Mastering eCommerce Optimization: 5 Tricks That Never Fail

September 22, 2016

By Joydeep Bhattacharya in Business Ecommerce Featured Marketing

Image courtesy of (Stuart Miles)/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Conversions are a critical aspect for an eCommerce site. Optimizing for conversions involves many elements like content, CTA, products, design, colors etc. It's all about attracting customers and making them reach the end of the sales funnel.

Here are five tricks that have the highest chances of converting the buyer:

1. Employ Smart Pricing Strategy

Pricing is an absolutely necessary aspect of consumer psychology. CRO specialists often use a perfect pricing strategy to positively influence the mind of the customer to generate more sales. Here are some easy ways through which you can revise your existing pricing strategy for greater profits:

Loss Leader Pricing: Under this strategy, the store sells goods that are below market price to attract potential buyers into their store. Once customers visit the site, they make up for the additional losses by buying products via cross selling and up selling.

Slashed Pricing: The old prices of the products are slashed and the new discounted prices are shown to the customer in order to receive more profits as shown in the screenshot below:

Odd Even Pricing: Prices that end in odd numbers tend to generate more sales. It works on a consumer psychology where odd pricing suggests a bargain which encourages buying. For example, a pricing of $39 works well as opposed to a price of $40. Odd Even pricing strategy is one of the widely used pricing strategies in the world today.

2. Use Product Bundling to Drive Conversions

Use product bundling to give offer suggestion to customers on their purchase. The offer can combine other products of same niche with the main purchase. The amount of money saved on product bundles drives sales and improves conversions.

Either optimize product pages with bundle suggestions or provide consumers with a separate product bundles page. Check out the example below of different products being bundled together:

Point out the money saved on the bundle purchase to drive sales. Consumers need not venture to different eCommerce stores to make the purchase.

Optimizing related products with product bundle suggestion improves conversion rate. It helps to keep loyal customers happy and provides ease of shopping to customers.

3. Optimize Landing Page to Drive Sales

The ROI of the landing page is evaluated by the amount of revenue generated. Here are the tricks to improve sales for an eCommerce landing page:

Create attractive headlines: The moment a visitor lands on a webpage, the headline should evoke instant interest in the marketer's objectives. Check out the landing page of Trulia which has a clear headline that engages and directs visitor to the next step with a precise CTA button.

The ideal headline consists of emotional outreach, power words and sense of urgency to engage online visitors.

Also:

Use only stunning images.

For effective and powerful layout, use negative/white space.

Use concise headlines with short sentences.

Optimize for mobile users.

For conversion rate optimization, test the conversion rate of a landing page with A/B tests by including a variety of images and content.

The call-to-action button has to be easily spotted. A CTA button should be prominent in size and color and easy to spot by the online visitor.

A landing page needs to be as simple as possible. It should be able to communicate the important points of marketing objectives with precise information in the form of images and CTA buttons.

4. Use Video Marketing to Outperform Your Marketing Content

The quality of rich content for customers on a site plays a major role in conversions. According to the survey by WVMP, "71 percent say video conversion rates outperform other marketing content."

Some of the best video marketing campaigns did not promote services but, rather, entertained and indulged the audience with a marketing objective.

Buyers look for reviews on video channels to get a closer look at products. And a single video shared on social platforms can reach millions of followers. Here are the ways you can increase engagement with your  targeted audience:

Provide your audience with expert information about a product. In the screenshot below, the professionals assist customers with skilled information as to how to install the pick ball net.

Thank your audience for their support of your journey so far.

A product review video, (like the one shown below), makes the store more reliable in the eyes of consumers.

Ask for 10 seconds of customer feedback and include it in the final piece. This can have direct impact on the number of social shares.

Align with an influencer to promote the video on the social channels. It increases the number of followers and people trust services marketed by a known face. Many brands have successfully used video marketing with influencers to promote services and attract new customers beyond their targeted zones.

5. Add Schema.Org Markup to Improve Relevancy and to Improve CTR

Schema markup aids search engine algorithms in identifying the content of a webpage. With schema mark up, you tell the search engine what the content is all about.

Here are some schema markups that should be used across eCommerce websites:

1. Schema Markup for Websites: To provide customers with site-links search box in SERP results as shown in the screenshot below:

2. Schema Markup for Breadcrumbs: Breadcrumb list mark-up provides Google's algorithm with the website hierarchy. Customers can directly access the desired webpage instead of going through the complete website hierarchy.

3. Schema Mark up for Website navigation: As you can see below in the screenshot, Amazon directs user to prominent pages for easy navigation.

4. Video Schema Mark-up: The required fields to be added for Video schema mark-up are name, video description, thumbnail URL, upload date.

5. Product availablity, reviews and ratings Schema Mark-up: Viewers can review services based on ratings and reviews. It provides customers with product price and status information in the SERP results only.

                        

Websites with schema mark-up have a better chance of ranking higher on search engine results. Add schema mark-up to the mentioned website content areas to improve relevancy and to improve CTR.

A full optimization strategy has plenty of rewards for an eCommerce store. It results in an improved conversion rate and it drives sales.  Fill the gaps in your optimization strategy by including the above-mentioned tactics.

Joydeep Bhattacharya is an internet marketer and owner of the SEO blog, SEO Sandwitch. He has been associated with SEO, SMO, PPC, ORM and other activities related to online marketing for the past 5 years.

Source: Mastering eCommerce Optimization: 5 Tricks That Never Fail