Creating an ecommerce store can be a lot of work, and finding customers and making sales isn’t easy. But with the following top ecommerce tips and tricks, you can learn how to get and maintain customers and grow your online store long-term.
1. Get Reviews
The opinion of customers is always important, whether negative or positive. When there are no reviews on your page, people will look for other shops that offer this visibility.
Positive reviews or testimonials show that you have an open, honest, and qualified online store. You can find a lot of plugins to integrate and manage reviews on your website.
While you should control what is being said, you will likely encounter at least one unhappy ex-customer. But even those reviews you should keep no matter if good or bad on your site. It shows customers that you have nothing to hide.
If a customer has an issue, try to solve it with your customer service, even on your social media sites. When you can professionally soothe a disappointment and solve their problem, it earns you more respect and trust from potential customers
2. Build Trust
People look before buying in a new shop for signs of credibility like trust badges, secure checkouts, testimonials, reviews, etc. There are many studies that show trust logos affect a customer’s sense of trust in a website and the buying decision. So when your site lacks trust badges, many consumers most likely won’t purchase from your site.
So integrate trust badges and security seals like Norton, reviews badges from Trustpilot and g2, and an SSL certificate on your website and checkout.
3. Pricing and Quality
The right quality and price can make a huge difference whether a customer buys or not. You need a good pricing strategy that matches the quality of the product/service you sell. While competitive pricing can be useful, it mostly depends if the customer finds your product first. So don’t force yourself to give up profit rather, invest it in good marketing and customer experience.
The better the quality and the more feature you offer, the higher you can make the prices. A price also depends on your targeted audience and product/service. If your product is expensive and you want to sell it to people in their twenties, you most likely won’t sell much. But if you sell a service to a business, you can up the cost depending on what you do.
4. Customer Benefits
To ensure that customers want to buy from your store, offer benefits like free shipping and free return. While shipping costs might not seem much, it is often the reason why customers choose another store. So if possible, make the shipping free of cost unless you offer worldwide shipping, then a fee might be necessary if you don’t want loos money.
Showcase the estimated delivery time so people know when they can expect your product.
Integrate different payment gateways depending on the audience, region, and product. Before deciding what payment methods you use, look for the different fees, safety, and how you can incorporate them into your online store.
Also, offer guarantees for your products and money-back guarantees, so potential customers feel safer in buying your product.
5. Loyalty and Affiliate program
If you create a loyalty program for your online store, it can retain your customers. While you should never stop looking for new customers, it is more affordable and rewarding when you keep the customers you already have. The more customers you can keep, the more you will save and make.
With a Loyalty Program, you can reward your customers with points or cash back after a money value or order number that they can collect and redeem for their next purchase. It not only increases your conversion, but you can also see who your best customers are and maybe offer them even more value.
Integrate an Affiliate program so customers can recommend your product to their friends, on social media, or on their blog. If someone makes a purchase through their Affialtie link, give a reward, e.g., a percentage of the purchase price.
Affiliates can market your product for you, and you don’t have extra marketing costs and still can get many conversions.
6. Build a brand and sell an experience
If you build a brand, it can help people to recognize and remember it. For a brand, you not only need a creative logo and an easy-to-remember name. You also should determine the image, messages, and values you want to represent.
When you sell an experience and make an impact on your customer, they can become loyal consumers who even recommend other people your product. Build long-term relationships with your customer by creating remarkable and delightful experiences where you connect through customer service, mission, and values.
The more memorable, emotional, and powerful the moments you provide your customers, the more they will stay loyal and remember your brand.
7. A clean, simple, and visually appealing shopping experience
The shopping experience needs to be easy and exciting for customers, so they buy again.
Make sure your store design is easy to navigate with fitting categories and has a simple and working checkout. Also, provide a responsive mobile site so customers can buy on their phones. Every part of your website must load fast because you will lose a lot of conversions when your site is slow.
Your product page should have different product images and detailed product features, and unique value propositions. If you have a Landing page, write an engaging copy and have a visually appealing sales funnel.
Place on your website attention trapping banners with new deals. If you write blog posts, also integrate different graphics, pictures, and videos.
It is essential that your shop appears in search engines like Google; you don’t want to miss out on free organic traffic. Do keyword research and SEO so your website can rank in search engines.
If you expect a large amount of traffic through a marketing campaign on a day like Black Friday, make sure that your website can handle the traffic. Nothing is more frustrating when many potential customers want to visit your online store, but your site crashes.
8. Finding the right Marketing strategy
Without the right marketing strategies, you won’t get any customers. You should plan how you want to attract potential customers with advertising, social media marketing, working with influencers, email marketing, or content marketing.
Also, think about how you get leads by offering coupons and creating a sense of urgency and scarcity for specific products. A countdown or limited time can bring you a lot more customers.
Integrate promotion flash sales, coupons, bestseller lists, and limited offers on your online store to bring customers to buy more.
Email marketing is probably the most important strategy you should use. Collect email addresses not only through sales but also through calls to action. Have an email automation system where you filter people if they are already customers or only signed up for the newsletter etc.
Through email, you can send all types of promotions, make upsell, give product updates, news, helpful guides, and much more. Also, thank customers after purchase and try to get a review from them. And if a customer doesn’t buy and abundance their cart, send them an email after 6 hours and maybe give an additional coupon code so they might convert now.
9. Experiment and Improve
No matter if you try out a new ad platform or make special sales, track your campaigns with special links. When you experiment with new methods, it will help you know which campaign brings conversions and which does not. This gives you a chance to improve your efforts.
Use analytics to see where users stay the longest and which page has the biggest bounce rate. Also, A/B test buttons, banners, and campaigns to understand how your customer behaves and what clicks best.
10. Outsource
Nothing costs more time and money than when you want to do it all by yourself. So outsource and automate tasks that could others do better. It can save you a lot of trouble when you hire the right freelancer and find automation tools to make your life easier.
