One Stop WordPress Shop: Actionable Tips and Simple Design for e-Commerce Websites
On a global scale, we are becoming an e-society. We depend on our internet connections to entertain us, educate us, to keep us connected with our banking accounts, our governments even, and we rely on it to keep us well informed at all times. With e-governments, e-business and e-health systems, the concept of e-commerce is becoming a form of a regularity that we rely on. In 2015, a total of £1,174 per citizen were spent through online shopping platforms within the UK, resulting in a 9% increase when compared to the year 2014. The country of USA isn’t that far behind this figure, with a total of 7.4% increase, resulting in a £1,120 revenue per shopper, according to the research published by E-Consultancy.
It is evident that the e-commerce is not the way of the future, but the contemporary way of shopping. While the market is continuously growing and increasing in sales, more and more individuals are offering their goods, services, and products via Internet. In 2015, a total of 12 million stores were open online. However, only a small percentage of them (650.000 total) are making a revenue higher than $1.000 USD.
So what makes those particular stores so special and successful? Their marketing? Accessibility? Quality of goods? Try all of the mentioned. But don’t worry, if you are running an E-Commerce store, we are here to help you tailor your .ME domain in order to attract traffic, enhance conversions, and overall will help you run a One Stop Shop through a WordPress platform.
Know Thy Online Shopper
[hypotext target=”audience”]Targeting audience[/hypotext] + Click to read more is a complex process which varies depending on the age group, location and overall the state of the market that you are entering. By researching your competitors and through consulting various sources, you can create an image of a model audience and design a value proposition based on that conclusion. The less known your company is, the better value proposition you need. It’s not all about branding, you need to offer your customers a concise and comprehensive content that will explain your service, and the value of it, in the best way possible. Although this is definitely a question of your conversion optimization, knowing your audience is the key element that will drive traffic, leads and ultimately sales.
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Age group
The age group that you are targeting is seemingly the easy part of defining your audience. However, a thorough understanding of every aspect of your audience can significantly help you with focusing your marketing strategy. For example, 80% of internet users own a smart-phone. And from last year, mobile searches have surpassed desktop. The first conclusion would be that you should leverage mobile optimization and invest in a mobile first strategy. However, according to Omnico research, the majority of online shoppers that are using mobile phones to compare prices, research products and services, are millennials, age 25 to 34. This narrows down your audience significantly. On the other hand, another insight, stating that while shoppers prefer using mobile devices to research products and services, the majority of actual conversions still happens on desktop platforms. So mobile first strategy could backfire really easily. Keep in mind that while targeting the right age group is a moderately easy task, you should always count in every influencing factor possible.
Location
Targeting different locations, which has always been a challenge in the industry of e-Commerce, is a delicate and time-consuming task that will require a lot of resources, a lot of testing, a lot of research and eventually a lot of your patience. But at the very end, it will help you with narrowing down your target audience, enabling you to focus your investments and gain more conversion friendly traffic. Important aspects that you will definitely have to mind when you are testing different locations is researching the local market of course. If you are entering an unfamiliar, foreign, market you should always check the local currency, local standard of living, and essentially check if there is any need for your product or service in this area. If you are planning on expanding your target audience in different markets, you will probably require some help from local freelancers, so be prepared for further investments. However, once you determine that there is no positive response from that particular market, you are able to gain the most valuable possible insight and focus on different location and converting traffic.
History Search
At the very end, establishing what your audience has in common is also an extremely valuable insight. Researching your audience interests, preferences, their habits and overall how they spend their time online, plus noticing patterns of that behavior, will allow you to focus your resources, efforts and your own time in order to hunt down the most converting traffic. A simple Twitter account is enough to provide you with time patterns that can help you realize when your audience is most active. A simple visit to your website’s webmaster tools and google analytics will reveal transparently the time when your landing pages receive the most traffic. At the very end, when you are aware who your audience is, when you gain insights from credible sources about their behavior, and after you focus on a particular location, this last step of establishing when to act and how aggressively will provide you with a custom tailored schedule that will keep your One Stop Shop open for ages to come. After this step, presenting your value proposition and tweaking your marketing efforts is a much simpler, and a far more specific, task. [/hypotext]
SEO: Your first stop to One Stop WordPress Shop
The standard operating procedure of designing a keyword strategy is basically focused on the exploitation of Google AdWords and Google Trends, plus a variety of other free online generating tools. If you don’t have access to MOZ, Ahrefs or any other SEO tool, targeting specific keywords might be a little bit more time-consuming task, but still achievable. Please note that while quite a few websites manage to run their e-commerce businesses with minimal investments in SEO, investing in your own rankings will always be a crucial factor that will drive converting traffic your way. While you can market your landing pages successfully via social media channels, and other various methods, the structure of your website and the most converting friendly traffic will always test your [hypotext target=”optimization”]optimization[/hypotext]+ Click to read more. However, you can utilize your WordPress website and keep your on-site SEO investments on a bare minimum, at least for some time.
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Your Basic SEO
Once you’ve installed your WordPress theme, and you can find a bunch of e-Commerce friendly themes at Theme Forest, you will probably get an all-in-one SEO plug in along with your theme. Preferably, you can try and use the Yoast plug in. This handy little addition to the back end of your website will transparently grade and support your on-site SEO in order to keep your pages and posts optimized for search engines. As far as the technical, on-site aspect goes, this is everything you need to maintain a healthy website structure that search engines will notice. Everything from the implementation of robots.txt to keyword density is easily monitored and explained in a simple manner. Yoast can also take care of your URL structure, Meta tags, social snippets etc.
Your Off Site SEO
A far more consuming task will be your off site SEO. Presuming that you want to keep your rankings on the constant growth (and if you want to lead a successful e-commerce store then you definitely should) the best thing that you can do is hire an in-house CMO, or hire an agency that will keep your website popping around the web and supporting your domain health. Be careful. Using only White Hat techniques will take time for your website to reach the very top of search, but when you insist on organic traffic and offer value to your visitors that is the best possible, long lasting SEO strategy that will keep you in business for years. Using Black Hat techniques will get your website penalized and pulled from search engines.
Your Mobile SEO
A mobile responsive design is definitely a must in the contemporary world of digital marketing. As we’ve already mentioned, mobile searches have surpassed desktop search during the year 2015. While this information brings a world of troubles for marketing moguls and large e-Commerce services, and especially Google search, what you need to know is that you will have to make certain that your website is responsive, designed with a minimum amount of complexity and with files uploaded as small as they possibly could be. Mobile optimization is a necessity in this day and age. You will be forced to adapt to large numbers of traffic and audience that will expect from you to have a completely user-friendly interface, but still keep your website pleasant to the eye of your visitors. More on that note in our UI/UX section. If you want to test the size and download speed of your current webpage, you can do that for free here.[/hypotext]
Content Marketer’s Little Helpers: Automation Tips
76% of B2B marketers post content online regularly. Believe it or not, the great majority of them uses WordPress for this purpose. Before we start discussing plug-ins and hacks that you should use in order to save time and still keep the quality of your content marketing, keep in mind that the more you leverage your website, the more clunky it will get. So while you can technically buy and download a bunch of plug-ins and apps that will help you integrate and automate your posts and social media streams, be aware that your website still needs some room to breathe. Not to mention the download speed, which can seriously affect your bounce rate and ultimately your conversions. Nowadays, you can [hypotext target=”integrate”]integrate your WordPress with your project management tools, your CRM, your social media networks and many more – the sheer amount of good options might just surprise you.[/hypotext]+ Click to read more
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Content Calendar
Once you’ve made sure you are targeting the right audience, have a fully optimized website and a bulletproof SEO strategy, your content needs to get organized and systemized. Or to use the correct term – it needs to be automated. Your social posts and your website posts should not just be systematically scheduled, but you should have a clearly defined purpose and monitor KPIs of every published post. While you can find great content calendar plugins for free within your WordPress platform, tracking the performance of your published content can be performed through such apps like Addshoppers and Hubspot integrations. Apps like the previously mentioned will allow you to track the number of views, followers, social engagement and much more on just one platform. They even provide you with actionable tips to enhance your content marketing efforts.
Social Media Automated
Staying social is probably one of the most important aspects of content marketing. This is why companies hire community managers, because you can simply lose track of time while you are on Facebook or Twitter. The larger your community gets, the more problems, and time-consuming tasks you are faced with. Apps like Buffer and IFTTT recipes can help you to fully automate your social media activities. For example, Buffer can schedule and post your blog entries instead of you. IFTTT can connect any app that you are using with another app, systemizing the publishing process to the point where you can save hours just by investing a little bit of your free time in setting up these apps. The best part about them is that they are free to use. At least for now. More advanced apps of this sort, like Hootsuite can provide you with instant analytics, notify you about your brand mentions and help you keep a relationship with each and every one of your customers. Marketing automation is extremely important in the current state of e-Commerce, since it leaves you with enough time to focus on the actual business development.
Stay Connected
Ultimately, with Zapier, a free integration tool, you can connect your blog posts and social media streams with your professional tools and your CRM systems. Although most paid versions of Customer Relationship Management Tools can already be automated and connected to your social media accounts. Twitter has become one of the most powerful tools for CRM today, and we cannot neglect the value of Facebook and LinkedIn in most markets.[/hypotext]
UI & UX Friendly Design
One of the most interesting misconceptions in e-Commerce is that pricing is the most affecting factor, which makes or breaks a purchase. Believe it or not, the number one reason why your bounce rate is high and conversions at the bare minimum is because you are not showcasing your product transparently. Remember that rarely someone will enter your landing page by accident, presuming that you are not spamming people. Present your product and your Call to Action in a manner that will be [hypotext target=”simple”]simple, comprehensive and overall user-friendly.[/hypotext] + Click to read more
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DIY Flat Design
Remember when we mentioned that responsiveness will ultimately affect your conversions? With flat designed website you can beat those odds and create a website that will be simple for use, look great on the eye, and conversion friendly. Start with colors, keep the overall design minimalistic, and at the very end mind the size of the images that you are using. Images that you post on your website shouldn’t be larger than 400Kb total. When people are trying to access your website, large files will keep them waiting to the point when they will simply navigate away. This will result in high bounce rate, which will eventually lower your rankings, and ultimately force you out of business. So while complex animations may seem impressive, the fewer elements you combine (flat icons, flat menu) the larger the chances are that you will keep your visitors on the site. You just need to be creative of course, but if you don’t mind stealing a few ideas, here is a great source.
Almost Simple UX Oriented Design
Along with your WordPress theme, you might want to consider purchasing a Visual Composer plug-in. This powerful designing tool won’t measure your UX analytics, but it will provide you with a great variety of templates that are pre-modified, simple to use and what is most important they are user-friendly. Statistics show that design patterns such as grid view or well-organized showcases will always outperform more complex designs. One crucial tip is to stay consistent, because once your visitors notice an irregularity within your webpage that’s a visitor gone. If you are interested in finding out more about how you can test and monitor UX on your website, you can find resourceful information and a great variety of tools here.[/hypotext]
The CRO- Philosophy
So now you are targeting the right audience, have a fully optimized website, your content efforts are automated and are saving you a significant amount of time, and your design is user-friendly. You have everything you need to run a One Stop WordPress Shop from your very device. The very last thing that you need to do, and you have to do it continuously, is Conversion Rate Optimization, tracking and adjusting. While we’ve covered this topic thoroughly before, here you will find [hypotext target=”tips”]a few DIY tips[/hypotext]+ Click to read more that you can employ to additionally increase your CRO and overall your website performance.
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Social Login For the Win
More than 77% of users believe that Social Login is the best way to get connected to websites, and would prefer to have this option available on every site they visit. Why? Because it saves time, it is as simple as that. Instead of receiving and email in order to confirm your subscription and type a bunch of data that you are forced to repeat with every login, a simple click that will allow your Facebook account to connect to a certain website sounds like a much better option. How can you install this feature? It is as simple as a one-time configuration of your already available WordPress plugin.
A/B Testing, Yet Again
If you are already optimizing your website for conversions, all chances are that you’ve performed a significant number of split tests this far. As much as this process seemed interesting and exciting at the beginning, you’re probably running out of ideas and are neglecting your split test results. You shouldn’t give up, since 44% of your competition has no intention to do so. Stay creative and mind everything that we’ve mentioned above. The right audience plus systemized marketing with a great design will lead to leads. What was once considered as high-tech analytical science, CRO optimization is much simpler today. So mind your clickthrough rate, optimize your funnel once again, and increase your ROI like president Obama did. [/hypotext]
Don’t end up wondering about your return on investment if you fail to research and apply everything of the above mentioned. In average, it’s costing us $92 USD to attract customers and only $1 USD of that amount is actually spent on conversions. So use your funds right, tweak your funnels, and invest your time and efforts in running your fully operational One Stop WordPress Shop for e-Commerce.
