The appeal for businesses to expand their target market by creating an ecommerce website may sound much easier than it really is. Many small business owners in San Diego and other cities think that creating an e-commerce website is easy and requires little overhead. The truth is it can be, but how successful will you be with a store that has no marketing backbone? Here are five ways that your ecommerce website can achieve success.
1) Make shopping your website easy
There are so many bells and whistles that can be implemented in today’s shopping cart software that make the buying experience more cumbersome. One of my least favorite sites to buy things is GoDaddy, because during the checkout process you go through about 5 pages of non-sense that they are trying to up-sell you on. It is annoying and obvious. Let customers shop the way they want to shop, don’t overwhelm the design with too much clutter.
2) Take advantage of Email Marketing
Use the data you acquire from former customers, prospective clients, and other resources at your disposal to target future business through email marketing. Consider adding a newsletter signup form to your website or weekly specials email to the checkout process of your site. This will help you accumulate data that you can use to market in a very targeted and traceable manner.
3) Find the shopping cart software that is right for your business
As a web design company we are always asked which is the best shopping cart software to use? The answer I give is that ‘it depends’… There are factors that would lead me down a few different paths. How many products do you plan on selling? How often will products be added/changed? How is fulfillment handled? These are only a few of the important questions, but clearly there can be very different responses which means that out of the hundreds of shopping cart platforms out there, some are a better fit than others in certain scenarios.
4) Effectively manage search engine marketing campaigns
Sponsored search advertising on Google is an incredibly effective way to drive site traffic. It is however its own beast when it comes to being successful and understanding how to manage Adwords. Marketing dollars can very easily be wasted on attracting the wrong users if campaigns, keywords, and landing pages are not properly controlled. My recommendation is to utilize an internet marketing company that can help you can setup correctly if not entirely manage this process.
5) Generate new content on a regular basis
One of the biggest components of search engine optimization (SEO) is that Google, Bing, and others are looking for fresh content when they crawl your site. Generating new content on a regular basis through blogs, page creation, or other outlets will help improve your organic ranking over time, give users a reason to come back to your site, and demonstrate that your business is active.
Here is another great resource for being successful with e-commerce websites.
2 Comments