://www.esellution.co.uk/pricing.html

eSellution: www.eSellution.co.uk
Twitter: www.Twitter.com/eSellution

Recent Posts

http://esellution.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/from-ebay-with-love.html
http://esellution.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/how-to-measure-social-media-success.html
http://esellution.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/ebay-revamp-top-seller-status.html
http://esellution.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/ebays-much-anticipated-international.html


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Wednesday, 14 November 2012

How to measure social media success

Every business, whether big or small, has their own social media pages in order to increase their brand image, engage with customers and promote various goods and services that they have on offer. While everyone is doing it, how do we measure if you are doing it right?

Well, the obvious way to check how successful your social media page is would be to look at the number of total followers you have on your various accounts. The more followers you have, the more successful you are. However, you can then break that down into a number of different areas. For example, if the total number of followers gained over the last few months is less than you have seen in previous months, it is possible that you are now doing something that you weren't a few months ago which is limiting the number of followers you are gaining. 

Another way to see how effective your social media presence has been is through the number of users who have actively engaged with you. While you may have a large number of followers, having users engage with you by posting things, sending you messages or commenting on things that you post is a great way to see that not only are they interested in your ecommerce store, but are also engaged by the various content you post. 

If you primarily use Facebook as your social media platform, you can use the built in analytics system to monitor various statistical data regarding your business page. This information looks at who is following you and their demographical information such as age, location and gender as well as looking at how many people are talking about you and how many of people were exposed to your content. 

To find out what people across various social media channels are saying about your business ,whether they follow you or not, you can use websites such as Social Mention and carry out a global search. You simply enter a keyword phase such as the name of your business and the page will scour the web and bring back all posts that mention these words. This will allow you to gauge public opinion regarding your business and also allows you to see users who you could potentially engage with to encourage them to follow you. 

Klout is another great way to measure your overall social media success. Based on your engagement, reach and amplification regarding your social media posts, your account is given a Klout score of 0 to 100. The higher your score, the more social media success you are achieving. Klout links your various accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blogger and many others to give you one combined score. While many people doubt the relevance of Klout in determining your true social media power, it is a great way to get an overall idea of how successful you are on some platforms and which others you may need to improve.

If all else fails you can't go wrong with using Google Analytics. The free platform from Google allows you to monitor a range of webpage information and while many primarily use it in combination with their ecommerce software to see data regarding their online store, you can set it up to also record all of the information to do with your social media pages. 

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Monday, 12 November 2012

eBay's much anticipated International selling feature up and running

eBay have launched their International Rate Card for eBay store owners who are currently on eBay's Anchor Shop package. 

In the past, whenever a seller has decided that they want to sell Internationally, they had to list each of their products as being available for overseas customers to purchase it. However, the new International Seller Rate Card allows sellers to list their products directly on to a number of different eBay sites within Europe and in Australia. 

This means that rather than a buyer having to come to the eBay UK site and purchasing from there as an International purchaser, the buyer can simply view it on their country's own eBay site as long as they are based in one of the countries within the International Seller Rate Card package. As an eBay seller, it will allow you to dramatically increase the number of users your products are exposed to, most likely resulting in an increase in sales. 

If you are an eBay seller who would like to take advantage of this new feature, you must upgrade your eBay account to the Anchor Shop package at £349.99 a month and then tick the box to "Opt in to eBay International Selling." 

To apply to be part of this new International selling feature you must be a top rated seller. However, should you lose your top rated seller status once you have been accepted, you will not lose access to the feature. Any sales made Internationally will also not affect the Detailed Seller Rating (DSR) that you have in the UK.

Before taking the plunge and upgrading your account to an anchor package, you need to first crunch the numbers in order to make sure that it will be the right move for your business. If you are not already on the anchor shop package you need to check how much you are paying based on the number of products you are listing in the UK as well as how much you are paying to list products on other International sites. For many eBay stores this will be the right move as many businesses are currently paying more than £349.99.

When branching out to International markets, you also may want to look at how you can use ecommerce software to also increase the number of channels your ecommerce store operates in, allowing you to develop your brand image and increase sales. We at eSellution offer a number of different packages to suit all online sellers, ranging from a free ecommerce store to our  Enterprise package.


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How to create a successful blog

When producing content to engage with your audience or for the purpose of improving your search engine ranking, producing fresh and entertaining content on a regular basis can often be difficult. However, whether you run an ecommerce store or another type of business, there are a number of different ways you can keep your audience engaged on a regular basis.


  • Break up your text - If a reader has to read through reams and reams of text, no matter how appealing your writing is, there are soon going to get either bored or frustrated. The best way to avoid this is to break up your text by either separating the text into paragraphs, using bullet points to make key points concise or inserting a range of different images that relate to your subject.

  • Don't waffle - Just like having clumps of text all together, taking three sentences to say something that can be summed up in one is another way to alienate your audience. Keep your writing sharp and concise, allowing your writing to be as informative as possible.

  • Offer guest bloggers - While you might produce appealing content and have a dedicated audience, having a guest write an article for your site from time to time can have a number of benefits. The obvious benefit is that you are getting fresh content without you having to actually write it. Furthermore, you are also getting a professional source with their own following to write for your site. This means that their audience will visit your site to view the content the guest blogger has produced for you, resulting in your brand image, website traffic and total blog reads taking a healthy boost.

  • Stay topical - When coming up with ideas for content, you should always be aware of what subjects are topical both in the news and in social circles. You can then look to create your own slant on this subject by relating it to something to do with your ecommerce business. This allows you to try and achieve the highest reads possible as there will be a number of people out there currently interested in that specific topic. However, this interest works both ways. There is no point writing about something that people were interested in a few months ago as they are likely no longer interested in anything relating to it. 

  • Get your audience involved - When writing a blog article, try and pose questions in your text that that makes the reader think and possibly encourages them to engage with you either through your social media pages or by commenting at the bottom of the blog post. Creating a platform for discussion at the end of your article is a great way to establish a dedicated audience and achieve a high amount of reads and shares.

  • Share your content - While you may get a few reads from your dedicated audience by just writing a blog post and then leaving it there for people to read, you need to share your content in a number of different places to give your content the best exposure possible. This means sharing your articles across Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Reddit and any other social bookmarking sites you come across. Depending on the CMS system or ecommerce software you are using to create your blog, you also want to include links to the social media pages to do with your business. That way if someone stumbles across one of your blog articles, they can visit one of your social media pages to get more information about your business.

  • Post regularly - Whether you are posting to entertain your audience or to improve your social media ranking through backlinks, it is vitally important you post on a regular basis. Just writing an article every few months isn't going to be enough to get enough backlinks to boost your ranking or to get a dedicated following. At the very least you should be producing one or two articles a week. If you have the time you may even decide to produce one every day. 

  • Link to other areas - If you are looking to produce your blog in order to help generate traffic and hopefully turn them into customers, remember to mention the services you provide within the text as well as placing links to other areas of your website.
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Wednesday, 7 November 2012

The American Presidential race provides top ecommerce tips

With Barack Obama comfortably defeating Mitt Romney in the race for the for US President, the Hawaiian is set for another four year tenure in the White House. In his victory speech, Obama promised American citizens  that "the best is yet to come."

While Obama will focus on improving health care, reforming immigration policies and the safety of troops abroad, how can owners of an ecommerce store follow in the footsteps of the re-elected President and improve their online business to make it more successful than ever.

Engagement


Obama spent months travelling around the states, meeting many people, shaking many hands and kissing many babies all in an attempt to create a more favourable public perception. While you can't spend your time travelling around promoting your business, you can use social media platforms to engage with your current customers and have them do the work for you. Regularly engaging with your customers on Facebook, Twitter and all other social media platforms ensures that they have the best possible experience when engaging with your business. This positive experience will then result in them telling their friends and family about your business, further developing your brand image and traffic.

Values


When setting up your own online store, you will have a number of ideas and values that are dear to you in helping you achieve long and short term success. As your business grows and your brand identity develops, it's important to not only hold on to these values but also take into account the values of your customers. Developing a business that meets the values of the customer is going to improve their shopping experience and ensure that they return to your store in the future to make another purchase.

Promises


Like all political campaigns, what a candidate promises they are going to do in the future plays a big role in whether they decide to vote for that candidate or not. The same principle applies to your business. When running your ecommerce business you want to regularly inform your customers about any offers you are running through your ecommerce software or any new product lines that will be added to your store in the near future. These promises keep the users engaged with your store on a regular basis. However, failing to deliver on these promises will not only damage your public image, but will also result in many customers perceiving your business and untrustworthy and refusing to buy from you.

Teamwork


While President Obama is considered the most powerful man on the planet, it's important to remember that it wasn't just him to go him there. He has a large team behind him, not only his family, but the campaign team supporting him and countless volunteers who worked diligently to help him achieve another term in business. Setting up an ecommerce business from the ground up makes it very personal to you and while you may want to be the sole person to make your business a success, just like Barack Obama, it is important that you draft in help. Whether it's someone to improve your social media presence, handle your orders or to develop your website, extra hands working hard to improve your business is not only going to allow you to achieve more success. it is going to help your business and brand image grow considerably. 

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Monday, 29 October 2012

6 ways to improve your business's conversion rate

Getting users to visit your ecommerce store is difficult enough, but getting them to actually make a purchase is another problem altogether. While your business may be great at bringing traffic to your site, if you aren't able to turn these visitors into customers, you are missing out on a number of sales that could seriously harm your business's performance. 

So how can you improve your conversion rate?


Make it easy as possible


Making it easy for customers to purchase from your store needs to be two fold.

Firstly, you need to make it as easy as possible for customers to move around your site, browsing through your products until they find one they would like to purchase. This simplicity in the layout could consist of more filters for customers to find a specific product they want, clearer images or more products per page. 

The next step is to make the checkout process as short as possible. When a customer has found the product they would like to buy, they want to be able to purchase it as quickly as possible. While you may need a detailed checkout system to get the customers personal details, delivery details and credit card details, there are a number of ways you can make the checkout system shorter. One way is to limit the information needed only to the bare essentials, this would be just the name, delivery address and credit card details. However, you could decide to go to the opposite end of the spectrum, taking more information the first time they make a purchase on your site to create their own individual account. Not only will this encourage repeat business, but when that customer next visits your ecommerce store to make a purchase, it will be much quicker as their details will already be recorded within your ecommerce software. 

Also this ease of access shouldn't just be limited to the store itself, but also the browsers which the customer is viewing your store on. You should make sure your store displays correctly in all browsers, primarily Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. If your store doesn't display correctly when a customer visits, it is unlikely they are going to make a purchase. 

Build up trust


If a customer trusts a business, they are likely to make a purchase from the store. While this trust is usually built up through the customer actually making a purchase, you can create these initial levels of trust through other areas such as your social media sites. Engaging with your customers on a regular basis, while also being  honest and informative about what is you have on offer is a great way to not only increase your traffic, but encourage that increased traffic to then convert into valued customers. 

Another way to build up trust is to simply be as open with the customer as you possibly can. For example, if you have a product that is out of stock, tell the customer that it's out of stock and that more will be available soon. Don't allow the customer to still buy the product and then just leave them waiting until you get the product back in stock. All this is going to do is annoy the customer and result in them leaving your site to go elsewhere. While you may miss out on that particular sale, your honesty in handling the situation gives you a much better chance of them returning to your store in the future.

Keep the customer informed

Throughout the entire shopping experience and once the transaction has been complete, you should stay in contact with the customer. During the purchasing process this will consist of regular emails informing them that their order has been placed and when it has been processed and dispatched. Beyond that you can also provide them with regular emails regarding any new products or sales you are running, giving your business the best chance of having them become repeat buyers.

Variety is the spice of life


The more options you provide your customers with, the happier they are going to be. While this may be a greater expense for you, the increased sales that these variables will bring in, make it a much more profitable endeavour. So what should you add variety to? Well the answer is pretty much anything you can think of. In terms of your products, this could consist of different clothing ranges or more size and colour options. You could also provide the customer with more payment and delivery options when it comes to actually purchasing the product. The more options you provide the customer with, the more customers that are going to leave your store having had a memorable shopping experience. 

Provide a number of ways for the user to contact you


A customer may visit your store, find a product they are interested in, but are hesitant to complete the purchase due to one or two queries they may have. Providing both an email address and a telephone number allows the customer to quickly get in touch and have their questions answered by you. While most online stores do have a contact email address, many people are often reluctant to email as they know it usually takes a few days before they get a replay. Having a contact telephone number makes the whole process seem much more personal, allowing them to have their questions answered to then complete their purchase straight away. 

Monitor your competitors


Even if you have had a large amount of traffic and sales in the past, you should always keep track of what your competitors are doing in terms of products they are selling and the prices that they are selling them at. You can then look to adjust your own online store to ensure you are still outperforming them. A customer may visit your site to view a product, knowing how much that same product costs at your competitors store. Having the same product, but at a higher price is then going to result in them leaving your store and purchasing from your competitor. If you had taken the time to view your competitors prices and adjust yours so that it is slightly lower or the same, that customer may have chosen to purchase from you rather than leaving. 

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An alternative to eBay Gallery Plus that will save you money

eBay Gallery Plus works by having a larger zoomed in image when a user moves their cursor over a product image on the search results page. The benefit of this being that a potential customer is able to see the product you have for sale in greater details, enticing them to select your product to purchase. 

However, while you may think this is a good feature, the problem arises in terms of how much it will cost the user. While some of eBay's categories offer this feature as a free addition to their listings, many don't, meaning that more often than not, you will have to pay the $0.75 when you list your product and when you list 1000's of products in your ecommerce store, the costs soon mount up. 

In addition to that, if you have a product that you list in a number of different categories, you will have to pay a fee for eBay Gallery Plus for each category. So for example, if you list a a sports video game, you may decide to have that in the Sports category and the Electronics category, meaning you will need to pay $1.50 to have Gallery Plus added to the listing. 

So what's the alternative?


The ecommerce software we provide here at eSellution is not only free in terms of allowing users to set up their online store, Facebook store, mobile store and integrate it all with their eBay accounts, it also allows users to add products to their ecommerce store and then add them to eBay. This means that as the images are on our servers, you won't be required to any image hosting fees to eBay.

In addition to this, all of our ecommerce templates have the zoom in feature added to all of the products, meaning that when a customer moves their cursor over a product image, they are able to see a bigger zoomed in image of that product. You can also export this ecommerce template on to your eBay store, allowing you to improve your business's professional brand image. 

If you run an ecommerce store selling a number of different products, being able to avoid paying image hosting fees could save you a substantial amount of money each year. Our free ecommerce store and the services it provides all have no monthly fee, no set up costs and no other hidden charges whatsoever.

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Thursday, 25 October 2012

How to build a successful email marketing campaign

Working with a number of different clients on a regular basis, we at eSellution have found that one of the best marketing tools at a business's disposal is still email marketing. Although some people believe email marketing to be ineffective and intrusive, if done correctly email marketing can still be one of, if not the most effective way to direct traffic to your ecommerce store. 

So how do you go about creating the best marketing email possible for your business?

Research

First you need to think about what you are going to send and who you are going to sent it to. Is it going to be a promotion email? is it going to advertise new products? or a sale you are running? Once you have determined what the message of your email is going to be, you next need to look at who is going to be your target audience. Determining who your target audience is involves looking at many different factors. Is the email going to be sent to current customers or people you are looking to bring to your store for the first time? Also, are the majority of your customers a specific gender, age or people who have certain interests? If so, then you are going to want to create an email campaign that has a certain message such as what style you are going to write it in, what colours you use and what images you are going to include. 

Attention

Grab their attention
right from the off
Right out of the gate you need to grab the attention of the reader. This not only needs to stand out in the subject heading and at the top of the email, it needs to also be written in a way that is going to entice the reader in and compel them to read through the rest of your email. The best way to think about this is to imagine you are reading a newspaper. When you scan through a newspaper, what compels you to read an article? Usually it will be either the headline or the image that goes with the article. The inbox of the recipient is exactly like a newspapers, lots of messages all vying for their attention. You need to choose a subject heading that is going to allow your email to stand out from the rest. 

However, while you want to make it as interesting as possible, don't over think it or try to be funny. Simplicity is key. While you may think something is funny and clever, the likelihood is that your recipient won't. Keep it clear and to the point, while also being able to get them interested. 

Interest

Once you have their attention, you next need to perk their interest. This basically means you should start giving them the information in regard to what it is you are offering. For example, if you are running an online clothes store, you may be sending out an email advertising a new clothing range or an offer you are running on your site. To grab their interest you will begin to give the reader more information about what it is your store offers and what promotion you are currently running.

As success for your ecommerce store comes in enticing customers to purchase your products through high quality images of your products, don't forget to include this in your email. Having various images portraying the message of the email is a great way to increase a reader's interest and make them desire what it is you are offering.

Desire

Creating desire is the crucial part of any email. You could grab their attention, perk their interest, but if you can't seal the deal and make them want what you have, you're not going to bring them to your site. You need to make them feel like they have to have what it is you are offering. Again, using the 20% off promotional email idea, you have already explained to the customer the type of store you run and perked their interest by letting them know you are having a 20% off sale, now you can create that desire by telling them exactly what products are part of this promotion. Even if you aren't actually trying to directly sell them something, the principles work the same no matter what the overall message of the email is. You need to be able to tell them why they need to act on this email. 

Call to action

Leaving them all worked up with no where to go is going to be a waste of time for them reading through the email and for you creating it. At the end of the email you should have a direct link, allowing the user to act on their desire. If it is an email advertising the products in your store, you would add a direct link to your ecommerce site. If it is to try and boost your social media followers, you would include links to your relevant social media pages. Whatever the message of your email is, there needs to be an appropriate call to action that allows them to carry out some form of action. 

Split testing

To allow you to get the best possible results from your email marketing campaign, you may want to carry out a number of split tests. Depending on the ecommerce software you use, split tests allow you to essentially send a small number of recipients emails containing different messages and different subject headings. You can then see which subject heading and which email content provided you with the most opens and the highest CTR. You can the combine both of these aspects and send them as one email to the rest of your recipients, ensuring you have an email that will be as successful as you can possible make it.

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Wednesday, 24 October 2012

Ecommerce success starts with the basics

As we always say here at eSellution, helping yourself stand out form the crowd is the most crucial factor in terms of making your ecommerce store a success. In the past few weeks we have looked at ways you can stand out from your rivals through your website design, using free ebay templates, marketing yourself correctly and through the use of social media. However, if you have covered all of these bases, what things can you do to your products themselves in order to give your store that boost it possibly needs?

Basic Information

When you add a product through your ecommerce software, you sometimes overlook giving the basic information the attention it desires in an attempt to get the product listed on your store as soon as possible. Particular emphasis should be placed on the product title and the product description. When inserting a title for the product, it's often tempting to add some descriptive words that you believe make the product sound more appealing to customers. However, this really should be avoided at all costs. You need to think about your title as the phrase someone would type in to a search engine if they were looking to purchase that particular product. Having descriptive words in your title means that although you are sell the product they are looking for, as you title will be different from their search phrase, your product will appear further down search engine results. Your title should be clear, concise and directly to the point. No waffle or other special characters such as stars.

As you can see in the example, taken from one of our client stores, Krystellie Fashion, the title just has to say exactly what the product is and nothing more. Not only will this make your store seem much more professional, it will give you the best chance of achieving as much traffic as possible through search engine queries.

Now the description of your product will be a different length and style depending on the product you are selling. As a rule of thumb, the description should be at least a paragraph, providing the customer with as much information as possible. If you are selling more specialist products such as vehicle parts or industrial equipment, you will need to put more information on as the people who are buying these products from you will be knowledgeable in this field and will want specific information such as dimensions and other specifications. 

Meta Data

Just like your product title, your meta data for your product is the information which is going to help drastically improve your products exposure by having it appear higher in search queries related to your business. Your meta data generally falls within three different sections; meta title, meta description and meta keywords. At a starting point, both your meta title and meta description can just be the same as the basic information you entered for your product as long as the title is concise and to the point. The meta keywords for your product will require more effort on your part. These are keywords and phrases that relate to that product, For example, if the product is a womens summer dress, you may choose to enter "womens dress, summer dress, womens clothing, womens dresses" as your keywords. 

When deciding on which keywords you want to use for your products, you should use a keyword tool to determine how many searches those keywords have recently had. You want to use the keywords with the most searches as these are the ones that will provide you with the most traffic.

Alternate Images

As the old saying goes "a picture paints a thousand words" and your product images are no different. Although you may have included all the information a customer could ever need within the description, a good or a bad image is going to play a much bigger role in whether they decide to buy that product or not. Not only should your images be off a high standard, they should also show the product from different sides. If you have variations of the product, such as colour, you may want to also have images of the different colour variations. The more information you can provide a customer with, the happier they are going to be. 

Once you have got all the basics right for each of the products in your store, you can then look to market these products to customers through your various marketing channels. However, no matter how big your business gets, you need to remember that doing the simple things correctly right from the start is what's going to allow you to keep on having that success. 

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Tuesday, 23 October 2012

Top 10 factors that put customers off your store

A survey recently carried out has discovered the top 10 turn offs for customers when visiting an ecommerce store. They were as follows:

  • Site doesn't look secure - Having a website that not only looks secure but actually is as secure as is possibly can be, is vitally important in the long term success of your business. This means having secure servers to protect your customers information and having a secure payment gateway for them to purchase products for you. If any of these aspects aren't secure, it's going to make customers very reluctant to purchase for your store.

  • Bugs and technical issues with the site - Whatever it is, whether it's an ecommerce store or some other website, if a customer comes across a number of bugs when attempting to purchase from your online store, it is going to harm your perception of being a professional business. Again, this will result in you getting less long term and short term sales. 

  • Insufficient images and product information - When a customer looks to purchase a product, before they decide whether to buy it or not, they want to have as much information as they can about the product, allowing them to make a more informed decision. No matter what the product is, it should have a number of images showing the product from different angles as well as displaying all the information they may require such as specification, warranty, delivery options and anything else they may require. Like having an website that doesn't look secure, insufficient details for each product makes your site much less trustworthy.

  • Difficult to use shopping cart - Whether a customer visits your mobile store or ecommerce store, the simpler and easier it is for a customer to buy from your store, the happier they are going to be. If you find that customers are finding your shopping cart difficult to use, why not sign up to our ecommerce software and get a free ecommerce store today. We have developed our shopping cart to ensure it provides not only the best shopping experience possible, but is also easy to use for buyer and seller alike. 

  • Checkout form too long and time consuming - Again, as stated in the last section you need to try and make it as quick as possible for customers to purchase products. As you need their personal details to send out the products or to get in touch with them in the future, you have to have some form of contact information. However, to make it as simple as possible you could choose to have the most basic information such as name, email address, delivery address and credit card details. 

  • Poorly-designed website - Like an unsecured site or one with bugs or a poor shopping cart, the look of your site is an essential part to your business's overall brand image. If your website doesn't look good, it's going to harm your brand image. Again using eSellution as an example, when working with a number of clients every day, we also ensure that their website is of the highest possible standard in all aspects, to maximise the success they can achieve.

  • Slow website - On average, if a customer has to wait more than 3 seconds for a website to load, they are going to grow frustrated and leave the site altogether. You can imagine how many sales this will result in you missing out on if you have a slow loading website. While you want your online store to be appealing to the naked eye, the more images and content you have, the longer it is going to take to load. However, this problem is a lot more prominent in mobile stores as a mobile phone's 3G capabilities aren't as fast as a standard Internet connect. To improve the speed of your site, there are a number of things you can do such as having a cache system the first time a user visits your store, reducing the amount of images you have on your site or changing the format of your images to ones that are smaller in size. 

  • Lack of customer reviews and feedback - The opinions of customers have a huge weighting on whether or not someone decides to purchase from your store, as those using eBay will know all too well. If you have a product on your store which has a number of negative reviews, the likelihood is that your sales for this product will be pretty much non-existent. If you do find that certain products in your store are receiving many negative views, you may want to think about removing that product from your store altogether as it clearly isn't of the standard you want for your business. 

  • Retailer based outside of the UK - As they say, you always feel most comfortable when at home and online shopping is no different. If you are based outside of the UK, customers are going to be more hesitant to purchase from you because of a number of different factors such as time it will take to get to them, added cost in shipping and an added price they would have to pay in terms of the conversion rate. If you find that you are a successful ecommerce store looking to achieve success within the UK, you may need to think about creating a branch within the UK, allowing you to overcome all of these concerns that customers have.

  • Insufficient delivery options - Like all aspects of ecommerce shopping, the more options you provide your customers with, the happier they are going to be. As time is as much a crucial factor as price and quality, customers want the option to receive their goods as soon as possible but at an affordable price. When a customer purchases from your store they should be able to have standard delivery within 5 working day, express delivery within 2-3 working days and next day delivery. If you have all of these delivery options covered then you will find that the majority of your customers will be happy.
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How a Facebook store can improve all areas of your business

When setting up your ecommerce store, we understand the difficulties that sellers face in being able to stand out from the crowd, get people aware of your business and generate interest in what you have to sell. Although Facebook has seemingly ensured some hard times in the last year, the social media site stills offers a Facebook store option for all businesses to take advantage of.

However, many businesses tend to believe that this selling platform is only beneficial to large brands who have a large interest and followers on their Facebook business page. While in some regards this is true, it doesn't mean that a Facebook store can't be beneficial to smaller businesses in a number of different ways. We at eSellution provide everyone who signs up for a free ecommerce store, also with a free Facebook store as we believe having a Facebook store provides any business with a number of benefits.

First and foremost, it exposes all of your followers, whether they are customers or not, to the products you have to sell. Now, while a Facebook store may not be a fantastic selling platform, the channel compliments your ecommerce software package enormously by being a great marketing tool. Many people who follow your Facebook business page may be doing so just to see any offers or promotions you run and as they may be doing this for a number of different businesses, they would be reluctant to leave Facebook and view an external site just to browse through your store. Like I said earlier, your Facebook store allows Facebook followers to view your products without having to leave the social media site. If they do then find a product that they like the look of, they will either purchase it through the Facebook store, or this initial interest in a particular product will compel them to visit your ecommerce store and make the purchase there. 

With your products appearing within the social media site, your Facebook store also allows you to improve your brand awareness, as customers will be able to share any products they view in your Facebook store with friends linked to their account. As the link to your store is within Facebook, the friends that do receive this link will be more likely to click on it as they will see it as much more trusting than if it were just an external link. Again this is great product exposure and could result in some of these people deciding to also make a purchase as they look to gain recognition for their peers by shopping at the same place.

A Facebook store is very simple to set up and run. Like all of your ecommerce platforms we offer here at eSellution, it can all be managed through our easy to use dashboard. There is no extra worked required at all, the items that you have imported into your ecommerce store will simply be replicated into your Facebook store. 

With over a billion active monthly users and an average of around 300 friends per user, you can image how many extra people your products can be exposed to simply by having a Facebook store. 

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