If you really stop to think about it, the average person probably spends most of their waking hours connected to the internet. And with the smartphone becoming more and more sophisticated, it’s really easy to see why. Companies are jumping on the bandwagon and making themselves more visible to potential audiences using a mobile device.

But what happens when everybody starts to join the smartphone party? The end result is a chaotic mess of information crammed into such a small screen. You may have experienced this yourself: you check your email to find multiple newsletters from e-commerce sites providing you with a lot of offers or promotions.

Such information overload can lead to consumers feeling overwhelmed and overstimulated. The result? Customers end up buying less despite retailers increasing the number of coupons or discounts. This defeats the purpose of sending out marketing content to potential customers.

Avoiding information overload in today’s busy digital space can still be done. Consider these tips to help your marketing content with sales conversion.

1. Create content that adds value

When you publish for the sake of publishing, you only end up saturating your site with useless information. This makes it harder for your potential buyer to purchase something from your site.

Create content that adds value to your customer’s life or meets their interests. Present your products or services in a way that directly correlates to what they are already attuned to. This is a marketing strategy that a lot of companies from BestSEOCompanies.com use, and it works, because they are simply creating content that markets the product or service and adds value to an existing conversation in the consumer’s headspace.

What are some examples of value-added content?

The tip of creating blog posts that are informative, educational or even thought-provoking has already been rehashed by many an article that it would be overkill to go through it again. We instead offer a different perspective. Seeing as you will be creating marketing content, why not opt to create newsletters that are well-curated?

Newsletters are often neglected because of a known fact that a lot of the newsletters that consumers receive end up redirected to spam or junk mail. But this is only because a lot of the newsletters being sent to customer inboxes are all just smoke and mirrors. But by curating it with articles, video links and other similar pieces of information that your customer will find useful, these newsletters are more likely to be read. The likelihood of these newsletters being read will also ensure a more effective e-commerce marketing strategy for your brand.

Social media can also be an effective platform for creating content that adds value to your customers’ lives. Webinars, for example, are a great method for providing content value to your potential buyers by showing them more details about your product, your brand, and other types of information that they won’t be able to find anywhere else. Unfortunately, webinars can be time-consuming. Using social media, such as Instagram’s IGTV platform can ensure that your customers can still have access to the information you want them to have but in smaller doses. Social media also provides the option for you customers to view the content on demand using Instagram and Facebook’s Save function, for example. That way, the content you create isn’t lost to them and they can digest the information you provide when they feel mentally ready to accept it.

2. Reduce choice overload

In the heydays of the door-to-door salesman, hard-selling was definitely the way to go. Rattle off a list of things the customer can buy, and hope that they pick at least one. But nowadays with so many businesses competing for the same customer’s money, customers are now faced with too many options. Having too many choices isn’t a good thing; customers tend to buy less and feel dissatisfied when they do buy.

When it comes to the business of selling, whether it’s a set of products or a bundle of services, it’s important to reduce any amount of mental strain that customers can experience when presented with a lot of choices. By fine-tuning specific elements on your website, newsletter, and other marketing platforms, there is a bigger chance that it will increase sales conversion.

What are some ways to prevent choice overload?

Customers may often find it difficult to make a decision about what to choose when the presentation of the products or services is haphazard. Organization is key: grouping products into specific categories and presenting them in a logical order will make the customer’s browsing and selection process less tasking.

Be careful when incentivizing the customer to decide quickly. While time-limiting techniques such as timers and coupons or discount codes that expire after a period of time may work for some, this may not always be true for customers who do not have any knowledge about the products being offered.

Another reason for choice overload is in the number of minute differences between different products. Asking customers to choose between highly differentiated products can make it hard for them to decide. Try to provide them a way to easily compare the differences between two or three similar products.

Finally, the most efficient way to reduce choice overload and thereby information overload is to present a limited set of products or variations to customers at any given time. A common drawback to shopping at thrift stores or on auction sites is the sheer number of options being provided to customers the moment they step foot into the physical store or online site.

Eliminate choice overload by featuring a specific group of items. For example, your site may present the top selling items first, or it may choose to feature a collection while the rest of the products that your brand offers can be accessed elsewhere should the customer choose. Allow for customers to look at your items based on their preferences by enabling filters in your online site.

Since choice overload is a direct precursor to information overload, addressing the paradox of choice will ensure that customers do not feel overwhelmed with anything you present to them.

3. Keep it short and simple

Creating content for the mobile experience means that articles and similar types of media submissions should suit the platform. People viewing content on mobile devices are usually on the go and prefer shorter content compared to long-form content.

Making marketing related content that’s easy to consume ensures that you’re able to capture the reader’s full attention for the duration of your content. This makes them more likely to grasp the message, provided of course that message is clear.

Is an infographic a good medium for relaying content in a short and simple way?

Infographics are a great way to relay content to an audience without overloading them with information. Infographics take advantage of a person’s preference for visual content. They present information through visually appealing charts, graphs and other similar methods of presenting data in a visual manner.

Keeping infographics short and simple can also be a challenge in itself. Infographics can sometimes be too heavy on the graphics. The layout of an infographic can also affect the way a reader digests the information presented. And despite it being an infographic, some creators will still cram it with a lot of text. Make sure to present only the data or information that is current and relevant to what you plan on presenting. And instead of text, try to present the information through a chart, graph, or any similar device. Facts, statistics, and other numerical information are more understandable when presented in this manner.

In order to make an effective infographic, it’s important to trim the unnecessary words and graphics and go straight to presenting the data. Make sure the data is presented in a layout that is easy to follow, and is also legible on smaller screens like mobile devices. Data that isn’t presented properly will only seem chaotic to readers, prompting that feeling of being mentally bombarded with information.

Graphic design is vital to improving the absorption of information and preventing information overload. The use of white space is a common technique in eliminating information overload, not just in newsletter design but even in posters and banners. Using an appropriate color scheme will also aid in information absorption. Color has the capacity of increasing or decreasing a viewer’s attention span as well as influencing their mood. Having a highly incongruent or loud color scheme may put readers off and may even cause information overload. Using appropriate graphic design elements can help keep the viewer’s attention until they finish reading the entire infographic.

Conclusion

Information overload is a common challenge that many marketing strategies often face, not just in the digital space. When it isn’t taken into account, it can drastically affect sales conversion. Understanding how to prevent information overload in the marketing process can help businesses increase their number of buying customers.

The post Avoiding Information Overload in e-Commerce Marketing appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

In this guide, we will discuss four of the most effective marketing tactics for the e-commerce environment. These tactics can be very effective to increase the revenue of your business, encouraging growth, and maximizing profitability.

Without further ado, let us begin.

Have an Effective Email Marketing

Email marketing—even amidst all the newer platforms and technologies today— is still one of, if not the most most effective tactics available, especially for nurturing your prospects until they are ready for the purchase.

Since in an e-commerce business, we lack of any physical engagements with our customers, your email marketing campaign will be your main, and most effective way to maintain engagement.

When implementing email marketing for e-commerce, here are some key considerations:

• Proper audience segmentation and personalization are very important factors to success nowadays. You will need to understand the needs of each specific audience, and deliver the right message properly. (link drip marketing)
• An engaging subject line will be the key to optimizing open rate. Make sure it’s to-the point and can communicate the benefit of opening the message. You will also need to optimize preview texts with a similar approach.
• Have an optimized landing page for each email sent. This is the key to maximizing conversion rate.
• The quality of your content, as well as visual design will be the most important factor in determining click-through rate (CTR).

To learn further about email marketing for e-commerce, you might want to check this guide by BigCommerce.

Implementing Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is the popular term now used to describe the activity of regularly publishing relevant, valuable audience to attract prospects. This can be an active blog, podcast, or even a YouTube channel.

The main idea of inbound marketing—as the name suggests— is to pull our audience “inward”, and it is particularly effective for e-commerce because:

• Your business is mainly online-based where you don’t have physical engagement. By regularly publishing content, you can maintain and optimize engagement with prospects and customers.
• A proper inbound marketing will improve your site’s ranking in search results. Remember that people mainly find e-commerce sites through a Google search, and this can be a very effective strategy to improve visibility.

When implementing inbound marketing in an e-commerce setting, here are some key considerations:

• Your inbound marketing efforts should not focus solely on promoting your products or services, but rather to provide relevant information about your niche.
• The key is a proper understanding of your audience: their needs, problems, and behaviors in general. If you can answer a specific issue with your content that is relevant for your ideal audience, you can drive a lot of traffic.
• Although we shouldn’t mainly focus on selling products, you should aim to convert readers into prospects—or even better—customers. You can include CTAs to capture your audience’s email address to follow them up with email marketing. This is mainly done by offering a downloadable content (ebook, white paper, etc.), free-trial, or even free stuffs.
• Developing the content is just half the job done. No matter how good your content is, it won’t bring any value unless there’s an audience. Promote your content through various marketing tactics, and aim to get as many backlinks during the process. Working with SEO experts will also improve your SEO results.

Make an Easier Checkout Process

While there are many different factors that can determine conversion rate, it is actually a common occurrence that the cause for a low conversion rate is simply because the checkout process is not optimized.

In the specific case of the e-commerce niche, we can avoid cart abandonment with an easy, optimized checkout process:

• The whole checkout process should be seamless, easy enough for anyone, and trustworthy. Include as little number of steps as possible.
• Make sure the whole checkout page is mobile-responsive and optimized. More and more people are purchasing from their phones, and you shouldn’t neglect this opportunity. Make sure all your buttons are easily clickable from a mobile device.
• Capture their contact information (email address) as early as you can in the checkout process. You can actually do this before showing any checkout forms. This way, if they abandon the cart, you can follow up with email marketing.
• You should provide a reliable real-time support that is easy to access during the whole checkout process. You can either provide a live chat feature here, or even implement chatbots. You might also add a live chat function in your app using an in-app chat API solution for Android or iOS.
• Don’t offer false promises, inform clear delivery times, stock levels, shipping costs, and other necessary information. You might also want to offer free shipping.
• Offer incentives and communicate them clearly within the review page(s). This is done to avoid cart abandonment.

Optimizing your checkout page is a pretty deep subject on its own, and there are still various ways to further enhance your checkout process. You might want to check out this guide to learn further.

Leveraging Social Proofs Effectively

People are now avoiding advertising all the time, and studies have suggested that people are more likely to purchase a product or service after reading a positive review, or after a recommendation from their peers.

This is often referred to as “social proof”, a psychological phenomenon when we follow the action of others, assuming this specific action is the correct one.

There are at least six main types of social proof in the marketing environment:

• From existing customers: positive reviews, testimonials, case studies, etc.
• From big masses: using large crowds as social proof, for example, “100,000 customers have bought our product, are you ready to join?”
• From experts: reviews from experts and thought leaders of the industry, including the specific content discussing your product
• From influencers: celebrities that have bought your product/used your service, influencer mentions, etc.
• From colleagues: recommendation from your friends or using social media data (i.e. “100 of your friends have used our product”)
• Awards/certifications: credible awards and certifications can be a huge social proof

So, how can we leverage these social proofs to improve conversion rate? Here are some key principles:

• 63% of customers are more likely to purchase something online when the site displays reviews and ratings.
• You can use real-time stats as powerful social proofs. For example, showing how many people are currently on your site, how many people are currently making a purchase, and so on.
• If you are a B2B ecommerce site, displaying client logos can be very effective. Make sure, however, that it is well designed.
• Encourage existing customer to leave positive reviews and/or ratings. You can offer incentives from discounts to freebies to other special offers.

The main idea here is winning the trust of your audience, so avoid using exaggerated social proofs.

End Words

The key to marketing success for e-commerce is understanding your customer base: their behaviors, their needs, and the problems you/your product can address.

You should also talk to a digital marketing consultant and adapt marketing tactics according to the length of your sales cycle. If your sales cycle is long, for example, you should focus more on the lead nurturing process.

The post 4 Effective Ecommerce Marketing Tactics appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

It is much more about listening and talking with customers than offering discounts.

Another way that having a social media presence can benefit you, is because you automatically have the ability to sell directly, on a different platform. So you can recreate your store on Facebook and people can shop directly through there, or you can talk about one of your products on Twitter, and people can buy it from the tweet itself. But these social networks also have the necessary tools in place that let your customers share your products and their recent purchases with their followers and their friends with a simple click of a button.

It may be difficult to measure the concrete returns based on the indirect aspects of using social media. This includes the returns that you get from replying to question your customers have, or engaging in conversation with your audience. But all of these components will help you build brand loyalty and increase the sense of community.

According to research, about 47.7% of social media users made their most recent purchase directly through Facebook and their eBay Daily Deals. And this number is higher on Facebook than any of the other big platforms. A distant second on the ranking was Instagram, followed by Pinterest and the rest of the big platforms.

There are countless of ways for you to improve and increase your business thanks to social commerce. If you want to learn more ways, take a look at the infographic below.

Link to the infographic: https://www.16best.net/blog/social-networks-and-their-importance-in-ecommerce-gateways/

The post The Importance of Social Media in Ecommerce appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

 Well — how does having more customers sound like to you?

 A report into the importance of SEO found that the top site for a search had an average click-through rate (CTR) of 36.4%, with the second and third sites achieving a CTR of 12.5% and 9.5% respectively. While you might be skeptical about the importance of SEO to your ecommerce site, it’s unlikely you’ll be skeptical about the benefits of more customers clicking through to your website.

But good SEO isn’t about artificially inflating your rankings — it’s about good business sense, content, and usability. By aligning your website with simple best practices and guidelines, you should see a positive rankings impact. Here’s how to get started.

Keywords

This is the first thing you need to get sussed in order to give your store a chance of ranking well. And keyword research isn’t techy or hard to do — anyone can do it with some simple tools.

There are various tools you can use to help you find out what the relevant keywords are for your ecommerce business. I have listed some of the best below:

• Answerthepublic.com
• Google Keyword Planner
• Ubersuggest

You may skeptical about their importance, but by using keywords which are relevant to the business your ecommerce operates in, you are showing searchers and search engines that you have a relevant website.

Mix up competitive commercial intent keywords with some top of the funnel keywords (often called ‘long tail’ or informational keywords) to ensure that your website content is natural and thorough. You may want to use these keywords in blogs or product guides.

Title tags

While keywords will improve your ranking on search engines, your title tag is the most important SEO tool for converting your searchers into customers.

Below I have highlighted the titles of pages that have come up on page one of a Google search that I made for “ecommerce.”

Note how ecommerce is included in each title tag and that they are short and succinct. You need to grab the attention of searchers quickly and demonstrate that they will find what they need on your ecommerce site.

A good title will be:

• Less than 70 characters long
• Unique
• Mention your brand and product where appropriate – it must be done naturally
• Include keywords – again, naturally

You might be skeptical about the impact of a title tag will have on your ecommerce site, but Google isn’t. Optimizing your title tags across your store is one of the quickest and easiest SEO wins for your business — and make sure that every page has a unique one!

In most content management systems, editing title tags is something you can quickly do yourself (or even automate). If you are on WooCommerce, you will want an SEO plugin like Yoast, whereas Shopify stores have an in-built system — or you can always download a metadata app if you’re looking to import data from another system in order to save time.

Content

Google considers content very important to how it ranks sites.

Previously, sites have stuffed their content with keywords in order to boost their rankings position. That no longer washes.

The key now with content is that it must be unique, informative, and relevant. If it isn’t, Google will penalize your ecommerce site by dropping you down the rankings in its searches.

Below I have searched for “men’s belt” to show you what relevant looks like in ecommerce:

As you’ll see, Google wants a close and relevant a match. There is a fair amount of diversity when it comes to exact wording and cataloging, but generally it’s pretty obvious how theses domains fit within the search.

If the content on your ecommerce site is not relevant, and does not incorporate the language used by your potential customers, then Google will not consider it a good match for their searches.

There are methods that you can employ to make your content more relevant and user-friendly:

• Utilize your keywords, but don’t spam
• Establish who your target market is and incorporate topics they care about into your content calendar
• Write naturally and for your customer, not the sales arm of your ecommerce company
• Include actionable points in blogs – things that your customer can do right now
• Offer answers to any questions your customer may have – if you can pre-empt then that will help you to remove sales barriers
• Be crisp and precise
• Incorporate video content where possible/applicable.

Relevant content will offer value to your reader and give them something that they won’t find elsewhere. Use the content on your site to explain how the products you are selling bring value to your customers.

Importance of UX

SEO has evolved and user experience (UX) is now an important part of what helps your ecommerce site rank.

Having found your site, your customers will have expectations of its usability. They’ll  demand that it is responsive, operates at a good speed, and that it is easy to get around.

This is where the latest design conventions and information architecture will come into play. Ensure that your menus and product catalogs are working well for you and invest in some user-testing to validate your site structure.

SEO and UX should be seen as partners, working together on your mission to take your customer on a journey (to your store checkout). As part of this partnership, search engines are now taking UX into account when determining search results.

Link building

Your Keywords, Title Tags, Content, and UX all come under the banner of “On Page Optimization.” OPO covers the things that you can do on your site in order to improve rankings. However, there is another thing for your brand to consider in order to maximize your SEO: link building.

SEO is about relevance and authority.

1. Relevance is about your site being the right place for search engines to direct their searchers to/. Google wants to know that when a user searches for conversion rate optimization (CRO), that they arrive at a site that is actually talking about CRO, not a spammy site stuffed with keywords and empty content.
2. Authority is about your site being a place that has been determined to be a good source of information — Google wants to take users to a site that has been validated. This is where link building comes in.

Link building is about getting other sites to link to your own: it’s about the public recognition of your site as a place people should visit.

The benefit of building links and raising your public profile is that it will increase your site’s authority. As your authority increases Google will consider your ecommerce site a better place for its searchers to arrive at!

There are a number of ways that you can build links. These include:

• Write a blog: this will allow you to build links internally. Also, if the content on your blog offers value, then it also gives other sites an incentive to link to it
• Linking out: link out to sites with authority, and create expert roundups to encourage other sites linking back to you
• Work with bloggers: there are loads of bloggers who are willing to collaborate with ecommerce brands over product guides
• Guest post on other site’s blogs: find blogs that are within your field, then ask if you can guest post on their site and include a link to your own.

SEO might seem like an obscure, impenetrable and difficult thing to quantify. But whether you’re a firm believer in its influence and power, or a hardcore sceptic, it’s real, here, and it isn’t going away anytime soon.

While it’s here, SEO will continue to have power over how your site is ranked and that means it has the power to influence how much money your business is making.

Even if you are still skeptical about SEO, make sure your ecommerce site is making the most out of its Keywords, Title Tags, Content, Link Building, and UX, because you can be sure that your competitors will be…

The post SEO & Ecommerce: The Ranking Factors That Even An SEO Sceptic Needs To Know appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.