As we all know, online shopping is not new for a very long time now and many people choose to look for goods and various offers there. Not only searches, but also shopping is often moving from physical to online stores.
Such a change in people's behavior only further strengthens the importance of advertising and communication on the Internet: especially for companies that conduct their activities exclusively in the Internet. What should you pay most attention to in order for the website to bring the desired results?
Data tracking
Adequate and high-quality data is one of the main things that companies should take care of in their daily commercial activities online.
If you're using Google Analytics to track and collect data on your website, make sure your accounts have as many good practices as possible:
Google Analytics 4 account created and properly prepared.
Proper tracking of key parameters relevant to your business is ensured. This can be the successful completion of various contact forms, adding or removing goods from the cart, paying for goods or other actions performed by users that are important to you.
The sources through which most of your traffic comes should be properly identified, irrelevant or misleading sources should be filtered out: it is essential to aim for the highest possible data quality and accuracy.
For e-commerce-type businesses, it is especially important to ensure that the main steps of the user journey are visible, from the first visit to the website to the purchase of the product. This will help you better understand at which stage people leave the site without making a purchase. Such information will be useful for future analyzes and possible site optimization actions.
Landing page
The pages that visitors arrive at organically or through advertising media play one of the most important roles in the user journey. These are the very first pages people see after clicking on a banner or organic search result. The following actions of potential buyers depend on what and how they see on the page and what experience they get. There are usually two actions - visitors, who did not find what they expected, leave the page or become interested and continue navigating on other pages of the website.
Thus, ensuring good practices for campaign pages is a must. What is the most important thing to pay attention to?
Clear headings. Try to highlight essential offers aimed at attracting visitors: major promotions, discounts, coupons or other exclusive offers.
Call-to-actions. Be clear about what action you are encouraging the visitor to take. It can be both a typical "Shop today" and "Sign up and get an additional 10% discount". It is important that these texts are visible and clear.
Adaptation for mobile devices. The smartphone gives us the opportunity to search for various information at any time, for example, while standing in line or riding a bus. For this reason, it is especially important to ensure that your website is responsive and works well on mobile devices. In order to find out which mobile devices are most used by visitors to your website, you can use the data collected by Google Analytics. This way, you can focus your IT resources on ensuring the mobile version works on the most popular devices.
Communication of the most important offers. If you have a variety of offers that you want to communicate to your visitors, choose one or two main ones that are the strongest and that you believe in the most. These are the ones you should try to highlight on your campaign page. They should receive the most visual weight compared to other offers or elements. Giving equal importance to five or six offers at the same time runs a huge risk that visitors will not pay enough attention to any of them. Or they won't read and understand the offers properly.
Extraneous elements and other disturbances. Try to minimize the number of elements or messages on the page: the abundance of elements risks the visitor's concentration on the essentials. Various pop-ups or repeated pop-ups of chat bots, which can lead the visitor to another page or otherwise divert his attention from essential information, are not recommended.
A/B testing. If you have the technical capabilities, we recommend creating at least two visually different versions of the page and dividing the traffic to them in the appropriate ratio. Seeing a statistically significant advantage of one version over the other, the less effective version should be abandoned, thus directing 100% of the traffic to the winning version.
Email letters and customer databases
One advertising channel that is growing in popularity and utility again is email. In today's market, we can hardly imagine an e-commerce website that does not actively carry out advertising actions in this channel. It must be remembered that in order for this channel to work and bring the desired results, it is necessary to put in a lot of work. We recommend taking care of the following things:
Update the database of subscribers for whom you plan to carry out promotional actions. In a long-term perspective, maintaining the "aliveness" of the subscriber database should be continuous. Various games or initiatives can serve this purpose, where one of the conditions of participation would be sharing your personal data and giving consent to marketing actions.
If you do not have an automatic customer segmentation option in your CRM database, I recommend doing the segmentation "manually". You can segment customers based on a wide variety of parameters, from demographic cross-sections to historical sales trends, e.g. shopping frequency, basket size, date of last shopping, etc.
Having a segmented customer database will allow you to display messages tailored to specific segments. You will be able to use them as e-mails respectively. campaigns in emails, Facebook or other digital marketing channels.
Make sure that the email during letter campaigns, you should have the technical possibility to use so-called "count down timers", which help the recipients of the letters to create the impression of urgency and importance. This will encourage potential customers to take actions they might not otherwise have taken. The impression of urgency will also be helped by specially formulated messages or headlines urging you not to wait and hurry up to make the purchase right now.
email don't forget to use clear call-to-actions in email campaigns. Regardless of the marketing channel you are running your campaign on, the use of these texts or elements is equally important.
If you have the technical resources, I recommend making at least a couple of different email versions and perform A/B tests: this will help you find out what actually gets customers to click on your email. email, then from it to your website, and finally to conversion.
Also, one of the recommended good practices is to take care of sending automatic e-mails to customers who have added items to the cart but have not completed the purchase ("cart abandoners"). Also, don't forget to send order confirmation emails for customers who have successfully purchased. You can make good use of such letters for submitting additional offers or informing about other upcoming promotions. Finally, if resources allow, you can send an additional letter with recommended products depending on the product purchased by the customer, e.g. offer of an iPhone case or headphones to a customer who has purchased an iPhone.
During email campaigns, you have a great opportunity to gather a "warm" audience, which consists of people who have clicked on one of your emails and have come to your website. If such users have given their consent to marketing cookies, you will also have the opportunity to share the collected audience with other digital marketing channels, e.g. Meta. This will allow you to direct advertising via emails to people who came to your site and viewed some of your products but didn't make a purchase. By showing them special offers on the Meta platform, you'll have the opportunity to bring users back to your site, creating another opportunity for potential customers to make a purchase.
In the next part, we will tell you more about the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) and advertising in paid channels for successful e-commerce.
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