Image by 200 Degrees from Pixabay

By Henry Brown

If you run a small business, you do need to look into ecommerce and making your products or services available online. Sure, brick and mortar stores still have a market and can prove extremely successful. But having an online presence just opens your business up to the world so much more. When you have a website, you create a space where people can check in on your company and browse your goods at any time of the day or night. You can quite literally generate sales while you’re sleeping – and while a physical store would otherwise be closed for the night. The same goes for holidays, weekends, and other dates.

Being online also widens your reach, as people from further afield – who might not have the time or means to travel all the way to your store – can shop with you and have their goods delivered directly to their door. But setting up a website alone isn’t enough. Sure, this is an important step, but you’re going to have to continually work on your website to make sure that it is optimized to sell as much as possible. Here are some suggestions that can help with this!

UX design

UX design stands for “user experience” design. All too many businesses focus excessively on the branding and look of their website alone. Sure, these are important elements that you are going to have to work on. But you need to make sure that you focus on usability too. Ensuring that your customers can easily navigate their way around your site, easily finding what they’re looking for, can make the difference between them closing the tab and shopping somewhere else, or following a funnel that will lead them to actually checking out. There are plenty of UX specialists out there who will be able to assist you with this. You can also find that testing helps – getting people to use your site as a customer and highlight any elements that may be missing or may improve their experience.

SEO

SEO is essential when it comes to any website’s success nowadays. Sure, a few customers will make their way to your website by literally typing your website into the search bar. But at the end of the day, most customers will make their way to you by using a search engine like Google. Think about how you shop online. Chances are, you put a few keywords into google to describe what you’re looking for. Teacups, phone chargers, hiking boots… whatever it is you’re looking for. Then, Google will present you with results and you’ll click one of the top links provided. Very few people scroll beyond the first few links, never mind the first page.

Of course, the order of sites presented isn’t entirely random. Google does it best to match the customer with the most relevant pages. So, you need to make sure that your page is relevant to the search terms your customers will be using. This is called “search engine optimization” and can involve steps from including keywords on your pages to ensuring that your page loads quickly and provides a good customer experience all round. Use an SEO company for assistance with this. SEO is constantly changing, so most companies leave this work in the hand of the specialists, rather than trying to keep up themselves alongside all their other responsibilities.

Bring customers back

Whether a customer makes a purchase the first time around, or leaves your page, you’re still going to want them to come back to your site. Whether that’s to complete another purchase or to give in to buying the item they were looking at and abandoned. Bringing customers back time and time again serves to familiarize them with your brand, convince them that your products are worth buying and to part with their cash, benefiting from your products and generating profit for you.

But how do you do this? Of course, there are several ways to go about this. But the most commonly used tends to be email marketing. Having some sort of email sign up form on your site can give you the ability and permission to target visitors with marketing emails. Just bear in mind that you generally have to offer some sort of incentive to encourage people to actually sign up. Most businesses will offer either a first-purchase discount code or free shipping on the customer’s first purchase. Sure, this will dig into your profits from the original sale, but it can bring back people to generate more sales in the future.

These are a few starter steps when it comes to helping your website experience more success. Hopefully a few will work for you!

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Henry Brown is an online marketing executive. When he isn’t talking shop, he’s roaming the streets of London, uncovering the extra-ordinary in the ordinary.