This year’s Holiday Shopping Season is very different from the holiday shopping seasons that we were used to in the past. The buyers as well as retailers are facing immense challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a lot of people are wondering how the online shopping season will play out.
Right from the start of the year, the pandemic has taken the world by storm and forced businesses to go bankrupt as well as cripple the global economy. But now, the lock-down has been lifted and we are returning back to normal life (if you can call it that). Even though the shopping malls and other businesses are open and waiting for customers, people are still afraid and are continuing the following social distancing, wearing masks, and the various other precautions that they are supposed to follow. This has paved the way for shoppers buying online and retailers following suite to fulfill their demands.
Keeping this situation in mind, we have curated 8 helpful tips for online retailers that can help you to not only bring customers to your website but also keep them coming back for more. Here are the tips for online retailers:
1. Make your Website Design User Friendly
When you are designing your website from elsewhere, make sure that your website designer has good UI/UX designing skills. It is very important that your customer has a good time navigating throughout your website. During the online shopping season customers have very little patience while browsing through the internet and if your website is confusing to them, they would just close the tab and go back to google to look for a better website that can suit their needs without making them frustrated.
2. Check your Website Loading Speed
It is crucial that you have a website that loads fast for the shoppers shopping online. After your customer clicks on the website, they expect it to load quickly, and just like what happens with a poor UI, they will be quick to go to another website that loads faster. Besides, if you have a website that takes forever to load, then Google is most likely to penalize you when it comes to SEO and make your website rank a lot lower than it normally does.
3. Send Notifications or Emails Regarding Abandoned Carts
Nothing converts customers better than retargeting emails, ads, and notifications. When a customer abandons their cart after adding the product that they want, it does not mean that they are no longer interested (in most cases). There could be a variety of reasons as to why they have abandoned the cart, which could be that they got distracted or they had remembered something important, or it just wasn’t the right time to buy the product. Regardless, when you send retargeting emails or notifications to them reminding them about their abandoned cart, almost 30% of them are likely to convert as it was noticed in various e-commerce surveys.
4. Make use of the Recommendation Feature on your Website
If you are not doing this, then you are missing out on millions of dollars in revenue. There are a lot of ways that you can recommend products to your website visitors, one of the easiest ways is to show them products that are related to the ones that they are buying or that they have added to their cart. You can also use cookies to show your customers the items that they have been browsing recently. Using cookies on e-commerce sites is the most common online shopping tip that you should be aware of.
5. Personalize the Customer’s Experience.
Personalization is considered to be the backbone of e-commerce and it is gonna continue to be so in the future. It can be done in a lot of ways. Like it was mentioned above, you can use cookies and other site data to personalize the product recommendation to your customers that can help them to make better purchase decisions. Another aspect where personalization is essential is in marketing. If you run marketing campaigns that are personalized and tailor-made for your customers by using various automation tools, then you have a higher chance of converting them easily.
6. Simplify the checkout page.
Your aim as an e-commerce retailer should be to reduce the friction in the sales cycle as much as possible. Making the checkout page very simple is a great start to minimize the distractions and get your customer to convert quickly. A great way to make the checkout process simple is to incorporate all the important forms on one page itself and ask for as little information as possible. You must also have the option to save the information for later, which can drastically improve the speed of checking out the next time.
7. Have a clear return policy.
One of the biggest factors that influence trust between customers and online shopping retailers is their approach towards return policies. Companies that have a liberal return policy as that of amazon are quite trustworthy in general. However, there is a clear line that must be drawn in which you should state the return window strictly and also about the charges of shipping the product again in case it is returned or replaced. Your customers will thank you for it and would love to shop with you again if you have a clear and concise return policy displayed at the time of checkout.
8. Leverage Social Media and Paid Advertising
Social Media is quite literally a gold mine for e-commerce retailers, especially when it comes to paid advertising. Using social media, you have the power to leverage the data that huge corporations like Facebook and Google have for a fraction of the price that it would have taken you to reach them using traditional ways of advertising. In fact, you can even track your progress and conversion using Analytics and improve on your campaigns the next time. You can retarget people who have taken action on your ads and drive them through funnels to convert them better. Social media ads has power to bring upto 4 times ROI or even more when you properly get it handled from a professionals.
