In the ever more competitive world of retail, you need to remain ahead of your competition and attract more online shoppers by leveraging every weapon in your arsenal. You need to think about how to optimize your product listings for both conversions and search engines, how best you can use social media and paid advertising and how your product images are going to draw more shoppers in.
And it doesn’t end there!
Continuously finding new ways to attract more online shoppers can be a challenging mountain to climb. But by condensing your marketing strategies down into smaller tasks, you’re sure to succeed.
Here are five proven strategies for you to add to your goals list…
1. Harness the power of optimized product listings
We all know your product listings need to contain all of the necessary information to answer your consumer’s initial questions.
But once you have the basics in place, you need to go one step further.
Ensure your product listings match across all of your sales channels for product consistency, and that they are optimized for search engines so that your website can appear high in search results. (More on SEO shortly).
Whilst you’re optimizing your product listings, don’t forget to take this opportunity to improve upsell and cross-sell activity, keeping the user within your own product set.
Taking the opportunity to display some of your other products that can enhance or complement a customer’s purchase is a great way of offering more value to your client base, whilst increasing your sales and average order value.
2. Remember SEO!
To rank highly in search engines, you need to ensure your content, product pages and website copy are all optimized for search engines. In other words, they need to be SEO ready.
Here are a few things you need to have nailed on your website:
Keywords
All of your content such as product pages and blog posts should mention your keywords, which are the words you think your target audience are searching for online. Here are a few vital places that your keywords should be included in:
- Product page title and description
- Blog post title and content
- Page URL
- Image meta tag
When it comes to keywords, you want to be searchable but you still want to be human. Avoid ‘keyword stuffing’ as search engines won’t appreciate that (and neither will your customers)!
Links
Links in your content as well as other sites linking back to you is really important for SEO.
If search engines can spot authority sites linking back to you, or that your website offers more value to a reader by linking out to useful content, then you are sure to rank higher.
Consider devising a strategy to get you more of these types of links:
- Backlinks – Go on the hunt for authority sites that can link back to your products, or your about pages and your blog posts.
- Outbound links – Link out to valuable content that will help your reader.
- Internal links – Don’t forget your own pages! Link out to relevant product pages or blog posts that your reader might love to take a look at.
Ecommerce product pages
Remember to use your keywords in your product pages and where possible, consider using over 1000 words in your product descriptions. If you have similar products in different styles, avoid using the same words across your product pages – changing the style information isn’t enough for search engines not to think of this as duplicate content. Think of new ways to describe your products, rather than just copying and pasting across your website.
We’d also recommend reading BigCommerce’s detailed guide to SEO.
3. Get to grips with paid advertising and social ads
With a variety of advertising available to suit both your target audience and budget, you’re sure to find something that works for you. Let’s start by introducing you to some of the more common methods of paid advertising:
Google AdWords
Google AdWords is one of the most heavily used forms of paid advertising. You can choose whether to use display or text only ads with highly targeted keywords to maximize your efforts. As this is a pay-per-click (PPC) form of advertising, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, allowing you to control your budget. AdWords can be published on the web in as little as 15 minutes, and with the ad reaching consumers at the point of them looking for an answer to their question, they’re likely to be in a good place to make a purchase.
Social Media Ads
Advertising across social media channels has grown in popularity immensely over the years. And will continue to do so with Facebook’s latest changes to the news feed. As social media platforms garner a lot of information about a user, you can use this to your advantage by ensuring that your ads are heavily targeted based on demographics, location and even individual user preferences. This is a relatively cost effective form of advertising and allows you to set a strict budget per campaign. Providing you’ve done your research on exactly who your target audience is and what they’re most interested in, you can be sure that your campaign should be effective too. Social media users are (more often than not) receptive to ads as long as they provide value, are visually appealing and shareable.
Retargeting
Simply put, retargeting (also known as remarketing) is controlled by some code on your site to ‘follow’ visitors on their journey through the web. They will never know it’s there and you can use systems to show ads at the right time to those who have already visited your site, knowing they are much more likely to be interested in your offer than someone who has not yet heard of you. Factual information, clear call-to-actions or humor can be great content pieces to share via retargeting.
4. Use influencer marketing as part of your strategy
With lots of influencers actively engaged throughout most (if not all) industries and with the costs involved being less than you might think, this is one marketing strategy you may want to get involved with. In the past, influencer marketing was heavily attributed to celebrity endorsements.
But there has been a recent rise in the number of other types of influencer such as bloggers, vloggers, Instagram celebrities… the list goes on.
If you get on the right side of this kind of influencer, then they will help to spread the word about your brand, product and business very quickly. Here are just a few of the ways you can get influencers involved with your brand:
- Social Media Endorsements
- Sponsored Content
- Social Media Takeovers
You can often find influencers across social media (and slapped across search engines), but there are also influencer programs you can sign up to. These programs pride themselves in pairing your brand with the best influencer for your product, target audience and budget. Some programs to start researching are Intellifluence and Traackr.
5. Bring abandoned shoppers back
Did you know the average online shopping cart abandonment rate is over 77%?
With over 2/3 of shoppers bailing before buying, how do you get them back to complete their purchases?
Tools like Cloud IQ offer you the ability to automatically and immediately retarget customers that drop out during the checkout process. Sometimes sending a series of ‘Can I help you?’ remarketing emails, from within an hour to weeks later, can make all the difference in a sale conversion.
The key components of a good shopping cart abandonment email are:
- Personal sender
- Catchy subject line
- Visual reminders of the product(s)
- Personalization
- Consistent branding
- Clear call-to-action button
The other key advantages of prioritizing shopping cart abandonment is to see and learn why shoppers leave in the first place. You may need to revise your shipping and delivery costs, return policy, or revise and enhance your product listings and FAQ pages.
These are just some of the strategies you can implement to attract more online shoppers. To read about each of these in more detail and to find out what other strategies you can use, take a look at our free expert guide.
