When it comes to being able to sell online, competition is tough. It isn’t like a brick and mortar store where you’ll get passing traffic and some will come in for a look.
You have to be active to drive traffic to your online shop, your website, and encourage them even further to make a purchase.
Luckily, there are a few tools you can use that can help you generate traffic and nurture leads. Here are five things you’ll need in order to sell online.
1. A responsive website
In 2018, 52.2% of all web traffic was through mobile phones and it accounted for a third of all online revenue. If you don’t have a responsive website, you could lose a lot of visitors to your site. Surveys have shown that 60% of those that have a bad mobile experience will abandon a brand altogether.
A responsive website also helps it to be fast. Research has shown that for every second it takes your site to load, you lose 7% of your revenue. That means just a four-second delay and you’ve lost over a quarter of your revenue.
2. An email list
Email still remains one of the best online marketing strategies for businesses. Email marketing has the best ROI of any digital marketing channel and can offer you great ways to target leads with specific offers that are more relevant to them.
Building an email marketing list can be challenging, but it’s worth the investment in the end.
3. Great SEO
While email marketing may help sales, most traffic for almost all websites comes from organic search. And it is hard to subscribe someone to your email marketing list without you actually getting them to your website first. Therefore, you need to ensure you’re appearing on the first page of Google and other search engines.
If you aren’t in the top three results, the traffic from potential customers is going to be much lower. There is a sharp decline in the click-through rate on organic search results as you get lower on the page. For instance, 30% of users will click on the first result but only 2% on the tenth.
4. Monitoring tools
You can’t make improvements in your online campaigns without knowing what has happened in the past. Free tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console can help you identify entrance points, exit points and user behaviours that can aid in developing your online presence and marketing strategies to achieve better results.
An example would be to see what pages visitors bounce more on. You could look at these pages and adjust the design to make it more user-friendly.
5. Reviews
Reviews are an excellent way to build trust with audiences. Buyers are more likely to trust the recommendations of their peers or past customers than they are to trust your sales pitch. You can collect reviews yourself, on social media, or on review sites, but you should always display reviews on your website for all to see.
Reviews help to build trust and allow you to build expectations for your customers. Reviews are also a great way to build SEO and create free social media updates to share.
