How to boost your E-Commerce Business
Written on January 5th, 2010 at 17:38 pm by rishabhmhjn
As the owner of an e-commerce website, it is always required to get traffic to your business portal, lure customers to your best products (highly profitable) and boost up the sales. But to get customers to buy your choice of product is what is not in the hands of the business owners. Here we'll discuss some to-do tasks that can help a lot in attracting customers to your e-commerce based website and drive up your sales to increase profitability. This post will be divided into 2 segments:
- Bringing traffic to your website, maintaining traffic etc
- Driving up sales and revenues through offers and value services
Traffic Generation - Bringing traffic to your website, maintaining traffic etc
For your e-commerce to really do its job, it will certainly require good amount of visitors to the portal. You may be having great deals on your portal but it would be of no use if no one knows about it. You need to market your offers really well. It should reach up to your target customers to visit your offer page at least once. Traffic generation is a very important aspect of e-commerce businesses. You should make use every tool or application that can derive your traffic. I shall list a few steps and to-do tasks to be performed to get traffic to your site:
Twitter can prove to be very crucial for driving up your traffic. Your e-commerce portal should definitely have an official Twitter account and should be a very formal means of broadcasting official relevant information to your followers. You should broadcast your best offers through your Twitter account. Make good use of #hash-tags as well. Group your alike offers under similar #hash-tags. Also, your #hash-tags should be unique, relevant to your company and products; you don't want your traffic to go to other e-commerce portals, losing your potential customers by use of some common #hash-tags.
Facebook Page And Application
Just like Twitter, you should definitely have an official Facebook page account for your e-commerce portal. Here also you should broadcast offers and value added services so that it reaches your fans who really are your potential customers. Also, you can also develop some interactive application such as "Gift It!" or "Send a present" etc to so that users can publish the content for their friends and network people to see which will also help in getting attention of more users and thus luring them to your portal. This also will help you create a virtual brand in the Facebook Environment thereby creating a buzz.
Social Bookmarking
One of the most successful ways to get traffic to your site is the utilization of the Social Bookmarking Websites - Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon etc. Delicious.com offers a very efficient tagging system for your bookmarks which can proof to be very efficient way in tagging your similar offers just like #hash-tags.
Easy Sharing Options
You must provide your user every possible sharing option - buttons, links etc to help him in sharing the page (item, offer etc) to their friends on their networks on Twitter, Facebook, Digg etc. The better sharing options you give to your customer, the more the chances become that your page gets shared which in turns increases the probability of bringing in more users to your website. Having and retaining traffic on your site will always increase the probability of you sharing your product. There are very easy sharing buttons available from many providers such asaddthis, shareit, addtoany etc which really takes care of the pain of coding buttons for different providers on different pages.
Caution about including add-ons that may spoil reputation
Introduction of a comment adding feature may sound very exciting, but there is an enormous amount of risk involved if the comments are not monitored/moderated. There is a simple psychology of users that they will hardly comment on your product/offer page if it is an excellent deal, but they will, for sure, comment if there is a gap between the expectation of the customer and the quality of service that are rendered. Although this gives a great opportunity for the company to understand the customer's expectation but non-moderated comments can proof very dangerous for the companies reputation.
Beware of the mistakes
- Always proof read your content for errors related to display, blocks, images, galleries, hyperlinks
- Do not exaggerate about what you cannot deliver. Not meeting the expectation which only has been aroused by you can hamper the image of the company's quality of service
