Why is Your Online Presence Important?
In the traditional shopping model, companies use their storefront to build a positive shopper experience and make a good first impression with their customers. With online shopping, an eCommerce company’s website handles the same responsibilities. An online storefront should cater to the shopper and strive to meet their needs. Doing so ensures that shoppers enjoy their time spent on your website. Remember to make your website easy to navigate. Having a complicated website would be similar to a brick-and-mortar storefront being constructed like a maze. Your customers should be able to easily find and purchase the products they want.
Your eCommerce website is also a representation of your company’s personality. It is an opportunity to engage with your customers and encourage loyalty. Individuals prefer companies that have consistent personalities because they find them relatable. Companies with relatable personalities are also more recognized by the public than quieter companies.
What Makes You Different From the Rest?
The convenience and availability of online storefronts have resulted in a boom in the popularity of online shopping. This means that there has never been a more profitable time to join the industry. However, there is a downside to the success of the eCommerce industry: it has grown increasingly competitive. With so much competition in the market, it can be difficult to differentiate yourself from the rest. This is why it is important for you to focus on developing a consistent online presence.
The most direct way to express your company’s personality through your website is with content marketing. This is the practice of producing content that your audience finds informative, entertaining, or interesting and hosting that content on your website. This content may be blogs, podcasts, or even a video series. Creating this sort of content allows your company to engage with its audience and encourages your customers to share their impressions of the company. In this way, content marketing can generate excitement around your company and drive organic traffic to your website.
Out Of The Box Ideas
- Focus on Organic Traffic
When most people think of ways to generate traffic to their website, they go directly to paid marketing. Paid marketing are things like video advertisements, Google Ad Words, and pop-up advertisements. While these styles of traffic generation are effective, they are only half of the picture. The other half of digital marketing is concerned with organic traffic, or the kind of traffic you earn without monetary investment.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of directing organic traffic to your website by aligning your website’s content with a search engine’s preferences. This works by convincing Google’s algorithm to rank you higher in the list of blue links that appear after searching for something. For example, Google consistently ranks websites with responsive design higher than still websites. This means that you can earn more organic traffic simply by building your website to cater to mobile users.
- Simplify Your Checkout Process
One of the largest challenges facing eCommerce companies in today’s world is shopping cart abandonment. It is nearly unheard of for customers to leave brick-and-mortar stores without purchasing a shopping cart full of products, but with online shopping, it is actually pretty common. One of the leading reasons online consumers abandon their shopping carts is a long and complicated checkout process or lack of shipping services and solutions. As previously mentioned, there is a great deal of competition in the eCommerce industry, meaning online shoppers can afford to be picky. You should also consider offering cheapest shipping services at checkout to accommodate every user’s needs.
- Choose the Right Template
Website templates have simplified the process of creating a website and made the internet a much more accessible place. These templates are created by website design experts and allow anyone to create a professional feeling website with ease. However, there are a few drawbacks to using a template when creating a website. For instance, the designers of these templates may have created these templates with specific intentions in mind. While templates may perform well in certain applications, they may not work well in every situation. This means that website templates aren’t as versatile as websites that are built from scratch.