Today’s guest post is by Jonathan Poston, President of Yiveo.com.
Simply put: advertising works. Under the spell of the Pied Piper’s tune, droves of customers float along toward a final destination, usually to shop at a store, attend an event, or stop by to enjoy a special service. But, could you imagine the most amazing promotional campaign driving thousands of people—let’s say to the “event of the decade”—but when everyone arrived at the address they were in the middle of Times Square unsure of where to focus their attention? That’s what many companies do every day without even knowing it.
Let’s look at how it happens. Advertisers are doing their work to drive relevant traffic: millions are spent on PPC / Adwords and other digital marketing efforts. Tremendous efforts are put into attracting as many eyeballs as possible, to coax them to visit an online store, or to check out some new software product. But, when the customers show up, the “Times Square” they encounter is a website experience that overwhelms them.
It’s hard to believe that so much effort can be put into rallying potential customers, and then let it all go to waste by failing to deliver. If you want a more concrete example of how this looks from an analytics perspective, check your PPC metrics and you’ll likely see lots of impressions and click through, but zero to only a few conversions. When people don’t convert, it’s likely a shopping experience failure that needs to be addressed.
Here are three ways to address that failure to yield super high conversion rates:
Precision Search
If your customers aren’t able to find what they want in a few seconds or less, you’ve lost them. This is easier for merchants selling one or two products, but when there are thousands of SKUs, it’s much more of a challenge. This is when it’s time to work with eCommerce specialists on optimizing your site and improving it with intuitive site design, search tools, and content clarity.
Competitive Pricing
Now that you’ve helped your customer find exactly what they came to get, and hopefully have that item or service featured in the best light possible, pricing is what customers will be thinking about next. Savvy customers will often have several competitor websites open at once for an easy price comparison. Adopting a dynamic pricing strategy can help you keep up with the competition’s price changes. Automated price intelligence can not only make this possible, but it can also keep you from engaging in a price war and cutting into your profits because always having the lowest price isn’t always the best strategy if you want to have healthy profit margins. While a low price might initially attract a shopper, additional value, like free shipping and great customer service, is what really seals the deal.
Superb Customer Service
Now that you’ve helped customers find what they want, and given them the best pricing, it’s still easy to lose everything if good customer service isn’t in place. Superb customer service is often the defining factor when it comes to getting repeat business. Otherwise all that money spent on generating new traffic is wasted. And, we all know bad customer service does more harm than simply losing the affected customers, because not only will they not buy again, but they’ll likely dissuade all their friends from buying too!
By following these three easy steps, you can organize your website to help your customer focus on what you do best: sell awesome products. Many websites suffer from an unorganized layout or poor merchandising, leaving many customers frustrated and taking their business elsewhere. With a little bit of planning and testing, you can grab the customer’s attention and win the sale.
Jonathan Poston M.E. is President of Yiveo.com, a content development agency specializing in PPC management, creative writing, project managing creative teams, and market research.
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