8 key focus areas to maximise your website’s conversion and experience
More and more businesses are recognising the need to have an integrated marketing and sales approach to reflect the complexity of their customers’ journeys. As more customers go online to research, analysis, and purchase products, the journey on your ecommerce website is critical to ensure you maximise the ROI of your spend.
While you may have a robust platform as the foundation for your ecommerce website, the solutions integrated with your platform play an important role in streamlining and optimising the customer experience to maximise conversions.
We’ve categorised the solutions into 8 key focus areas to maximise the impact of your website. The following provides a summary of each of the areas and potential suppliers you can work with.
8 key focus areas of an ecommerce website
8 key focus areas of an ecommerce website
1. Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) Tools
CRO tools enable you to better understand customer behaviour and identify website issues so you can optimise the journey on your website. For example, if users are dropping off from your product pages, you may need to revise the product details, add clearer call-to-actions (CTAs), or add more images and videos to improve conversions.
2. Product Information Management (PIM) Systems
PIM systems enable you to manage all product information required to sell online (and in other channels) all in one place. The main benefit of PIM systems is you have a single point of truth for product information which ensures the information is always up-to-date and accurate.
3. Loyalty
Loyalty programmes are one of the most effective ways to retain customers and grow customer spending. You can create a referral and/or loyalty programme to reward your customers for referring family or friends, meeting spending thresholds, or making repeat purchases. Loyalty tools such as Yotpo or Loyalty Lion are solutions that can help manage your loyalty programmes.
4. Customer Service
Without a doubt, customer service is one of the top drivers of customer satisfaction. Satisfied customers will refer their family and friends and are more likely to make repeat purchases. In addition to providing great customer service, you can create FAQs and provide multiple ways for customers to reach you through forms, chat, or email to enhance the customer experience. Some examples of customer service tools are Zendesk and Gorgias.
5. Ratings and Reviews
Including ratings and reviews on your product pages is a great way to build trust in your products. You can capture customer reviews directly on your website or by email after the customer receives your product. While TrustPilot is probably the most well-known reviews solution, there are other solutions available such as YotPo, Feefo, Review.io, and BazaarVoice.
6. Payments and Subscriptions
Your payments processor plays a critical role on your website and is a key part of the customer journey. Your processor needs to be secure, can detect fraud, and accept multiple payment options. In addition to debit and credit cards, digital and mobile wallets are popular payment methods and should be a payment option on your website.
“Buy Now, Pay Later” is also gaining popularity, and businesses like Klarna and Clearpay are becoming more well-known in this space. Many ecommerce platforms are also developing their own payment gateway, such as Shopify Payments, which gives businesses more ways to accept payment.
On a related note, subscriptions could increase the frequency of your payments through repeat sales for certain product categories. Offering a monthly subscription to your customers increases the potential to capture revenue in subsequent months.
7. Analytics
Having access to analytics is an important factor in understanding the performance of your website. Many businesses struggle with the challenge of having multiple data sources because they use multiple programs that are not integrated. Some ways to resolve this challenge are to build custom reports or get an analytics solution that consolidates the data into a single view. Some examples of these solutions are DataStudio or Tableau.
8. Email Service Providers
While email marketing may have a bad reputation, it remains one of the most cost-effective and powerful channels. SaleCycle found that 59% of respondents said marketing emails influence their purchase decisions and 50% of respondents buy from marketing emails at least once a month.1
Making simple modifications to your email strategy such as creating segments and using personalisation can improve your email performance. Email service providers such as MailChimp and Klaviyo also enable you to create trigger emails that are automatically sent based on customer behaviour which reduces the manual deployment of emails.
Next steps
Now that you know the key focus areas to maximise the impact of your website, the next steps are to choose and implement the solutions against the areas. The ecommerce landscape is complex with many solutions in the market. So it’s understandable if you don’t know where to start or feel overwhelmed when you start your research.
This is why we created the guide, “Ecommerce Unleashed: Maximising Your Website’s Impact for Marketing Success”. Developed in partnership with ISBA, this guide covers different aspects of creating an impactful ecommerce website including a 6-step process that you can follow to audit, assess, and implement the solutions for your website.
To see the 6-step process and read the full guide, request the guide here. If you have any questions about the process or would like to speak with us, feel free to contact us.
Source:
- SaleCycle, 8 Essential Email Marketing Statistics: 2020 Edition, 2022. https://www.salecycle.com/blog/stats/18-essential-email-marketing-statistics/.
