Identify the persona of your target market: How can you expect to persuade your website visitors to buy if you don’t know who they are? Creating a profile for your typical customer is a highly effective way to attract the right sort of people to your site through improved targeting. Understanding who your customers are will help to inform everything from your on-site content to your marketing material and promotions, which will help to increase conversions.
User intent: What is your customer looking for? Once you’ve identified your ideal customer(s), you should consider how they think. What drove them to visit your website in the first place? What information are they looking for, and what could stand in their way when it comes to making a purchase? If your on-site content is written with user intent in mind, you’ll reap the rewards. Google’s regular algorithmic updates are designed to improve the experience for searchers.
Simplicity of navigation: As well as considering what brought visitors to your site in the first place, you need to ask yourself what they expect to find once they’ve arrived. After all, a congested homepage, confusing menu structure or slow page-loading speed will have potential customers leaving a site just as quickly as they arrived. One of the keys to creating a user-friendly website is to ensure that navigation around it is as simple as possible.
Offer quality search functionality: On-site search is a fantastic way to help shoppers quickly and easily find the products they’re looking for without trawling through menus, categories and subcategories. The quality of your search functionality can have a major bearing on the performance of your website: according to Econsultancy, as many as 30 percent of visitors to ecommerce sites will use the search box.
Dealing with abandoned baskets: Abandoned baskets are a frustration for any ecommerce site, but unfortunately they’re also a part of life. Baymard Institute, the independent web usability research institute, has calculated the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate as 68.6 percent, meaning two in every three shoppers who reach your basket pages will ultimately end up not making a purchase. Once you’ve recognized that abandoned baskets are an inevitability, you can take steps to encourage those shoppers to return and make a purchase. One of the most effective tactics here is launching an email recovery campaign, in which targeted messages are sent to shoppers who have added items to their basket but failed to purchase them. Simply reminding customers what they’ve abandoned can often be all that it takes to encourage them to complete a purchase.
Courtesy of BetaNews
