Today starting your own online venture is easier than ever. In fact, we at Helios Solutions have enabled many of our clients to set an ecommerce store and increase their outreach.
The ecommerce industry is growing at a faster pace than ever.
“Experience is a master teacher, even when it’s not our own.” So, our mantra is to learn from the experience of someone who has made it big in the online realm.
Take lessons from successful people
The man who sold books online from his garage in Seattle in 1994 is the second richest man on the planet today. Yes! We are talking about none other than the e-commerce magnate Jeff Bezos, founder, chairman and CEO of Amazon.com.
The mission of Amazon is to uplift the worldwide standards of customer service and customer-centricity that other companies look at, admire and emulate.
In order to serve customers in a better way, Jeff recommends following this precise definition of customer centricity – “Listen, Invent and Personalize”.
Hire smart people
Jeff says that a single individual cannot keep in touch with a plethora of new things happening. Therefore, to achieve your mission you have to put in place a recruiting process that attracts and retains smart, talented and hardworking people who want to be a part of your mission.
Listen to your customers: Companies that do not listen to their customers, fail!
Invent: Companies that only listen to their customers also fail! It is your job to invent for the customers, they won’t invent for themselves. For instance, Amazon’s One-click buying.
Personalize: Take every individual and put them at the centre of their own universe. Start with the customers and work backwards.
Don’t be invisible for your customers
Imagine you have exactly what your customers are looking for but they don’t know how to find you! Terrible, isn’t? The structure of your website must be friendly to the search engine crawlers. Your ecommerce site must be optimized for search engines so that you get more organic traffic to your site.
Pay heed to analytics and search data
Keep track of what people are looking for via search engines before you opt for ecommerce website design. Ignoring data can be a fatal mistake in this ecommerce era. You should have a clear and precise idea about what are your customers’ needs. Once you know that you can create value offerings for them through your e-store.
You can rely on tools like SEMrush for performing competitor analysis so that you are better equipped with insights to formulate content and SEO strategies for your ecommerce website. If you are not knowledgeable then you should hire consultants to get your work done.
Align your content to search data
The best thing for you to do is to collaborate with your SEO consultants and align your content to their inputs. This would help you to craft your content by embedding the words and phrases that are frequently used by customers for search.
If you can create solution for the issues people are always searching for through your content then they would automatically come to your site.
Make customer-centric information architecture
The magic mantra is very simple – just become obsessed with serving your customers truly well. Laying the foundation of information architecture in a right way is very critical for optimizing your web shop for the search engines and also keeping it immune from any shifts in algorithm updates.
For example, you are a company selling home furnishings and it might be structured like this:
- Bed sheets category: YourDomain.com/bedsheets/
- Mattress category: YourDomain.com/mattresses/
You can create sub-category within this structure for specific type of bedsheets:
- King-size bed sheets category: YourDomain.com/bedsheets/king-size-bedsheets/
- Queen-size bed sheets category: YourDomain.com/bedsheets/queen-size-bedsheets/
- Kids bed sheets category: YourDomain.com/bedsheets/kids-bedsheets/
This kind of structure is intuitive to your customers and enables you to deliver a pleasant customer experience as it would make the most sense from navigation perspective.
“If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is powerful.” – Jeff Bezos
Create an effective ecommerce sales funnel
Before we move on to create an ecommerce funnel, first let’s find out – what exactly is an ecommerce sales funnel?
Well, it is a visual representation of your ecommerce sales process that helps you to craft a workable ecommerce business plan.
As shown in the figure below, your target market is represented by the wide top of the funnel. We will see in the subsequent steps below how to convert your target audience into your customers.
Make a lasting first impression
Design your landing page such that it attracts visitors to your site. You can harness the synergy of SEO, email campaign and social media to boost customer acquisition. Encourage them to sign up for some sort of list so that you get their contact information to become your first line of communication.
Capture leads by presenting a front-end offer
Here you offer them a newsletter or product catalogue of special deals or anything like that. This step is all about creating curiosity for your potential customers so that they have an idea what they get if they stick to your site.
Offer an upsell at the back-end
When your customer is about to buy a product then create an offer for them such that if they upgrade the service or product will allow them to get more benefit. Of course, you will also make more money.
For instance, while you go for buying smart case for your iPad on Amazon which is worth Rupees 990.00, they create a bundled offer which is a subtle upsell as shown in the figure below.
Do not forget to offer an downsize option
This should not be looked down upon as loss of sale, whereas, it would help you to retain a potential customer who has budget constraint and would otherwise leave without buying your product.
Repeat this process and keep going
You have to continue to bring new customers to your website. Also identify repeat customers and bind them in some loyalty programs or offer them membership benefits. Thus keep in touch with them and build you loyal customer base.
Wrapping up
Hey, we are not finished with our mantras! It’s just we are giving in more digestible doses:). Yet, we don’t want you to lose on a very effective mantra that is always remaining updated with the latest statistics and trends of ecommerce industry.
So, are you ready for a profitable ecommerce venture? You could be the next self-made billionaire, you never know! Which topic you would like to read next?
