While ecommerce has come a long way in recent years, it still has a long way to go.
One of the main problems with online shopping is that a certain amount of guesswork is always required before making a purchase.
Customers are never quite sure about the quality of an item, since they can’t touch it like they would when shopping in person.
Instead, they are forced to rely on small photos and glib product descriptions.
Attracting consumers to your site is only the first part of your problem. Once they show up, why do you think they’ll buy what you’re selling?
You’ve baited the hook and caught your audience’s attention, but if the bait’s not tied to anything your conversions sink straight to the bottom.
Behavioral psychology has a lot to say about why we buy the things we buy and what the decision-making process looks like.
Knowing what your customers want or need to see from you will help you convert the traffic you already have, and ensure that the ones who get away eventually come swimming back to you.
If you understand your brand and your market, these five strategies can turn traffic into conversions.
It’s 2014. The majority of people are doing business online. It’s imperative that your company website offers the experience your target audience needs to encourage a conversion.
Whatever services your business provides, your website needs to go beyond basic.
Deploying a smart conversion strategy is the key to your website success. WiderFunnel created a method for identifying areas of improving conversions on your website called “the landing page influence functions for tests” (LIFT) model.
By adopting this kind of method to evaluate and test on your website, you can find the optimal way to interact with your potential customers.
In February 2011 the first Panda Google algorithm update affected search results and changed the way SEO professionals and webmasters needed to think about optimizing websites.
The goal of Google Panda was to lower the rank of ‘low-quality’ websites that had thin content and increase rankings of higher quality and more authoritative websites. It was the beginning of the end of ‘SEO content’.
Since then, and after more than a dozen updates to the Google Panda algorithm, websites have exponentially had to improve the quality of their content. There are various ways people speculate Google deems a website quality including the depth of the content, engagement metrics on pages, social sharing and the quality of websites linking.
The importance of a strong online presence exponentially increases as time goes on. Companies need to follow their audience into the digital space and provide them with the optimal experience online.
However, just creating a website isn’t enough; there needs to be careful consideration into your target audience, their optimal experience and how you can affect it.
Using the 11 attributes of usability, one can determine how to present digital content that will best satisfy users.
The 11 attributes are as follows:
In February 2011, Google Panda was released and the nature of the content seen by individuals searching on Google began changing.
Google Panda was an algorithm that was meant to serve higher quality content to users in Google search results. With dozens of updates to Google Panda since then, the SEO industry changed and SEO professionals now needed to become content marketers as well.
Even since, we’ve seen Penguin hit links and a potential update strike this past week on lower quality guest posting.
Any good content marketer knows that different types of content work for different types of consumers. On top of the type of consumer, where they are in the sales funnel also plays a part in what sort of content will most likely lead to a conversion.
With these factors in mind, what type of content should be served to your potential customers?
If you manage your own Google AdWords account but the very thought of logging in and performing tweaks sends shivers down your spine, I’ve put together a really simple five point checklist for you.
There’s no better time to spring clean your AdWords account than the dawn of a New Year – so what are you waiting for?
An AdWords campaign is never complete. The most successful campaigns are chopped and changed regularly in order to wring out every last cent of ROI.
PPC is becoming increasingly competitive – in order to run a successful campaign you must be committed.
According to an August 2012 study conducted by ReffferralCandy, in the US there are 102,728 ecommerce retailers that generate $12,000 or more in revenue.
Given the ever increasing consumer migration to the digital marketplace, this number has likely grown even more in the last year and a half.
With such a competitive market, online retailers need to do what they can to stand out and provide incentive for consumers to shop at their store over another.
One way to do this is to gain the consumers’ trust and loyalty; as part of a full strategy, effective pricing strategies can help grow this customer relationship.
Pricing strategies on the website slightly mirror those in physical stores, and they are a great way to capture potential customers throughout the phases of the sales cycle.
It’s a concept that has been instilled in us since the beginning of grade school: reading is a powerful tool for learning.
In the book Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell imparts a series of case studies to explore the psychology of the human decision-making process, which is ever so applicable to the practice of engaging users on the web.
My greatest takeaway: Human decision-making has little to do with the amount of knowledge or information available, but rather what we do with a shockingly small amount of data.
“No enterprise can exist for itself alone. It ministers to some great need, it performs some great service, not for itself, but for others… or failing therein, it ceases to be profitable and ceases to exist.” Despite being said in the mid 20s, these words, spoken by Calvin Coolidge, are so essential to business that they’re still spoken today.
What Coolidge’s poetic statement implies is that the entire reason businesses exist is to make a profit, and more importantly, that is the sole reason that they exist.
Moreover, Coolidge suggests that in order for any business to maintain their role in any marketplace, they have to provide value. And those that have fallen out of favor have done so because they have lost sight of how to provide that value.
The reason for this brief glance through history is not to give another lecture on Business 101, but to remind online marketers that the key to online success still comes from core business principles and not aggressive SEO techniques.
Instead it comes from core business principles, specifically the one surrounding a gripping value proposition. And the smaller your company is, the more significant this principle becomes.