It’s true the e-commerce business is showing impressive growth globally.

But, an increasingly competitive environment demands that you continually innovate on your strategies to both maintain and improve your e-commerce sales.

Without wasting any more of your time, here’s how you can sharpen your e-commerce strategy, boost sales and get better ROI.

#1 Focus on Customer Experience

Let me ask you this, what shapes a customer experience?

Well, there are many aspects to that, and here I shall share and discuss the most vital ones with you.

• Ease of navigation – While people are online, they usually lack patience and are not ready to compromise on convenience or ease of use.  If you want potential customers to latch onto your e-commerce website, you should ensure that your customers are able to quickly reach to the page where they can spot the products they want to buy.

• As few steps as possible – Once the customer has selected what they need to buy, the remaining steps for them to complete the payment and log out from your website should be minimal, this is very important.

• Give importance to content / description – Customers looking to shop over the internet are generally prudent.  Hence, before they decide to order, they will of course look at the description to ensure that the product is in line with their expectation.  Ideally, the description needs to be easy to read, informative, and they should be able to clarify on the important attributes of the product.

• Reviews – Reviews are very critical, and the more you have, the easier it is for your customers to make a decision.

• Product images – The product images should be very clear, sharp and give a 360 degree view, so that customer can make an informed decision.  For high-end products, I would definitely recommend including insightful product videos.

#2 Offer Incentives for Customers

Incentives can provide much needed motivation to a customer to go ahead and buy products from your online portal, rather than move to your direct competitor.

Incentives align your interest with the customers’ and hence they are quite effective tools in converting a visitor into a customer.

You can reward customers for referrals or provide incremental discounts as they buy more from you.

It is also important to recognize your special or repeat customers by providing them with privileges.  This encourages them to be loyal to you in the future.

#3 Be Mobile Friendly

A growing proportion of online customers are making purchases either through their smartphones or tablets.

If your portal doesn’t address their needs, you are missing out on a significant portion of the online business pie.

Your eCommerce website has to be so designed to give your mobile customers a great viewing and shopping experience.

The website has to have a responsive design, and should adapt to the size of the display screen, or you need to create a separate mobile website for mobile users.

#4 Crunch the Numbers, Analyze the Data

You may be happy about getting a decent number of customers on your online portal, but to make sure you continue to get business from them in the long run, you need to find out who they are and how they are reaching your website.

You can get this information through search analytics.

You also need to measure how many of the e-mails you sent helped you get customers, or which keywords or PPC campaigns translated into business.

By doing so, you get a clue on which marketing and promotional efforts are paying off, and which ones are not productive.

Accordingly you can plan to scale up the more productive ones, and scale down the unproductive ones.

#5 Nurture Multiple Sources of Lead Generation

While search engine optimization is a great way to drive traffic to your online portal, it is not the only, or the most effective way, of getting visitors.

Besides, over dependence on SEO may be risky; there are continual changes in search algorithms so you run the risk of finding your portal being ignored by the search engines over time.

Hence, you also need to try out alternate promotional channels / marketing channels like social media advertising, Google Adwords, video marketing and E-mail campaigns.

While you try out multiple channels, also measure their productiveness so that you can optimize your marketing spend, to maximize the return on your investment.

The Bottom Line

So folks, at the end of the day your success depend on getting found by your audience, making it easy for visitors to browse your online store and on providing quality goods and services.

By keeping a close eye on search analytics and making quick decisions on the basis of the data, you can hone your eCommerce strategy.  Needless to say, this will help you retain loyal customers, get new visitors and boost your sales.

You can also join us for E-commerce Marketing Course.