Online spending in the US is now a $600 billion part of life. If you have an ecommerce website, maximizing your share of that is crucial to your success. Ecommerce experts recommend you pay attention to the needs and wants of your customers and make their online shopping experience as easy as possible. You need to stand out from the more than 1.1 million online shopping sites in the US.
Avoiding some simple mistakes and bad practices will help you stand out. Creating a professional and responsive approach to your ecommerce site will do, too.
Here are 9 common ecommerce mistakes you should avoid.
1. Don’t Preach to the Customer
Just because you know what you want to sell, doesn’t mean it’s what your customers will want to buy. If you preach to your customers about your products but they want something else, you’ll lose sales quickly.
Tailor your ecommerce website to what the customer wants and you’ll have much more success and sales. Ecommerce experts consistently outline ways in which you can understand more about your customers.
2. Don’t Ignore Email Marketing
Focusing on social and paid social is trendy but good, old email marketing is effective and has demonstrable ROI. As a lead-generation tool, email is excellent. Sixty-one percent of customers prefer to be contacted through email.
Build your email lists through your other marketing channels so that you can contact your customers with promos and follow-ups.
3. Don’t Make it Hard for a Customer to Buy From You
Make sure your website and shopping cart perform well. If it’s hard for a customer to complete the buying experience, they won’t.
Reduce the number of steps people have to take to get to the shopping cart. There are reasons one-click shopping works.
4. Listen to the Ecommerce Experts and Avoid the Hard Sell
Customers are savvy. Modern customers don’t want to be given the hard sell. Traditional advertising is on the wane.
All these truisms are just that because your customer is interested in connecting with your story and your brand. As Marketing Rebellion author Mark Schaefer says, it’s the most human company that succeeds.
Tell your story through your email, social, and website so that customers are interested in you and your site.
5. Don’t Ignore Loyal Customers
Offer special deals to loyal customers. Invest in a rewards program and a loyalty program. Doing these things will encourage people to return to buy more things from your site.
A good loyalty program can improve customer retention (and therefore sales) by as much as 25 percent.
Loyalty programs include things like special discounts and rebates, rewards for consistent purchasing, free merchandise or swag, coupons offered to “insiders” that others don’t get, and special access or advance access to new products.
6. Don’t Make People Wait
According to ecommerce experts, one of the easiest ways to make people enjoy their experience on your site and come back again is to fulfill their order quickly.
Rapid order fulfillment and shipping are expected. Fast and free is the norm.
But 1 and 2-day shipping can drive your costs up. Even if you can’t afford to ship items overnight, you can make the process transparent.
Use emails to keep customers updated on what is happening to their orders. These emails are good touchpoints on a customer journey. Let them know the order is being processed, tell them when it has shipped, and provide them with tracking information if you can.
7. Don’t Ignore Your Customers
Respond to your customers. No matter how they contact you, ecommerce experts recommend you respond directly and quickly.
Interact with your customers when they are positive and negative about your site. Thank them for kind comments with a reward to help generate repeat business.
Deal with their concerns when they have them with honesty and transparency. If you don’t respond in good time to a complaint, you can lose more than a third of your customers.
8. Don’t Focus Solely on Selling Your Product
Create a content marketing strategy. You will gain customers by giving them content they can use and appreciate. A good blog will drive people to your site for the content. There’s a good chance they will stay or return to buy from you.
Make videos that show how people use your products or inform customers on how to use them. Create content that is linked to trending subjects or the news cycle.
Make sure your content is built for SEO. Use keywords that link to the products you sell. If people can find you in the top 10 results of an organic search, your site will get clicks and people will see what you’re selling.
9. Hire a Marketing Agency that Specializes in Ecommerce
You may well have marketing expertise in your ecommerce business, but working with the pros can really push your ecommerce engagement to new levels. A marketing agency that specializes in ecommerce will look at your sales funnel from start to finish. They will work with you to make sure all these other tips here don’t go to waste.
Whether you need help with content creation, customer retention tactics, or email marketing campaigns, a marketing agency can put you on the right track to ecommerce success.
Avoid These Mistakes and Grow Your Ecommerce Website
If you follow these 9 tips that ecommerce experts stand by, your site will thrive. You’ll need to put the work in. These mistakes exist because people don’t spend the time and effort on their site and customers they need to.
Now that you’ve read about these mistakes, though, you’re in a better position to respond to the needs and wants of your customers.
To amplify your return on your investment, get in touch with us to get an opinion from an ecommerce expert on how you can improve your online shopping experience.
