6 Key Success Factors for Your Online Shop
What are the key issues that online retailers should resolve to prosper? We identified five key areas that will help you to enhance your profits.
Turning website visitors into customers can be a challenge for any online business. After all, no one has a 100% conversion rate, so there’s always room for improvement. In today’s article, we’ll explore some different methods of turning those undecided visitors into customers.
It's important to keep in mind that if you’re looking to improve your conversions, it probably means you’re pretty happy with the amount of traffic you’re receiving. That’s good news. However, you should also consider whether or not you’re driving the right people to your website. When was the last time you looked at your buyer persona? Are you sure that your target audience is who you think it is?
Having said that, the tips we’ll look at today will assume the traffic and audience are to your liking. Today, you'll read about converting traffic once these users are on your website. We’ll focus on 5 main themes:
- Focus on your product pages
- Highlight customer support
- Build trust
- Be transparent
- Optimise your marketing efforts
Focus on your product pages
To begin, let’s look at the most influential page when it comes to converting visitors into customers: your product pages.
Detailed product descriptions
When analysing any element of your online business, try to look at things from the shopper’s perspective. When it comes to the product descriptions on your product pages, consider whether or not you're providing enough information.
Does the shopper get enough details to feel comfortable completing their order? Are the important specifications there? Try to hit all of the following points in your product descriptions:
- product name
- product brand
- dimensions
- colour
- weight
- main features
- main benefits
Speak your audience’s language
This is another element of your website that requires having a good understanding of your audience. Depending on how you drive traffic to your site and who your customers are, it might be worth having a closer look at your buyer persona. In other words, who is your core audience?
Being clear on this topic can help you influence the style of your texts as well as other marketing efforts.
A shop selling fishing gear is going to speak a different “language” than a shop selling urban fashion. Using the right voice can give your shop credibility because it places you in their community. For niche audiences, this can be a very influential factor.
Shutterstock/Master1305
Focus on the benefits
Product features are always important to highlight, but benefits are the ones that speak to consumers’ emotions.
A great salesman once said “You don’t sell the steak. You sell the sizzle.” This means that a steak can sound appetising by itself. But the sound of the steak cooking can be even more powerful. The sounds, smells, memories and feelings associated with the steak are a much more of an emotional selling point than the steak on its own.
Keep this in mind when you write your product descriptions. Tell the reader not only how this product works, but how it’s going to improve their lives.
Think about television commercials for the latest smartphones. Many of them have a lot of similar features. Many of the flagship phones are indistinguishable from each other. So, companies like this will try to focus on the features that really make them stand out.
For example, if your newest phone can take great night-time shots, you should mention how artificial intelligence helps the camera take better photos in low-lighting settings. But how can you take it to the next level? Storytelling.
Focus on the great times your customers will have (in low-light situations): Parties in clubs, bars, concerts, and weddings...
"With this camera, those unforgettable events will actually be unforgettable!"
Recommended reading:
How to Calculate and Boost Your Conversion Rates
Product images and videos
Having high-quality product images is an absolute must these days. However, many online shops don’t feel the same way, so this is a way for you to stand out.
A simple rule of thumb: you can never have too many product images.
Okay, you probably can have too many images, but it’s better to have too many than to have too few. Show the product from different angles. Show it in use. The images should not leave much to the user’s imagination.
Shutterstock/gpointstudio
Product videos can be a bit trickier. If you have the time and resources, it could make sense to do some product videos as well. A short introduction to the product, showing it in use, or even just a 360-degree perspective can help users get a better "feel" for the product.
There are a lot of things you can do with video. They are getting more popular and it’s something you should also consider for your online shop.
Highlight customer support
Having reliable customer support can be a great selling point for shoppers. They may check customer reviews for insights into this (more on that later), but there are a few things you can do to make this an obvious benefit of your brand.
Communicate your availability
Shoppers may very well look for signs of whether or not your customer support is helpful. It’s up to you to communicate your availability. If your site’s visitors see that your phone number, email address and chatbots are easily accessible, this communicates your willingness to help them, whether it’s before, during, or after the purchase.
Future Shop, one of the most reliable AV shops in the UK, even posts two phone numbers directly in their navigation. They also highlight their “free expert advice” on every page as well. If customer satisfaction really is important to your shop, make yourself available to your customers (and let them know you’re there for them!).
Source: Future Shop
Build trust
Trust is such an important element in boosting conversions and turning those site visitors into customers.
Many of the tips we’ve already mentioned fall into this topic of building trust. However, there are some more things you can do to proactively boost your shop’s trustworthiness for first-time visitors.
Collect and display customer reviews
As we touched on earlier, customer reviews can give your site’s visitors insights into your customer service.
Reviews can even help you build trust with shoppers before they even visit your shop. By making sure your star ratings appear in the Google search results, you can increase the odds of winning more traffic.
It’s important to differentiate between two types of reviews that are important to online businesses: product reviews and service reviews.
Product reviews are reviews that provide feedback on the specific product they purchased.
Service reviews (aka shop reviews) give consumer feedback on the service of the shop. This relates more to topics like delivery and customer service.
Both types of reviews are important and are treated by Google differently. Google can display both types of reviews in the search results for both paid and organic results.
Besides displaying your ratings in Google, you'll want to display these ratings directly on your website as well. This way, shoppers don’t need to go elsewhere to read up on your online reputation. On top of that, you should make sure you reply to reviews as well.
Trusted Shops offers shop owners Google-certified reviews that can be displayed in different ways on your website. They can also be sent to Google automatically to boost the conversion rates of your Google Ads as well.
Create an About Us page
An About Us page can be a great way to build trust as well. If you don’t have a dedicated “story-telling page”, utilise the About Us page to tell your company’s story.
If your story isn’t super compelling, that’s okay. You can share other insightful things, like your employees' stories or glimpses of the day-to-day life in the business.
If people can empathise with you, there’s a higher chance they’ll buy from you. Again, this can be really helpful in niche industries as it gives your shop even more credibility.
For a deeper look at creating an About Us page, click on the link below:
Recommended reading:
5 Things to Keep in Mind When Creating an "About Us" Page
Highlight your guarantee, return policy, or buyer protection
If your shop stands behind its products and/or services, consider highlighting the return policy in your shop.
Whether it’s a 30-day Buyer Protection that customers can opt into like the one offered by the Trusted Shops Trustmark or a personal return policy, make sure your shoppers know the option is there for them.
Source: Solarplexius
Learn more about the Trusted Shops Trustmark or contact us directly.
Certifications
We already touched on what benefits the Trusted Shops Trustmark and Buyer Protection can do for your shop. However, depending on your industry, other certifications might be worth displaying on your website, ranging from manufacturing processes to digital security:
- SSL certificate
- Fairtrade
- PCI DSS certification
- Vegan certification
Of course, there are lots of certifications out there. Some may be more relevant to your audience than others. This will require more research from your side.
Be transparent
Ah, transparency; the cousin of trust. Being transparent is another way to build up some trust with new shoppers in a subtle way. Here are three quick ideas for adding a bit more transparency to your online shop.
Show your inventory
Depending on your shop software or e-commerce provider, as well as your inventory management tools, this could be an easy thing to implement on your website.
Not only does this give transparency about your products and your stock, but it also creates some urgency (if the number is low). Of course, you shouldn’t create false urgency by reporting incorrect numbers. However, simply displaying this number along with the other tips you’ve learned today adds another touch of transparency to your visitors’ shopping experience.
Shipping costs/options
No one likes surprises when it comes to completing an order, especially when pricing is involved. Always be sure to be transparent about shipping costs as early as possible (usually on the product page).
However, you can take this advice one step further by displaying all the shipping costs and options out there. Whether you offer free shipping or overnight deliveries, make sure users know what everything costs and who is providing the service. Depending on where the customer lives, they might have preferences for one logistics company over another.
More options and transparency are always a good thing!
Make an FAQ section
Depending on your business and your product line, it might make sense to create an FAQ page or section in your online shop. It would probably suffice to create one page somewhere easily accessible rather than include it on every product page. Your customer reviews and customer service teams can be inspirations for this page.
Source: Solarplexius
Optimise your marketing efforts
It’s important to know that many sales don’t occur during a shopper’s first visit. That’s okay. You just have to be diligent. In this last section, let’s look at some things you can do to win them over after they’ve left your website (or in this first example, right before they leave).
Exit-intent pop-ups
As an internet user from the mid-90s, it pains me a little to recommend this, but the truth is that pop-ups can be really effective. There are quite a few kinds of popups out there, but there is a specific one made for visitors who are about to leave your shop: the exit-intent pop-up.
As you might guess from the name, this pop-up can “sense” when a user is going to leave (i.e. when the user’s mouse moves towards the X to close the tab/window), and this triggers the pop-up to reveal itself.
By offering an additional discount or some sort of incentive to complete the purchase, users may be inspired to buy the product right then and there.
Email marketing
Emails can seem as old-fashioned as pop-ups, but they can also be an effective tool for boosting conversions.
It’s worth noting that email marketing tends to work best for repeat customers since including users in newsletter lists requires their permission. This isn’t so easy to accomplish for people who’ve never shopped with you before. However, the task isn’t impossible.
If you incentivise them to sign up for your newsletter, you may well get a few people to sign up. You could, for example, offer a one-time discount for people who sign up for your newsletter. Yes, a certain number of people will immediately unsubscribe after getting their coupon, but not everyone will. It could be worth the effort to get them to sign up though. After all, email marketing still offers one of the best ROIs in digital marketing.
When it comes to customer data, you need to be careful. Ever since the GDPR regulations came into effect in 2018, any company that does business in the EU should be aware of the effects of data privacy violations.
GDPR is also relevant for the next tip...
Retargeting
We’ve all witnessed it, and it’s probably worked on you as well. Retargeting can be a great tool to remind a website visitor of your products after they’ve left your online shop.
Through social media ads or Google Ads, you can target those users to get them back on your site.
Once again, users need to opt into the cookies when they first enter your website, but if they give you permission, you should be good to go. With the help of various "pixels", you can get those visitors back on your product pages in no time.
Conclusion
An online shop can always be optimised to improve your conversion rates. Turning website visitors into customers can be a challenge since every user behaves a bit differently. That’s why it’s important to cover all your bases and show users why they can feel confident buying from your online shop, even if they’ve never heard of you before.
