Besides people, search engine spiders are also a key audience for you online. In order to crawl and index your website (periodically), search engine spiders need to be able to read your website easily. This is one more reason why it’s very important that you have a professional web designer custom build your website, with clean code that allows spiders to crawl your site thoroughly. A poorly designed and coded website can be a revenue killer for an E-commerce business.
Even if “potential customers” are impressed with your website the first time they visit, your job does not end there. You have to create a smart navigation structure, (especially on your HOME page) to entice customers to delve deeply into your product’s detail pages. This means your product’s detail pages should be set up to both showcase your products attractively, and to position related or complementary products nearby as well. This allows you to easily up-sell your products. It’s important to make your potential sales pages both very easy to navigate, and information-rich, so they provide any information customers might want to know about your products, quickly.
Today, many E-commerce businesses often mistake “leads” for “sales” which leads to lost potential revenue. Your site should be designed to take your “potential leads” all the way to your product-detail-pages and keep them there. Smart marketing messages and promotions can entice your “potential leads” to purchase, and prominent “call-to-action” buttons (“buy now” buttons) can help you convert sales more quickly. Most importantly, make it as simple and painless as possible for potential customers to pay you online. Your end goal is, of course, to turn as many leads, into direct sales, and these details are all important to reach that goal.
To provide a better experience on your E-Commerce website and to increase revenue, you should learn as much as you can about your customers. From their demographics, to where they were just prior to landing on your site, to how they behave on your site. This information will provide insightful feedback to help you tailor your website layout, functions and products to your customers’ needs. Here are two tools you can use to gain insightful knowledge about your customers:
1) Google Analytics: This is a powerful tool that not only allows you to measure your site’s traffic, it also lets you know where each of your visitors came from. This will help you to better market your business to customers based on their location, culture, or even language. Google Analytics is a free tool and provides many insightful reports.
2) CrazyEgg. This tool allows you to see how customers behave on your website. CrazyEgg’s “Heat-Map” reports show which page or section of a page customers visited and where they clicked on your site. It also shows which sites your visitors came from such as Facebook, Twitter, Google.com, Bing.com, etc. These reports can help inform your decisions on how to layout your webpages to best meet your customers’ needs. It also helps you decide which websites you may want to invest more in, based on who brings the most referral traffic to your site. CrazyEgg is a paid tool, but for only about $9 per month, it is well worth all the feedback you’ll get on how customers behave on your site.
To effectively market your business to customers online, and to successfully convert new leads to sales, these are critical steps to take while developing and establishing your E-commerce website. If you need professional assistance to get started or want to learn more about our E-commerce web design service, contact our Minneapolis web design firm at: (612) 590-8080.
