Strategic Ways to Improve your E-commerce Store’s Performance

Striving to become “the most customer-centric company on Earth,” Amazon has set the bar high for smaller e-commerce brands.

Today, shoppers expect online retail brands to provide exceptional customer service, create amazing content, and understand their specific needs and preferences. They are even ready to pay more for relevant deals and products.

So, apart from competitive prices, what techniques should you use to improve your e-commerce store’s performance?

Keep your Site Easily Navigable

Many customers will abandon your website if it is difficult to navigate through. To avoid that, ensure your visitors can find the right products and purchase them effortlessly.

Start by optimizing your navigation menu. Reduce the number of categories and subcategories. Instead of traditional drop-down menus, consider using hamburger navigation bars that will save you lots of space. They bring all your links to a single place and perform great both on desktop and mobile devices.

Apart from a navigation bar, add search boxes and filtering options that will help those customers find specific products and brands.

Add internal links to help customers explore new content.

Show breadcrumbs to help visitors understand where they are while browsing through your site

Provide Exceptional Customer Service

With so many brands in your industry, you need to give your customers a good reason to purchase from you. Before making buying decisions, customers will compare different online stores, their services, products, prices, etc.

Apart from amazing website design and top-quality products, seamless customer service will help you stand out in the competitive market. According to research, 1 in 3 customers would not purchase from you again after a negative experience with your brand, while over 90% of them would never come back after two negative experiences.

To provide exceptional customer support, offer real-time feedback across multiple channels. Provide live chat options. Once your customer support representatives clock off, let customers chat with your website or social media chatbot that provides relevant feedback 24/7. You should also have a detailed knowledge base and an FAQ section for users that prefer self-service.

Keep Communications Transparent

E-commerce logistics plays an important role in increasing customer satisfaction. If a customer sees a product on your website, adds it to the shopping cart, spends time filling out the form, and then sees that the product is temporarily out of stock, they will probably leave your site frustrated. The same applies to delivery services. The abovementioned study says that half of the customers believe that retailers are responsible for product delays, while 74% of them say that late deliveries harm brand perceptions.

That is why you need to keep your communications with customers transparent. Let customers track their package. Before purchasing from you, inform them about the estimated delivery date. Show how many items there are in your stock. Amazon does this for every product on its site. If there are any shipping problems, keep customers updated and provide refunds.

Sure, to do any of that, you will first need to optimize your manufacturing and inventory management processes. Keeping track of your materials, orders, inventory, and sales can be complex if you are still entering data manually into spreadsheets. This is where you could use cloud-based manufacturing software and centralize these activities under a single platform.

Personalize User Experiences

Surveys show that 62% of online customers expect to get personalized offers. For them, one-size-fits-all offers do not work anymore. There are numerous ways to tailor your e-commerce brand messaging to your customers’ specific needs:

• Track customers’ geolocation, browsing patterns, and historical purchases to offer more relevant products and services.

• Segment your emails. When a customer signs up for your newsletter list, ask them about what kind of products, promotions, and content they are interested in. Based on their preferences, segment customers into relevant groups and send the promotions they care about.

• Personalize user experiences on your website. Use AI chatbots to personalize interactions with customers and recommend relevant products. Sephora even lets users upload their photos to try out different makeup products and choose the right one.

Create Awesome Content

In the digital marketing landscape, content creation is critical. It lets you position yourself as an authoritative online resource, engage users, and deliver value to them.

Start by creating informative, unique, and data-backed articles. Produce infographics, whitepapers, comprehensive how-to guides, and tutorials to solve your customers’ problems and inform them about the latest industry trends.

Focus on visual content. Remember that your customers cannot see or feel your products. Take photos of products from multiple angles. Use 360-degree videos that will make your products even more appealing. Video content, such as unboxing videos or tutorials, is always great, as it evokes emotions in users, engages them, and inspires brand loyalty.

Finally, focus on user-generated content. Make testimonial videos and let your satisfied customers tell your story. Case studies will explain what problems your customers faced and how they solved them using your products.

Conclusions

Today’s e-commerce landscape has become increasingly customer-centric. Precisely because of that, you should optimize your website with your shoppers’ needs in mind. And, these tactics may serve as your solid starting point.

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How to Increase Your Average Order Value Through Product Recommendations

Product recommendations are one of the most powerful selling techniques around. Think about a time you’ve visited a brick and mortar store. We all think we’re immune to salesmen. In reality, it’s hard not to be swayed by someone who knows more than you do.

Of course, in the world of online shopping, it’s harder to take advantage of this effect. However, there are still steps you can take to steer your customers towards the perfect product for them.

These days, product recommendations are still an effective way to boost order values on e-commerce stores. In this article, we’ll look at several ways that this can be achieved, as well as some concrete examples of product recommendations in action.

First, some background...

Why you Should Use Product Recommendations

The core of any good product recommendation strategy is figuring out which products are right for your customers. However, unlike in the past, this isn’t done with personal intuition or expertise.

Instead, the e-commerce sphere uses data on its customers to decide on the best product recommendations. This can be done with a native function in your e-commerce platform or using a third-party plugin.

This is great since you don’t need to be a data science expert to get the benefits of product recommendations. All the same, it’s important to understand a little bit of the theory behind these tools.

In practice, there are three main ways that these tools come up with product recommendations:

1. The Content Focused method - This uses cookies to track your customer’s behavior, to determine their likes and interests

2. The Collaborative method - This uses buying patterns from other customers to find trends as a basis for product recommendations

3. The Hybrid Method - This uses elements of the first two methods in tandem

Now you understand what makes product recommendation tools tick. Next, we’ll look at how to leverage these to increase your average order value.

There are two ways that these techniques will increase order values:

1. By steering customers towards a more expensive alternative product

2. Or by encouraging customers to buy additional products as accessories or add-ons

Now, here’s ten ways that this works in practice.

Suggested Products

The most common product recommendation you’ll find uses the ‘recommended for you’ format. This is a hybrid approach. To some extent, it can take into account the customer’s browsing history. Mostly though, it just recommends similar items.

The goal is to increase order values by directing customers to a pricier alternative.

As much as this is a popular way to recommend products, it’s also not the most effective approach. There’s generally very little real personalization, so these recommendations tend to have poor conversion rates.

The example above is from ASOS, but the only thing all of the products on display share is that they’re ostentatious shoes.

While a product recommendation like this is better than nothing, you have several much better options. A ‘recommended for you’ style recommendation is the bare minimum that you should implement.

Email Recommendations

Of course, product recommendations can also appear off your site. This is most often done through email marketing. The benefits of this are numerous. For one thing, it can help you to salvage lost sales through cart abandonment emails.

However, using email marketing to increase order values works a little differently. That is after you’ve optimized and sent your email with a great sales email subject line, you have a shorter window of opportunity to upsell extra products or upgrades. For physical products, this is before the initial order is dispatched.

If you sell services, this is a little easier.

In either case, the trick is to use your standard automated emails to recommend products. The great thing about this is that users are more likely to open something like an order confirmation than they are a pure marketing email.

Here’s a typical RyanAir booking confirmation, for example.

Frequently Bought Together

This is probably the most common way to increase order values by adding additional products to the cart. This is generally used when someone is viewing a high-value item. You then push additional low-value items as accessories or necessary add-ons like batteries.

These are pretty effective, but since they’re computer-generated, you can end up with some weird combinations. In the above example, it’s hard to say why anyone would need three pairs of headphones and a Bluetooth speaker.

This example would probably be more effective if they recommended lower value items, like a charging cable or carry case for the first set of wireless headphones.

Customer’s Browsing History

To utilize these product recommendations, you need to collect a certain amount of customer data and then track their behavior. As well as increasing order values, this is a handy way to eke out higher lifetime values from your customers.

The way this works is that a customer isn’t always ready to buy the first time they view a product. However, they might then forget about that product entirely. This type of recommendation is simply a gentle reminder.

Nobody tracks their customers like Amazon. On their homepage, they have a widget to display the last ten or so items you viewed, like so.

This can remind you of an item you previously considered. Equally, it can leave you scratching your head about why you were looking at banana slicers.

Related Item Recommendations

This is another technique aimed at increasing order values by adding on additional products. However, it works slightly differently from ‘frequently bought together’ recommendations. That is, they go together, but they aren’t necessarily bought together often.

Generally, this is because they’re items with a similarly high value, rather than one high-value item and one or more lower value accessories.

Equally, it could be a combination of many high and low-value items.

This is very effective in niches, like home improvement, where customers can be pushed from buying a single product to taking on an entire project. For instance, the example above would more than double the initial order value.

Bundles

Similarly, you have product bundles. With a product bundle, you offer a discount when all the items are purchased together. This type of product recommendation works best when the customer is going to need the extra items at some point anyway.

The goal then is to get them to buy them from you straight away, rather than someone else down the line. The discounted price incentivizes this.

Product bundles are also great, as you can offer flexibility. Budgets differ, so not every customer can afford everything they need all at once. Offering different tiers of product bundle helps to overcome this challenge by offering something in every price range. This is the kind of thing you see a lot of and is effective if you are pushing an offer to your e-store for affiliate marketing purposes.

Updated Products

Humans are simple creatures. One way to show this is how much we love shiny and new things. It’s easy to take advantage of this fact when selling goods. This works well with prestige goods.

This is precisely why car companies release a new model every year. Even if the changes are minuscule, a certain number of people will still splash out on the new model, because it’s the new model.

Similarly, this works well with high-value consumer goods, like computers, cameras, and phones.

Luckily, newer models also tend to have a higher list price.

What’s great about these recommendations is that they require very little effort on your part. Check out the example above. There’s no compelling copy or fancy calls to action. The fact that it’s a newer model is enough.

What Others Bought

One of the most sophisticated ways to use product recommendations is to display what products other people ended up buying. From a marketing perspective, this is gold, since it taps into the herd mentality.

The European music retailer Thomann uses this in a creative and impressive way.

There’s a bunch of things to take in here. Look at the pricing, for instance. Only one of the recommended alternatives is below the price of the item the customer is viewing. This has two effects. It provides a sense of choice while also directing the customer to more expensive alternatives.

Also, the percentage of customers who went for each option is displayed, providing a strong element of social proof to encourage conversions.

Finally, the most popular item is displayed first in the list, underscored with its availability in green text. This is a powerful way to encourage customers to commit to a purchase.

As a bonus, displaying alternative products like this is a great way to rank for long-tail keywords. This is an easy way to use your page structure to boost on-page SEO.

Best Sellers

Another easy to implement technique is directing customers towards the bestselling items in a certain niche. This works in two main ways. Firstly, it focuses your selling efforts on the most popular options. These are naturally the easiest to gain conversions.

‘Bestsellers’ recommendations also have a layer of social proof.

This works better in some industries than others. In particular, these product recommendations are effective in niches with a strong emphasis on trends. The obvious example is fashion.

The example above makes good use of star ratings, which you can add as a structured data markup to your search results. This helps to project quality and legitimacy.

Customers Also Viewed

This kind of recommendation is pretty simple, but if you’re only going to implement one of these techniques, it’s a pretty good all-rounder. The crux of this is that it displays both alternatives and add-ons to increase order values.

This example appears on a listing for a shirt.

As you can see, the recommendation points the customer towards other shirts, as well as hoodies and jackets.

You’ll also notice that most of these are pretty much in the same price range. This is a safe bet for this kind of product recommendation, as customers probably already have a certain budget in mind.

Recommending a Rolex wouldn’t be nearly as effective.

How to Increase Average Order Values with Product Recommendations

One thing is for sure. You’ve got a lot of different options when it comes to product recommendations. However, your best bet is to use a number of these techniques all on the same page.

There’s a reason that big ecommerce platforms like eBay and Amazon usually have dozens of different recommendations on every single listing. Each one builds on the last to boost order values and conversion rates.

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ABOUT: OWEN BAKER

Owen Baker is a content marketer for Voila Norbert, an online email verification tool. He’s spent over a decade in online marketing. He enjoys sharing his knowledge of content marketing across a range of websites.

E-commerce Marketing: Build a Successful E-commerce Business Using Social Media

Social media has taken over the business world. With all businesses now having their own social media accounts, taking advantage of the audience reach that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn has throughout the world. With this in mind, it only makes sense for businesses, no matter how big or small they may be, to dive into the social media world to promote their brand. This is especially true for e-commerce businesses.

Whether you are a college student making money online or a seasoned businessperson who have decided to take on the challenge of technological advancement, there are a number of things that you should know about in terms of e-commerce stats and social media marketing.

Why is social media important for e-commerce?

It is projected that by 2020, 90% of businesses will be using a social media platform to connect with their consumers. At the same time, data shows that customers tend to spend 20-40% more for companies who interact with customers through social media. This proves that social media interactions can help increase traffic towards your business and help you create a good reputation for your brand.

How do you drive traffic from social media?

The social media is the perfect place to build three important things for businesses:

• connections

• relationships

• engagements

By connecting and interacting with your customers, you get to create a positive brand reputation and provide your consumers with a venue for them to express their opinion about your products and services. By providing your customers with a positive experience, you get to foster better relationships with your consumers, receive recommendations and drive sales towards your business.

Tactics for eCommerce Social Media

There are a variety of ways for business owners and social media managers to drive traffic towards their brand. No matter what products or services you are offering, it’s still important that you have a better grasp of how social media works and how to take advantage of it.

1. Position Yourself Uniquely

What particular aspect of your business differentiates you from your competitors. One thing that you have to understand is because social media is a great way to reach out to more people, you will not be the only one promoting their brand online. So to stay ahead of the game and to really make a mark in your industry, you should decide what you want to be for your consumers and use that idea when you create a compelling brand story. Your aim here is to improve the customer experience and promote a positive brand that people will remember.

2. Increasing Friends and Followers

Followers are more than just numbers. Yes, the algorithm of some social media platforms does look into the number of your followers and subscribers, but more than that, your followers can actually be your most loyal fans and customers who will do everything to share their happiness towards your brand and recommend you to as many people as possible. To be able to gain more followers, you should create a content that will help you promote your brand, reach more audiences and rise above your competitors. You might also want to ride the trend of automating your Instagram interactions through one of the 10 best Instagram bots of 2019.

3. Promotional Posts

First of all, you need to understand that promo posts are aimed towards your prospective customers. You should keep in mind that the promotional post you will be making should be geared towards gathering more followers and potential clients. Thus, you need to make your posts more relatable to the public, depending on what your brand is all about.

4. Live Streaming Videos

Live broadcasts can help enhance and maximize your direct communications with your customers, followers and community partners. Live streaming an event gives you the opportunity to reach out and interact with more people across the world. Live streams also take less time to produce and this gives you and your customers the opportunity to share your thoughts about your brand and everything in between.

5. Instant Messaging

The great thing about your business having a social media channel is that it also provides you and your customers with a means of communication. Be it for customer support, inquiries, complaints, etc., taking advantage of the instant messaging app is a great means for you to maintain better relationships and interactions with your followers.

6. Facebook and Instagram Stories

Another means of improving your interactions with followers and gaining more potential customers is by using the Instagram Stories bar. This feature allows users to post a content that will remain live for 24 hours and will disappear thereafter.

Many social media managers and brands are taking advantage of this feature to post live and timely updates about any particular event or interesting story that they would like to share with their followers. This can also help increase your one-on-one communications with customers as any interaction they do on any Story that you post, you will get a direct message from them.

7. In-app Purchases

The best innovation ever made available in various social media platforms is the option of buying products and making payments in-app. This feature allows e-commerce businesses to make it easy for their potential clients to place orders and purchase any product or service that they are promoting.

Among all generations, millennials have the most spending power online. They are more open to doing in-app purchases, while social media users of higher age demographics are still more comfortable with doing in-store purchases. But the good thing about the availability of social media stores is that they can also drive more customers to the stores. This means that an online store is a great way for businesses to acquire more customers.

Whether you are selling products or offering professional services, and no matter what industry you may be in, social media has proven how much of a valuable tool it can be. Whether it’s for customer relations, retention, or support, data gathering, or sales, your business can gain a lot of benefits from creating a social media account. By having a better understanding of how you can better harness the power of social media, you can start gaining more potential customers and achieving business success online.