It seems like Amazon has taken over online sales. Is it even possible to drive traffic to your online store?
It’s possible, and you might be surprised how well the eCommerce space functions outside of Amazon.
There are a lot of buyers out there. In 2019, estimates show that there will be 1.92 billion buyers globally. But how can you reach these people with all the competition?
You can follow the seven tips below to help you make a successful online store.
1. Create a Customer Support System
Having excellent customer support is one of the essential areas you need to focus on for your store.
Your shoppers need to see you as reliable. If they ever run into problems, your visitors need to be able to count on you.
Make sure you have several ways your customers can contact you. The most common are email and phone support.
If you don’t have a business line and don’t want to give out a personal phone number, there are VoIP services that will provide you cheap business phone numbers.
Another common feature found on eCommerce stores today is chat boxes. Instead of tracking down a support page, your customer only needs to open up the chat window on the page to get help.
2. Develop a Good Design
It doesn’t matter if you have the best product in the world if you can’t build trust with potential customers.
A good design helps build this trust by providing a professional experience for your visitors. Recent studies show that customers prefer to buy from sites that invest in good design.
It will cost more in the short term. But when you invest in design, you are investing in a service that will increase your bottom line for years to come.
3. Get on Social Media
Do you know how much time the average person spends on social media every day?
Recent surveys found that people spend on average 2 hours and 22 minutes per day on social networks.
If you want to get new customers, you need to be where they are spending their time. Make sure you have social media profiles set up on all the major sites.
Once your profiles are set up, you can spend ad dollars to target people who might enjoy your product and build your following.
Use your social followings for advertising products, promoting content, and spreading the word about your online store.
4. Don’t Ignore On-Site SEO
SEO has changed, but it hasn’t gone away. You still need to make sure your on-site SEO is on point if you want to increase your rankings in the search engines.
When you create your category and product pages, try to target keywords that get more searches. You can do this in the URL, title, and meta description. Once you set these up, you can use your keyword and variations of it in the page content.
Another common problem with on-site SEO for stores is duplicate content. If you have product variations set up as their own products, they are going to share descriptions.
This duplicate content can make it harder to rank these pages. Instead of creating separate products, create product variations on individual products.
5. Build Your Email List
Email hasn’t changed much since it was created, but it’s still one of the most important ways we communicate today.
Even though people are spending more time on social media, you can’t always count on it to reach your customers. To do that, you need an email list.
Don’t only use your email list to talk with your customers when they make orders. Send them emails through the month as well.
You can offer deals, tips, and move potential customers down your sales funnel.
When you use your email list, make sure you are making use of tools that track performance. You can monitor which subject lines and deals give you the best conversions with your store.
6. Create a Useful Blog
There is more to SEO then optimizing your products. You can create a blog to help too.
By creating a blog, you can start targeting informational keywords. These are search terms that you wouldn’t be able to target with the other pages on your store.
A blog won’t only help with SEO. It’s also a way to build trust with your customers.
When someone buys a product, most of the time they want to buy the best. When you demonstrate your knowledge with your blog, you can establish yourself as an authority in your industry.
Creating content also gives visitors something to share. If you can create interesting or informative blog posts, you can encourage people to share them on social media.
This sharing can help expose your store to people who wouldn’t have ever known about you.
7. Make Your Store Mobile Responsive
The use of smartphones has taken off. You hardly come across someone with an old flip phone these days.
This spread means you can’t ignore mobile consumers anymore. Four out of five Americans now use their smartphones to make mobile purchases.
If you want mobile users to use your store to make purchases, you need to give them a convenient experience.
This means investing in a mobile design. The design of your store should change based on the size of the screen. For smaller screens, this means vertical layouts will work better than horizontal ones.
Because of slower mobile speeds, you will also need to make sure your page loads quickly. People don’t stick around if they can’t view the page after a few seconds.
Work on optimizing your images and page size to try and get your load times under a second.
Making a Successful Online Store Isn’t Easy
While it isn’t easy to create a successful online store, it is exciting. Make sure you use all the tips above to increase your chance of success.
Things are always changing, so what you know today might not be what works tomorrow. Make sure you are always learning about the newest trends so you can take advantage of them.
If you are looking for SEO and social media tips to drive more people to your store, then head over to our blog. Our tips can give you a leg up on getting your marketing strategy going.
