How to Achieve Your 2015 E-Commerce Goals

2014 was a huge year for e-commerce retailers. Here’s to the New Year in e-commerce! Here’s a quick idea guide to achieving your goals for the New Year, 2015.

Want to increase traffic?

Use Advertising Effectively: If you do use advertising such as Pay Per Click or display ads, make sure that this traffic is going to a specially designed landing page for the ad. Send them to a product page or a selection of products and not the homepage – by doing this you will be creating less friction between entry, add to cart, and the final purchase. These landing pages are your chance to funnel visitors in and make those clicks count.

Retarget Those Customers! Retargeting is having a huge year. With newer ad offerings such as Adroll where customers will see personalized recommendations along with the products they’ve viewed recently, retargeting is becoming even more of an effective tool for e-retailers.

Decrease Bounce Rates: you might have the traffic, but if you have high bounce rates you may be losing most of your traffic within the first minute of the customer entering your site. Look for pages with high bounce rates and see what you can improve. Is the homepage confusing? Is it not showcasing any products up front? Does it lack banners that beg the customer to click on them? Make a note of potential changes and sign up for a service such as Optimizely where you can test changing elements of the site. Make small changes to see the most impact – too much change and you risk alienating the customer. Small adjustments, such as one or two small design changes at a time will help you fine tune your A/B testing.

Want to Improve Your Conversion Rates?

 The Secret Tool – Your In-Site Search. Visitors that use your site search are way more likely to convert than visitors that don’t use the site search. According to a Screen Pages study, use of the search box results in an average conversion rate of 2.4%, against a site average of 1.7%. Based on one of the site audits we’ve done for one of our clients, visitors that used the site search box (only around 13% of site visitors) to make a purchase were driving 40% of the revenue.  Are you providing your visitors with an optimal experience? Is the site search bar easy to find and offer relevant search results? To make you’re your e-commerce site search is optimized, create landing pages for commonly searched terms, adjust the search to send misspellings to the right products, and make sure to send customers with product codes directly to the product page. Some other options to improve search are extensions such as Solr Search and integrations with companies such as SLI Systems that deep dive into your search data to improve your product selection and offer highly relevant product suggestions. Site search reports are also a great tool to see what products are searched for the most so you can improve your product selection to better cater to your customers.

Email Is Still One of the Best Conversion Drivers Out There: According to Custora, over the Thanksgiving weekend, email marketing generated 23.1 percent of online orders, beating free search and paid search. Email may be an old hat but is still one of the most powerful conversion drivers marketers can use. Even in Monetate’s E-Commerce Quarterly in Q1 2013, email marketing shined with a conversion rate at 3%. Email marketing still wins as the most cost-effective marketing channel for businesses maintaining customer engagement, according to a study by Forrester Consulting. Segment your customer base to truly capture the power behind this marketing channel and make sure to set up abandoned cart emails. Other email based innovations include in-email transactions, responsive design, and microsegment targeting. The most powerful emails are emails that use context-based content, such as showing relevant product suggestions to customers based on their order history or open time customization based on when the email message is opened.

These are only just a few recommendations – there many more ways to help improve conversion and increase traffic in e-commerce. Everyone needs to have a well-rounded multi-channel marketing plan to truly make an impact. Take the time in the New Year to improve your site so you can be even more prepared for the holidays. Keep in mind that in any e-commerce website changes, planning must be in advance. Allow at least two months for any major changes, including server configuration, email campaigns, responsive design, and more. 2015 is bound to be another big year for e-commerce.

Want to Achieve Your Goals This Year? Contact Forix Today.