I have been getting a lot of positive feedbacks with the first article [read here], sharing lessons learned setting up your online store. So now I am adding a few more learnings that I hope you can adopt with your ecommerce site.
Cross marketing/Upsell
There will come a time where your operations have stabilized and you are now looking forward to increasing your revenue. First thing that you would think of is increase traffic, but before you try on paid ads and other advertising platforms check on the things you could cross promote on your site.
Some examples:
Upsell on your product page
You can also reward your customers for actions they make on your website
eCommerce is a numbers game
One thing I learned from my boss is that more than the creative marketing you execute it all boils down to numbers. If X number of sessions can generate X sales revenue, then you can work your numbers back to achieve the sales target. It’s not about pageviews but sessions(online foot traffic) that matters.
Sharing you a guide for your eCommerce computation
 |
| Courtesy of Mon Lizardo |
Lesser clicks = more conversion
We were going through a website redesign and one of the bosses requested that hover feature to be available, so that customers won’t be required to click to see the content. It actually make sense, if in other websites you want customers to keep on clicking pages, for eCommerce you want the customer journey to be as short as possible. Try visiting your favorite online store, they will usually have the following:
- Hover to expand categories
- Express checkout
- Pop up to proceed to checkout
Keep your content fresh
Just like any other websites or brick and mortar stores, you need to give customers reason to visit your website. This can be done through various marketing activities, but the basic action you should be doing is updating content of your website. This means updating your banners, hot items, best sellers, adding new type of products and more. If you notice with the top online stores, they usually have regular campaigns; rainy day promos, gift ideas for mother’s day, new items, daily deals, etc. The most common mistake for website owners is launching the site then not updating it regularly.
Master your platform
Chances are you are running with one of the ecommerce platform, which if you have done you research right, ecommerce platforms has tons of hidden features that you can actually use. We are using magento for almost a year now, and still getting to know some of the features that we are not able to maximize. Some features that is usually available on an ecommerce platform.
- Coupon codes
- Special discounts [specify duration]
- Bundling [group together SKU’s for a special price without the need to separate inventory]
- Alert for low stock inventory
- Special discount for a customer group (ex. 10% for all employees, 5% for registered users, free shipping for guest users, etc)
Hope this article was able to add knowledge to your ecommerce journey! Share us some of tips and experience with running your own online store, post a comment below. 🙂
Haven’t read part 1? read here: https://www.techglimpse.ph/2014/10/things-i-wish-i-knew-before-starting-e.html
Looking for an e-Commerce consultant? Let’s talk sherwin.yeo@gmail.com 🙂
Nice read! very helpful especially I'm starting my online store! 🙂