The holiday shopping season is just round the corner, but before you hit that road, you must work on your SEO to boost your natural search traffic and revenue. Lisa Wehr over at practicalecommerce.com has provided a few great tips on how to boost your holiday sales for this shopping season. I am more than happy to share her views with my visitors.
According to Lisa, apart from initiating fresh keyword mining, starting pay-per-click campaigns and going in for link building, you must also try new tactics to convert browsers into buyers.
Unfortunately, a weak economy and plummeting income have brought down the number of impulsive buyers and increased the number of cautious buyers. People visit and re-visit a site before they are ready to make a purchase. They even visit other online stores, compare prices and only then are ready to take the plunge.
According to a study released by the online security provider, McAfee, out of the 163 million shopping transactions they tracked, 65% shoppers completed their purchase after waiting for a day or more.
Shopping cart abandonment is an albatross around the neck of any online retailer, but such instances can be used as opportunities by e-tailers. You can actually get the customer to come back and reclaim the shopping cart. Now the question is, how can you convert browsers into potential customers?
Offer special deals and discounts: A little more for a little less! Shoppers love to shop at a discount. If a shopper shows interest in your product, lure him/her back to your website with a discount or free shipping. You can even offer them free gifts if they purchase from your online store, say a complementary scarf when she buys a dress or a pair of socks when he buys a pair of trousers. Get inventive!!
Send an email: Give shoppers the option to sign up for emails and bring them back with exciting offers. For instance, send a welcome mail with a discount on the first purchase.
Talk about your security: You are convinced that your site is secure but do your customers share that confidence? According to McAfee, conversion rates are higher if shoppers feel that they are in a shopping haven.
So, wrap your products attractively with some interesting deals and discounts to get the most out of this shopping season, but make sure that you keep these offers going through Christmas and afterwards. You never know when the sales will pick up, and a missed opportunity is a missed sale!!
6 comments:
Seeja
This is a timely post.
Following up abandoned shopping carts can be one of the most effective techniques to boost website conversion rates. Ecommerce teams have found that up to 50% of the abandoners can be converted with an optimized follow up email campaign. (There’s a free tool here you can use to find out how this would work in your environment here .
There are some secrets of success to getting this right. Tone and timing are the most important of these. The email needs to use a service, not sales tone, and the timing is critical, ideally an immediate real time email to follow up an abandonment.
However I’d caution against a simple, single follow up with an offer (such as free shipping). Several of the largest retailers last year found out to their cost that it’s all too easy to train the customer to expect an offer, thereby increasing the abandonment rate. There are ways to avoid this, but it comes down to the detail of the execution of the campaign. I’ve blogged about how to manage promotions at the online checkout here .
Also there’s a best practices webinar recording here which goes into the techniques you need to use to get that 50% conversion number.
Charles,
I read through your posts, they were really insightful and had some real great tips. I personally feel that it's easier to get conversions out of existing customers than brand new ones. So, email flyers are a great tool but like you said they need to carry the right tone and should be timed well. I also agree that creating a promotion code page is a good idea. All the deals and coupons in one place and updated regularly will definately help.
More than half of consumers (55 percent) have experienced security incidents that caused them to think twice about using an e-commerce Web site, according to a Yankee research study. Online retailers will be tasked with keeping their customers’ sensitive data safe, and along with this, their identities. Security is a major worry nowadays as identity theft is on the rise. What consumers need is credibility and the assurance that their privacy is safe. Give them the opportunity to click with confidence. A privacy seal like that of TRUSTe indicates that the website is in compliance with best practices to ensure consumer privacy and security. TRUSTe’s privacy seal for small businesses makes privacy easy and affordable. This in turn can also convert web traffic into sales.
Hi Heather
Spot on. As someone said, security is not an accident. I feel third-party authentication can help online retailers win credibility. And credibility wins customers!!
Credibility does win customers. Thanks!
This is really an informative blog site as it provides great about ecommerce. According to me Lisa is a genius.In this blog the blogger has focused on Search engine optimization which will help in improving the page ranking of a website.
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alex
SEO
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