Inflation is a silent killer in your business. It is like the boogeyman that creeps into your house while you are sleeping. Add to poor economic conditions and you have got a business that’s set up for failure.
Whether it is due to the weakening pound, rising costs of manufacturing and labour, or just plain inflation — the days of 10% increases in sales every year are over. But rising prices aren’t necessarily bad for eCommerce companies. In fact, as long as you adapt and grow with the market conditions and invest in good eCommerce SEO, you can use these trends to your advantage. Here are a few tips to start you off.
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Enable Product Reviews
Product reviews are a huge asset to eCommerce sites because they help customers make purchase decisions, drive organic rankings, and can be used in content to create organic search authority.
Potential customers want to know what others think of your product before they buy it. If you don’t have reviews on your site, you are quite simply leaving money on the table.
Product reviews also have the potential to increase your SEO rankings. Google wants searchers to click through a set of results and find exactly what they need as quickly as possible. Product reviews signal that your site might have an answer for them about a specific query and may provide more relevant information than other sites linking back only with generic anchor text or irrelevant link texts like “click here” or “visit our website.”
Personalise Email Offers
When it comes to email marketing, personalisation is still the name of the game. You can start by sorting your customers into groups based on their buying or browsing behaviours and then sending targeted offers that are specific to those groups.
For example, if someone fits the criteria for being a highly engaged customer (i.e., they check your site frequently or follow you on social media), you could send them information about new products before anyone else.
This is called customer segmentation and it works wonders when you sort your customers properly.
Don’t have time to segment your audience? Consider enlisting a third-party tool or service to do it for you! A marketing automation tool can collect data from your site and automatically put customers into lists based on how they behave while they are there. It can also send out scheduled emails with offers that specifically appeal to specific lists.
The ultimate goal is to get to know your audience better so that you can personalise offers even more effectively in future campaigns — but don’t let this be a barrier to entry! Simply mastering the basics of customer segmentation can also provide significant value and improve your email marketing results.
Modify Your Website Design To Align With Your Users’ Needs
The next step is to modify your website design so that it caters to your users’ needs.
First, make sure your website is compatible with different devices, including mobile phones and tablets. More than 50% of internet searches happen on the small screen, so your business may be missing out on sales if you don’t have a responsive website design.
Furthermore, make sure that your website is easy to navigate. Intuitive navigation can make it easier for users to find the products they want, allowing you to keep them on your site longer. Consider having a simple layout for quicker navigation. Think minimalism!
Lastly, don’t forget about readability! Use fonts that are easy to read so that visitors can understand what information you are trying to convey without giving them a headache. Keep in mind that not everyone has a perfect vision, so the more considerate you are with the little details, the less you will have to invest in fancy campaigns.
Optimize Your Images
Mobile sales have increased dramatically in recent years, and according to multiple studies, consumers prefer photos over text when they are browsing a website. However, since a slow page speed is one of the main reasons why people leave an eCommerce site, using unoptimised high-quality images may be something you want to avoid.
Use image compressing tools to retain the quality of your images while reducing their size. Also, add image alt text to every image that gets uploaded on your site for SEO purposes. Google Images accounts for nearly 19% of all web searches performed each day (2 billion!), so you want to capitalise on that.
Finally, avoid using stock photography for product images; it is the kiss of death for online shopper loyalty. People want something authentic when they buy stuff online – so you can either keep things real or lose them forever!
Add a Rewards Program
With the rising popularity of eCommerce and the increasing costs of running a business, it can be difficult to grow your sales. But the fact remains, in spite of the challenges, there are several ways you can increase your sales even with retail prices going up at a rate that would make every budget stretch for months.
You can do so by creating a loyalty program that rewards customers with special perks or discounts for repeat purchases. The idea here is to convince people to become loyal customers by giving them something extra in return for their loyalty, rather than have them come in once and never come back again.
Another approach is to use scarcity and urgency while marketing products – like “We only have X number left. So, get them while they are hot!” This might not seem like a reward but think about it. You are incentivising an impulse purchase with a special offer, which can encourage customers to come back to you.
And the third approach is a tad controversial but extremely effective: use viral loops to get people talking about your product before they buy it. This ties into giving partners incentives to share their content on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which can help attract new traffic.
Optimise Your Social Media Strategy
Social media is a great way to engage with your customers and generate leads, but you can’t enjoy any of its potential benefits unless you have a clear strategy or goal in mind.
To optimise your social media strategy, start by being strategic about which channels you use. Investing in all channels at once will obviously cost you more. So, you need to get familiar with the demographic information of a platform to know whether or not you can leverage it to improve your figures!
If you are selling men’s shoes, for example, investing in a Pinterest campaign isn’t the best use of your time since its female userbase is three times of its male userbase. Instead, focusing on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, where there is an equal number of male users, will help you get the best out of your buck.
Next, ensure that your branding is clear and consistent across all channels: this will help strengthen recognition of your brand as well as build trust with consumers.
Also, don’t obsess over every piece of data about what users do when they come across your content. instead, focus on how customers feel after interacting with content related to your brand or product on any platform. Experiment and see what works! Each company has unique needs, so there’s no universal social media strategising approach that will work perfectly for all businesses.
Create Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is content that doesn’t have a shelf life. It is:
- Not reliant on current events, trending topics or information that could go out of date quickly. Things like “5 Ways To Make Money Selling Data” wouldn’t be considered evergreen because five years from now, the information in your blog post could be irrelevant and unhelpful to readers since third-party data is on its way to becoming obsolete, starting 2022.
However, a blog post called “5 Ways To Make Money Selling Your Goods Online” would be more evergreen — it wouldn’t matter if you were selling cakes or data. The point is you can sell stuff online! That’s always true no matter what year it is.
- Able to be used for educational purposes for months and years after being published. For instance, by writing a blog post about how to make money selling goods online, you can attract people who might not even own an eCommerce store yet but are interested in learning more about selling things online.
Then, they find links to your products on your site and start buying them because they wanted to learn how to sell stuff online and now they want your products! In this case, education came first and the sale was secondary. And that’s the most sustainable way to keep making eCommerce sales.
Remember that evergreen posts will always attract readers and customers alike who need help with whatever skill/product you are advertising in the article. So, you will never run out of sales opportunities. It doesn’t matter, then, what the economy is like.
