Online shopping has been on the rise for a while, and the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 only exacerbated this trend. It is expected that more than 18% of retail sales worldwide in 2021 will be e-commerce sales.
There are a lot of advantages to starting a successful online shop. It can be a low-investment business to start and allows you to reach many more customers than a simple brick-and-mortar store ever could.
However, the internet is full of online shops. It’s essential to drive traffic to your site and reach your customers to ensure success.
Are you wondering what you can do to make sure your online shop will be successful? Let’s take a look at what you need to know.
Focus on Creating Engaging Web Design
Having an engaging web design is essential when you run an online shop. Even if your product is truly one-of-a-kind, the visual appearance of your website can mean that your business will never succeed.
You can either make a website yourself or have a professional do it for you. Either way, you will want to incorporate the design principles of web design to ensure that your site captivates the attention of your visitors.
User experience is another crucial aspect of web design. You can learn more about the importance of user experience here.
Make Sure Your Online Shop Is Mobile-Responsive
More and more people are doing their online shopping on their mobile devices. For this reason, your website must be mobile-responsive. If it doesn’t, you will likely lose customers to your competitors you have invested in being accessible to their mobile customers.
Don’t Neglect the About Us Page
When one of your site’s visitors goes to your “About Us” page, it means that they are interested in learning more about your company and your products. This is a valuable opportunity to share with this potential customer who you are, what you do, and what you offer.
You don’t want to waste this opportunity. Be sure to include your address, contact email, and social media channels.
Offer Top-Notch Online Support
When your customers are purchasing something online, they are taking a risk. Since they are not buying it from a brick-and-mortar store, they are betting on the fact that your company will be there if they have questions, concerns, or other issues.
If you do not offer excellent online support, you cannot expect your customers to regularly return. On the flip side, when your online support is responsive and reliable you will find that customers keep coming back again and again.
Know Your Audience
Many people that are starting businesses make one crucial mistake when they begin. They have a product and they want people to buy it. They assume that they should advertise to everyone so that their product becomes known to the most people possible.
However, it’s simply not the case that all of the different demographics of people want the same product for the same reasons. People are different, they have different lives and are in different life stages. The same thing simply isn’t going to appeal to everyone.
When you try to appeal to everyone, though, you end up not appealing to anyone. Your advertising and incentives become so vague that they don’t particularly spark anyone’s interest.
What you need to do instead is define your target audience or audiences. The information that you need to know about them is exhaustive.
You don’t just need to know how old they are, where they live, and how much money they make. You need to know what their interests are, what their pet peeves are, and what makes them tick. You need to have a sense of their values, their aesthetic, and what drives them.
Understanding your target audience gives you the ability to speak their language. It lets you market directly to them in a way that captures their attention. You have a product that will solve a problem your target market has, and by understanding them you can help show them why they need what you have to offer.
Don’t Be Afraid to Partner With Other Brands
When you are in business, sometimes it feels like you are going it alone. However, other brands are not necessarily your competition and can often be beneficial to you. Consider partnering with other brands to help boost your reputation and drive traffic to your site.
Utilize Popular Payment Options
One of the important parts of your site is the payment option you provide to customers. Make sure that you offer several different options to appeal to the largest number of customers. You also want to make sure that buyers can create an account where they save all of their payment information, making it easy to come back and make another purchase.
Use the Power of Social Media
Social media is an incredibly powerful advertising tool. This is an awesome way to connect with tons of potential customers and build your brand identity. Some tools can help you specifically reach your target demographic, allowing you to make the most of your social media marketing efforts.
Encourage Social Sharing
There are a bunch of different ways to encourage people to share your posts on social media. When public discussions are occurring online about your products and brand, this can exist as powerful social proof.
Consider starting a campaign that encourages people to share your product or brand. For example, you might have people enter a contest by tagging a friend or commenting on a social media post.
Have a Blog That Offers Value
Blogging is an essential part of any online shop for several reasons. For one, it is a way to generate more traffic to your site and store. When you have SEO-driven blog posts, it can help your pages rank higher on search engine results pages.
On top of that, having a high-quality blog can help to build your brand identity and solidify your company as an authority in your niche.
Allow a Space For Product Reviews
When people buy something online, they aren’t able to hold it in their hands and look at it directly. Instead, they have to go by the photograph and product description you offer.
However, by also offering reviews and ratings for your products online it can help give your customers more information. You want to encourage people to leave reviews as they are much more convincing when there are a lot of them. For this reason, don’t be shy about asking previous customers to leave a review when they’ve been satisfied with your product.
Prioritize High-Quality Images
When you look at a website, what do you see first? If you’re like most people, your eyes go right for the images before starting to scan the text. This is for a good reason, too, as humans process visual images 60,000 times faster than we process text.
For this reason, you want to prioritize having images that make an immediate impression on your potential buyers. Make sure your photos are high-resolution when it comes to your products so that customers can see all of the details. Include photos from multiple angles to help them get the best sense of what they are considering buying.
Optimize Your SEO
When you operate a brick-and-mortar store, you can expect that some people will simply stumble upon your shop when walking or driving by. However, running an online shop means you don’t have this advantage.
To have a successful online store, you will need to ensure that your website receives study traffic. If you do not work to boost your traffic that no one will even know that your store is there to buy from.
Offer Free Shipping
It has become an expectation of people shopping online that they can find free shipping for the items they want to buy. When there is an additional cost to pay for shipping, many buyers will bounce off your site and look for a store that does offer this incentive.
You need to run the math when you decide to offer free shipping. However, many store owners find that their return on investment is worth the cost, as they make more sales one saying state this policy.
You will want to highlight the fact that you offer free shipping at various points throughout your website. This encourages sales and can help lead to repeat, loyal customers.
Offer Incentives
When you visit just about any popular online store, you will likely find the landing page, headers, and footers advertising promo codes or other incentives. The reason behind this is simple: it helps generate sales and potential repeat customers.
You can even use the power of technology to your advantage with this one. You can use the available data-driven tools to help target specific incentives to different groups of buyers.
Many sites incorporate pop-up discount boxes on their site. While this can be a good tactic, you want to make sure to not overdo it. Too many pop-up windows when a customer is simply trying to navigate the site can be irritating enough that it drives them away entirely. An excess of pop-up windows is associated with spam in many people’s minds, and that’s the last impression you want to make on prospective buyers.
Build Your Email List
One really easy way to build relationships with customers at all levels of the sales funnel is through email marketing. This is an incredibly powerful tool for increasing your revenue and encouraging sales. When you have built an email list, you can use it to send targeted emails to different buyer groups that appeal to the specific interests of the buyer.
To efficiently build an email list, you’ll want to set up a system for collecting the email addresses of leads and customers. There are several different opportunities throughout your site to ask people if they are interested in receiving notifications through email.
You can’t expect everyone who visits your site to want to receive emails from you. Those who do, however, are interested in your brand and therefore the perfect audience for your email marketing strategies.
Help Customers Feel Secure in Buying Online
One of the big risks of buying products online is that you could spend money on something that ends up not being what you want at all. This makes consumers warier about buying things online. However, when you offer money-back guarantees and generous refunds, this can help to ease their minds.
Your online customers can’t see exactly what they’re buying when they click “add to cart.” This means that it’s inherently riskier than buying something at a physical store.
When a customer knows that they can return an item makes them more comfortable with making a purchase. It also makes your brand seem more reputable and insinuates that you trust and value the customer.
Professional Web Design For Your Online Shop
When you run an online shop, your website is your storefront. If you had a physical store, you would want it to be easy to navigate and a pleasant place to spend time. When your shop exists in the digital realm, it means you can create the same positive experience through professional web design.
At Nizek, our team of experts specializes in mobile development, web development, product design, and more. We’re here to deal with the complexities of the web so you don’t have to.
Are you looking for a web design company that can help your online store thrive and grow? If so, contact us today!
