How To Build, Grow & Scale A Successful Ecommerce Business
- Updated on: 2019-02-12
- Read original article here
Recently, I took an online marketing course designed specifically for ecommerce businesses. If you’re unfamiliar with this term, it’s where businesses (small and large) sell their products on the Internet. Given this new insight, I thought it worthy of sharing with you.
Since a lot of people are unfamiliar with the nuances, we’ll stick with the basics. However, if you do have any questions, feel free to comment below or connect with us on social media!
This seems fairly simple, right? Nope, each of these elements has multiple layers and optimization techniques.
When a visitor lands on your site, chances are they didn't come directly to your home page. With a well thought out marketing campaign, visitors are going to hit your blog post, product pages, etc.
But just like most internet users, they're going to be curious enough to click around your website and land on your home page.
From top to bottom the first thing they'll see is your header. Your header will act as a navigator for your audience.
This has to be consistent throughout the pages, so make sure you optimize it. How do you do that?
One retailer who really does a solid job at doing this is Zappos.
Moving down, the next thing you want your visitor to see is your main banner. This can be show seasonal products, current holidays/events, or any featured products.
Sticking with Zappos as our example, we can see that they're trying to promote UGG boots this holiday season.
Given it's the middle of winter, it makes sense to promote these shoes. You won't see UGG boots as a main banner during the summer.
Now, we aren't going to walk you through the whole process of setting up your website, but we'll give you some insight on how to optimize your home page. Along with the above, be sure to include:
As you can see in the image above, the footer gives you another opportunity to direct your visitors wherever you want. Be sure to include links to pages across your site, more information pages (we'll define that next), a CTA, and if you want to be more 'advance', a chat box so customers can contact you about any issues they might have.
This is probably the second place your visitors will go to (if you have them.) A more information page is exactly what it sounds like; pages that give website visitors more information about you, your products, etc.
More information pages can be broken down tomany types: 'Contact Us' page, 'About Us' page, 'Terms and Conditions', 'FAQ', 'Shipping Information', etc.
Whatever you decide, make sure you give a clear message about who you are, why they should trust you, and what makes you special/different.
A simply way to do that is by creating two videos; 'Why buy from us' video and 'Hello from the owner' video.
These videos can be posted not only on your website, but across various channels such as social media and emails.
The 'Why buy from us' video
This doesn't have to be tricky or hard. All you have to do is tell viewers why they should trust you. Try answering some of these questions to help you get started:
Why buy from us video example
The 'Hello from the owner' video
We know this gets a bit repetitive at times, but you don't know which video your website viewer will see.
Similar to the why buy from us page, this video is a bit more 'down to earth'. Talk about the owner and the struggle they might have had to take. Or why this business is so important to them.
To get started, try answering some of these questions to generate the flow of your video/content:
Marketing tip: this content can be repurposed to many formats! It can be converted to a blog post, series of tweets, an email campaign, etc.
Hello from the owner example
By now, you have the viewer's attention. You've told them your unique selling proposition, they trust you/your brand, and now they want to see what kind of products you offer. The next logical page your visitor goes to is the products page.
Your products page is a list of all the items you sell, either categorized or individually. Remember, you don't want to list the full details, just a quick overview..
I saw a great example when making a recent purchase. I was in the market for new basketball shoes, so I happened to find their page on Twitter. Once I landed on their site... they had me! I ended up buying 2 new pairs of shoes.
Here's what worked for them:
This leads us to the individual product page. All of the elements from above still apply to a product detail page, but here's what you need to additionally include.
Wow... That's a lot of information! There's still a lot more you can do with youre-commercesite such as nurturing your emails.
Since that topic is a long discussion itself, leave us a comment below if you want us to talk about it in another post.
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