In the last few years, the profits generated from online retail have only grown. That means bigger opportunities to generate sales for your online retail business but also means much higher competition from online rivals.
Therefore, it’s important to maintain a competitive edge.
Not sure how to stand out? Here are 5 top tips to enhance your online retail business.
1. Improve Your Website Navigability
Perhaps the most important part of any retail site is the way it’s been designed for navigability. Navigability is the ability for visitors to move around between the different pages based on their desires and preferences.
Aside from knowing what navigability is, you should never underestimate its importance – there’s even academic literature on why this factor is so crucial to a business site, and it’s informed the way government websites are designed.
Ok, so navigability matters. But what’s the best way to improve it on a website?
Use third-party menu navigation software. This will optimize navigability for your site, ensuring that all your customers can get to the pages they want and view the products they want to buy. Plus, you don’t have to do any of the work yourself. You can focus on important business operations while others ensure your site is pleasing to customers.
We guarantee this small change will deliver significant improvements to the sales your business generates – and fast.
2. Improve your SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is an essential component of your online business. SEO determines how high up a search engine’s ranking your site appears when customers search for key terms relating to your business.
The greater you work on your company’s SEO, the more customers will visit your site when they search for the products you sell, and the greater the chances you will have at maximizing your company’s sales.
All in all, it’s a no-brainer.
So how does search engine optimization work? It’s all about structuring your online content in a strategic way to make it show up higher on the search results page. The main factor that affects your web content’s SERP ranking is keyword inclusion. You’ll want to strategically pick certain keywords that you think your potential clients will be searching for and include them within the content in predetermined quantities.
For instance, if your company sells home furnishings, you’ll want your landing pages for your products to include more uses of the keywords “armchairs,” “ottomans,” and “end tables” (depending on what exactly you’re selling) than your competitors.
Of course, it’s not as easy as just using the keyword a hundred times. Search engines also penalize pages for unfair practices like “keyword stuffing.”
It’s best to hire an SEO company to assist you with writing this content to avoid these penalties. That way, you can guarantee effective results and not worry about any negative consequences of doing it yourself.
3. Take Out Targeted Social Media Ads
The ability to produce targeted social media ads to pinpoint your key customer demographic gets better and better every year.
If you have the right data on the profile of your customers – where they live, what their age is and what their tastes and hobbies are – you can use this information to generate targeted social media advertising.
That means that you’ll only pay for ‘clicks’ on the ads for the people most likely to buy your products, making this form of advertising much more successful – and much more value-for-money – than traditional approaches to advertising.
4. Use the Best Quality Images
In today’s Instagram-oriented world, poor-quality images that don’t look pretty are a complete no-no.
High-quality, well-curated images of your products, on the other hand, will convince customers that you have a stylish product range that they can trust.
It doesn’t take much effort to make your images more attractive and higher-quality, but it could have a big impact on your sales.
Just think about what your experience would be like if you were in the customer’s position. When you’re looking to buy things online, the pictures displayed on the vendor’s website are a huge deciding factor for whether you’ll make the purchase–especially since you can’t physically see the object in front of you like in a traditional store. So if the photos don’t paint the product in the best light, you’re going to keep scrolling until you find something else that’s up to your standards.
Of course, not everyone is a professional photographer who understands how to use lighting, angles, and editing to make a product look good.
Luckily, plenty of freelance photographers are looking for work and want to use their expertise to help increase your sales. Try checking out various freelancing hubs on the Internet to find a photographer you can hire to improve your site!
5. Make Sure You Have the Best Customer Service
Last but not least, it goes without saying that no business stays successful for long without strong customer service. However, many online businesses continue to devote inadequate resources to their customer service units.
It’s essential to keep customers happy, so they spread the good news of your business by word of mouth, and they keep returning to your site time after time.
What’s more, a good review will also likely convince other customers to buy.
You’ll need to ensure that your business has at least one customer service representative who you can easily reach for reliable communication. Even a simple e-mail address that clients can reach out to with any questions they have about your products can make a big difference, as long as your representative can respond promptly.
Stay Ahead to Stay Successful
The online retail industry is a highly innovative one and constantly changing. You have a strong chance of finding amazing strategies that steal customers from competitors, but you must get used to adapting your approach.
It’s not a silver bullet – but sticking to these five tips will help keep your retail business successful in the years to come.
