Considering the fact we are talking about an extremely competitive niche, eCommerce is, to date, probably one of the most time-demanding industries for entrepreneurs and the reason this happens is directly linked to how the internet works. There are offer and demand; trends change under short notice, marketing strategies keep reinventing themselves, and why not mentioning the constant crave for being up-to-date over the latest discovery in digital technology.
We can safely assume then the scenario in which a brand is capable of tanking due lack of a proper PR strategy; however, metrics do tell us that conversion rate and ROI are the vital aspects of analysing whenever tracking our company’s growth. Today we are going to study four essential elements you need to consider if your aim is to improve your business’ ROI stats.
1) Site Speed
This is the most frustrating aspect a client can come across: those pages that keep eternally loading photographs, plugins and other stuff. When surfing the internet, experience needs to be reduced to the minimal: enough with those pages filled with transitions, plugins and so many other etceteras that only distract your customers from the main purpose – getting to know your products.
Whenever a site takes more than 3 seconds to load fully, there is a 50% chance your potential clients would switch vendors for acquiring products in a close-by future. These scary numbers tend to get worse when the mobile aspect is involved in the equation, as recent studies prove people do most of their online shopping while enjoying their spare time with mobile devices.
2) Emails and Subscribers
If there is a must-have at any eCommerce site beside a review plugin feature that is a newsletter for subscribers. Either weekly, biweekly or monthly, a newsletter is your biggest shot to promote latest updates, upcoming sales, important news and events, and many other etceteras that can quickly turn into revenues.
However, there are other interesting approaches to this subject as what could be PushCrew with their notifications for subscribers where you get a fancy looking CTA for your subscribers without even requiring them to be surfing your page at the time you send it.
When used smartly, these strategies can be a hit for any industry, from photography to inredning online – options are endless. To make our subscribers strategy an effective one, take into account these factors:
• Total amount of subscribers
• CTR and Open Rate of your mails
• Unsubscribe Rate
• Nature of the content being sent
After all these elements prove their unique value as an informational resource, we can start measuring the overall traffic of our website: where do they come from, how long do they stay, your best “seasons” and your “winter time” as well. Assets like those only turn themselves as crucial growth data.
3) Shopping Cart Abandonment
Even if we can target a certain population with a taste for creating fantasy shopping carts and leave them for months prior placing an order, fortunately for businesses that aren’t the common scenario. Thus the importance of fixing whatever potential issue you clients may be facing that interrupts the natural checkout process.
Are your prices too high in comparison to your competitors? Is the checkout stage too messy? There is a proven factor that customers find annoying to fill tonnes of questionnaires asking for valid proof of identity, or feedback surveys prior final stage of checkout. Issues with credit card vendors can also be grouped among these inconveniences, as people often don’t realise most eCommerce business only accept international credit cards as means of payment, including PayPal as the most common alternative.
Introducing a live chat service can be extremely helpful for getting better checkout rates, as chat operators can help customers in real-time to sort out inconveniences they might be facing, while at the same time reducing the cancelled order amount.
4) Customer Engagement Costs
This is, in short terms, the fees you need to pay for keeping your audience engaged. There are multiple approaches to bringing traffic to your site, and perhaps more for how to retain it and keep an interested public in whatever content you desire to publish.
Most of these strategies will be directly linked to the kind of eCommerce business you have, however, as a rule, ad prices in social media channels like Facebook or Twitter are way cheaper than the pay per click rate that marketing channels offer – though the conversion rate of typical social media networks is lower than specific marketing channels.
