In between manning the Volo stand at Spring Fair in the very busy lunchtime periods, we also had time to wander over to the Ecommerce Theatre where there were talks ranging from selling internationally, social selling and optimising your ecommerce website and online sales. From this, we have decided to collate a few of the takeaways we took from these presentations, the first one being how to increase your online sales. Below are key points to doing just that:
First measure your audience: Did you know that most UK online sales happen at the beginning and end of the year when we get bad weather? Using surveys from platforms like Survey Monkey and site analytics helps you get a grasp on who is viewing your site and when and how they are using it. Using text boxes within your survey questions makes answers more accurate and detailed. Tools such as Hotjar help you to see heat maps of areas on your page where you customers are clicking.
Learn to embrace SEO: Optimising your website is crucial to helping customers find you on Google. Page titles, meta data, keywords in site text and site maps all contribute to gaining you a good position in search rankings. Of course, quality content will always be key to successful rankings and having a platform to post on such as a blog helps this. Apart from SEO, having a respected brand will get you the furthest with customers, and using more traditional offline marketing channels are still relevant.
What are your buying options? Customer retention throughout the buying process is down to making the purchase process simple. Having clear pictures of the product and its packaging, large buttons and basket security when paying all helps with the end sale.
Engage with your customers: Having a good relationship with customers is critical to the development of your business. Updating customers with relevant news, sales or promotions, as well as inviting them to events will all help with engagement. Creating an incentive such as a loyalty scheme could even bring straying customers back.
Developing an email marketing strategy: Email-marketing creates over 20% of traffic that goes to your website, so creating a clean email database and engaging content will go a long way, especially if you connect them to your Google Analytics tools. Reading emails on mobile is also on the increase, so designing one that fits all devices would be beneficial.
Thank you to everyone that came over to have a chat and we hope to see you again in March at IRX!
Catch up with Volo in a month when we’ll be returning to the NEC for IRX Expo
