Starting a business online is an enticing endeavor. With the ease and convenience of online sales, many are interested in creating their ecommerce business and start selling goods and services digitally. However, being a new business owner or entrepreneur is never an easy journey. To help guide you as you enter the ecommerce industry, here are some of the common challenges online businesses face and tips on how to solve them.
Boosting online presence and visibility
Source: Unsplash
Ecommerce is a fast-growing and highly competitive industry. There are already millions of ecommerce websites and the number continues to grow each and every day. One of the biggest challenges that new business owners and entrepreneurs face revolves around establishing their brand identity and boosting their presence and visibility to millions of users online. Taking this into consideration, marketing should be one of the priorities indicated in your business plan.
However, marketing online is not as easy as it seems. You can start by posting a status update on your personal social media account but this can only reach people within your circle and your community. To target a larger audience, it is important to know the effective marketing tactics and techniques adopted by most ecommerce businesses today.
Search engine optimization or SEO is one of the most utilized marketing strategies for online businesses. It is a non-paid marketing method that can help increase website traffic through search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Optimizing content for these websites, therefore, improves visibility to web users. SEO puts emphasis on the quality and relevance of your website’s content in determining your website’s search engine ranking. The higher the rank, the most visible your website becomes.
Another popular marketing tactic used by businesses online involves social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Social media marketing is an effective way to reach a larger audience with minimal costs or risks. However, an important aspect of effective social media marketing emphasizes knowing your target audience and understanding the social media platform’s demographics.
Knowing who, what, and where is important in social media marketing campaigns. The first step is to identify who your target audience is. Then, determine which social media platforms they commonly use. For example, the majority of Facebook users are between 25 to 34 years of age and are mostly male. On the other hand, TikTok’s largest age group is 10 to 19 years old and consists of mostly female users. Understanding this is critical in social media marketing campaigns as it helps place your content directly into where your target audience is.
Generating and converting quality leads
Getting people to visit your website is one thing. But, keeping them interested in what you have to offer is an even more daring challenge for ecommerce businesses. An increase in website traffic means that your marketing strategy is working. It’s effectively bringing in people to check out your digital products, goods, and services listed on your website. However, the mere increase in brand awareness does not automatically result in an increase in sales.
In order to generate quality leads, it’s important that your content provides valuable and relevant details and information to the customer. Your content may be about your products and services, your business, and your niche. When a potential customer considered your content valuable, this creates a relationship that puts your business as a reliable brand in your industry. Quality leads are users that found your website useful and find interest in your products, service, brand, niche, or industry.
Now to capture quality leads, it is important for ecommerce businesses to identify non-valuable and valuable website visitors. Those who spent time browsing through your catalog and read through your blogs are far more valuable than those who immediately backed out of your online store.
Using customer relationship management (CRM) software can help you determine quality leads. From there, you can target your sales and marketing efforts to these customers and guide them through their buyer’s journey. Try out email marketing and targeted advertising in order to encourage these quality leads and turn them into actual sales.
Designing a good ecommerce website
Source: Pexels
Electronic commerce or online stores often start with a digital business website. It serves as their store’s front where customers can interact with and browse through their digital goods, products, and services for sale. An online store’s website is an important part of the ecommerce industry as it serves as the platform where an online sale or transaction can take place. However, one of the biggest mistakes that startups and small businesses make in the ecommerce sphere is not paying attention to their website’s quality.
A good website is more than just pretty colors and fancy graphics. Instead, it has something more to do with the website’s user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). In simple terms, the user interface is what your website looks like. It includes every design element including typography, images, tables, color palettes, themes, and the like. But aside from that, the UI design also involves the website’s user navigability and interactivity. It includes the button types, navigation options, and even the animation that users see when they interact with the website.
On the other hand, the user experience or UX focuses on how the website’s processes go. The purpose of the UX design is to ensure that a customer would have a smooth and hassle-free buying journey from the product announcement, selection, checkout, payment, and even post-sale. UX includes important ecommerce elements such as marketing strategies, sales techniques, and customer service.
When it comes to the user interface, one of the most common tips is to avoid clutter. A potential customer can quickly back out of your website when your homepage is bombarded with chunks of text and other distracting design elements. Instead, keep your homepage clean and simple but ensure that the other features of your website are easy to navigate from there. In order to have a good ecommerce website design, it is important that the UI and UX of a website should focus on functionality more than just aesthetics.
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