New Year’s can be disregarded as a holiday; however, with a rundown of New Year marketing thoughts, you will not commit that error. While the facts confirm that shopper spending drops in January, remember that it doesn’t vanish by and large. Saying a sensational goodbye, brands chose to get inventive and brilliant with their campaigns and posts. We should simply say that the outgoing year is somewhat a cornerstone for being more imaginative as of now. While a couple of brands go through the straightforward, innovative course, different brands choose to think critically and synchronize their New Year campaigns with their brand philosophy.
Here we investigate how creative ideas to ring in the New Year can be imaginative. The web-based media space shall look lively and brilliant as it is loaded up with New Year wishes. Everything necessary to craft an excellent marketing campaign is a brief period of imagination to keep clients energized after all the gift-giving during the holidays. Yet, assuming you’re low on both of those, we’ve assembled five plans to kick you off.
One of the most effective methods for increasing traffic is to discover what people are seeking right now and then develop your content accordingly. Examining the data should be part of your New Year’s resolutions. It is critical that you understand what people are looking for. If you have an online store, this might help you support discounts rapidly. Individuals, for the most part, start thinking about their lives as the year comes to a close, and they soon begin to set objectives for themselves.
During the Christmas or Hanukkah season, many businesses use email marketing software to send emails. Set your company out from the crowd by sending something before New Year’s Eve. If you feel the urge to stand out from the competition, you may even send an email before the New Year. More significant chances are being noticed since people’s inboxes are often overflowing with messages on New Year’s Day. Send out unusual ideas to certain groups of your supporters, as well as email-only details that you aren’t publicizing on social media or your website.
You may even include a discount code or recall a suggestion for your email to improve it even further. You might also organize a giveaway challenge for a select group of loyal customers. This results in highly valuable, watched content while also providing your brand a boost.
Request that followers submit Christmas recordings with their own clips and your selected hashtag, containing your product or both, and provide something enticing in exchange. Keep this in mind when you plan your January marketing strategy. Connect with your online media audience by asking them to submit remarks or tales that stirred them in the preceding year. It may be anything: a personal tale, a comment from a celebrity, or something they’ve read or seen. You might have the substance on several platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and even Facebook. Each of these has a unique set of engagement options.
Your content should also be tailored to your specific demands, utilizing catchphrases that have larger search traffic. This will also increase visitors to your website. Keep it short, to the point, and direct. Get some information about them or publish their New Year’s resolutions on Facebook for a chance to win a prize.
If you offered a prize for images of a holiday feast, follow up by asking how fans dealt with their other holiday chores. Afterwards, award them for something quirky and unusual that your customers did during the holiday season. It doesn’t have to be directly related to your business; this is more about building relationships. Consider New Year’s driven developments that will benefit your company the most. If you own a clothing store, offer a special discount on apparel, adornments, and splendor items that shine. If you own a liquor shop, combine a bottle of wine with a pair of wine glasses as a complimentary item to make festive bundles perfect for gifting as presents for New Year’s Eve celebrations.
Regardless of whether you’re not shipping a new product, having a unique discount on New Year’s Day is a great idea. To generate enthusiasm among buyers, the advancement should ideally be New Year driven. Begin the new year by giving discounts on a variety of items. If you’re stuck for new year’s advancement ideas and don’t have any new items to sell, simply reduce the items in your store!
While your Christmas sales may have ended, there may be clients who are waiting for greater bargains. This is a fantastic opportunity to provide those customers a chance to buy your stuff. Flash offers are fantastic New Year’s marketing ideas, and they can help you get your Christmas merchandise out. Get out your Christmas product and make it a point to get your clients to act right away. Many shoppers wait until after the holidays to take advantage of offers like this. Nonetheless, keep in mind that such consumers are unlikely to be your greatest future clients. Therefore this should mostly be considered as a way to get rid of excess inventory.
Obviously, you can’t anticipate the same high as you would during the Christmas sales, but it will help you sustain the dramatic decline that most company owners see in sales towards the end of the year. If you don’t want to perform another special task right now, you may extend your Christmas discounts until January or February.
Having a stale old website or physical store from the Christmas season shall never bode well with returning customers. Within a matter of a few days, not only do you have to try and list new products, but you must try and offer a new look and feel to customers for the New Year so that they are encouraged to look around and make more purchases. In order to execute this successfully, given below are a few ideas.
If you own a private company, efficient drop-offs or product deployments are critical to the success of your business over the holidays. However, the start of the year might be an incredible opportunity to launch a brand-new product. A fantastic new year’s marketing strategy would include significant promotional activities throughout December, which would eventually lead to product shipment. When the clock strikes midnight, you can ship the merchandise.
Rather than repeating commercials and promoting the same things, your new year marketing should focus on new products. Persuade your clients to try something out of the ordinary, something truly novel. People are incredibly open to change in the first two or three months of the year, so here is your chance to capitalize on that enthusiasm.
A simple tagline may do wonders for your company. If you’ve been doing your rounds, you’ve probably seen this tagline used more than once. You can’t expect your new year’s marketing effort to be productive if you keep repeating and using the same advertisements.
This may appear to be counterproductive because all of the gifts have been purchased and unwrapped, but the ideal customer for your product may be ready to purchase. This opportunity to sell will be bolstered if you purposefully promote this upcoming new product throughout December alongside your exciting holiday dispatches or bargains. On the other hand, you may also direct exceptional New Year’s freebies. New Year marketing ideas, such as this one, may help you create buzz about your business.
Despite the online sales boom, it is suggested that businesses that have an offline presence also focus on some unique marketing strategies to capitalize on offline business as well. This shall help in growing the brand in a very sustainable and proportionate manner.
If you have a physical presence, you may decorate your showcase window with a New Year’s theme. This is one of those misguided yet important New Year’s marketing ideas that you should use this holiday season. This may be anything like a New Year’s Eve theme in which your items are used. It’s bound to catch the attention of by-passers. You can also elect to display banners and standards in high-traffic areas.
You may use any assistance that is relevant to your business and is associated with the New Year; merely make an honest attempt to get people through the door. This might include areas like shopping malls and marketplaces where people go to buy New Year’s Eve treats. If people see your pennants there, your things will stick in their minds. This can help you create brand awareness, which can lead to transactions.
While the New Year time is great and everyone is in a festive mood, there shall be a sudden dip right after. As a shrewd businessman, you must try and stay ahead of the slump. Thus, by using creative marketing ideas, one can continue being the talk of the town and keeping their brand in the limelight by executing some fine planning before ringing in the New Year itself!
Deals do tend to fall down following the Christmas season. Here’s a suggestion that will make a huge impact in terms of energy: Launch a post-New Year’s Eve promotion. This arrangement can begin in the New Year with exciting discounts, and you may be able to attract customers to your business. If you own a physical store, consider everything your customers would require throughout a long day of profit, mostly winter products and fitness goods. Regardless of whether you want to try something pricey, you may get a simple upgrade that provides a good discount. You can advertise the advancement via web-based media as well as other marketing tactics.
You may also include goods in your promotion that will help clients achieve their goals. For example, a home equipment business may market air fryers to aid in the development of eating habits.
Having a development plan that expressly targets this group of customers may be beneficial to you. You may create an atmosphere in which your clients will be compelled to value their body for what it is worth. At the same time, you can progress to a stable way of life through advancement. Everything else being equivalent, you can run developments of clothing and even advertise them in this manner.
Disseminate these developments using all available marketing channels. You should also guarantee that the progress is for a specific product that is associated with the objective. You may persuade them to buy by emphasizing its benefits and giving a discount.
The highs and the lows of the Holiday season peak with New Year’s and then wanes off eventually. The above-given tips shall help you in both times. With credible New Year marketing ideas and tactics, you may capitalize on this event. Sending out offers, challenges, new products, and New Year’s greetings may go a long way toward building your brand’s image and increasing sales. So, what are you waiting for? Go get creative with your marketing tactics and win some customers!
Need help getting started? Our marketing specialists can help! Contact us today.
Have your eCommerce sales plateaued? Have they dropped off altogether? What if your eCommerce sales are barely increasing?
There’s actually a lot you can do to drive online traffic to your website and boost eCommerce sales. We’re talking about digital marketing. Implementing the right digital marketing strategy can effectively increase the number of shoppers who visit your website as well as increase the number of sales transactions that occur daily.
You might be thinking, what is “the right digital marketing strategy” exactly?
The answer to that question is tricky, and could depend on the nature of your business and your target audience. For example, if you own a B2B company, then the strategies you use to target potential customers will be different than if you own a B2C retail store.
That being said, there are a handful of digital marketing strategies that will deliver powerful results regardless of your industry or market.
Here are five marketing tips and ideas for your eCommerce site to help you drive website traffic, turn visitors into customers, and increase revenue.
Your eCommerce website visitors will not be able to touch, examine, or handle the products you’re selling, which is why the visuals you provide on your site are so important. Even if you’re selling SaaS or other services on your website, we recommend that you enhance the visuals as much as possible. What do we mean by that?
Instead of merely using a few product photos, include many high-res photos and a zoom-in function that visitors can use to examine the product in question. If possible, use 3D images of your products as well, and integrate “turning and rotating” capabilities so that shoppers can get a 360° view of the items you’re selling.
Try including a video tutorial or virtual tour of your SaaS, if applicable. When potential customers are able to watch a video demonstration of how your cloud-based software interface works, they will gain a better impression of the platform and be more likely to subscribe, enroll, or buy.
Digital marketers know that it’s far easier to retain an interested customer than it is to interest a brand-new one in shopping for the first time. This fact is true for both brick-and-mortar retailers and eCommerce websites, which is why all types of businesses dedicate a substantiation portion of their marketing efforts to targeting their existing customer base.
Your eCommerce site should have built-in features that enable shoppers to create their own secure accounts. These accounts should also have a Wish List feature that shoppers can use to “save” items to their Wish Lists. You can design personalized email marketing campaigns to remind customers about their Wish List items.
This marketing idea works best when the Wish List reminder emails contain detailed, relevant information. For example, don’t just remind a recipient that they never bought the sneakers on their Wish List. Instead, include customer reviews of those sneakers, offer the recipient a “buy this product now” discount code, or provide them with another incentive that will reward them for acting fast.
User-generated content is any digital content that is created by users, consumers, and “regular people” and not by a company or brand. User-generated content is typically found on social media platforms, but you can also find UGC across the internet. For example, a Google My Business customer review can be considered a type of UGC.
User-generated content that features your products or services is a form of word-of-mouth marketing. When business owners like you recycle user-generated content on their own platforms, it has the same effect. UGC tends to resonate with consumers. Consumers trust the opinions of other shoppers far more than they trust traditional advertising claims, which is why you should definitely incorporate UGC into your marketing strategy.
Try turning five-star customer reviews into social media posts. Retweet and repost UGC that features your products or services. Partner with social media influencers and ask them to post “unboxing” videos that feature them opening your products and using them in such a way that inspires their social followers to try your brand.
In an article we published earlier this month called How to Set Up an Instagram & Facebook Shop, we discussed the importance of why eCommerce retailers should set up Shops on both of these social platforms, and you should definitely check out the article when you have time. The biggest point we made was that when eCommerce retailers decide not to set up social media “shops,” they actually miss out on a lot of sales.
You’re probably thinking that you don’t need mini-eCommerce shops on social media when you already have the real-deal i.e. a fully-functioning, responsive, mobile-friendly eCommerce website. We get it. But we’re here to tell you that, nope, you’re wrong #sorrynotsorry. For today’s consumer, convenience is everything, which means that unfortunately, your Instagram visitors might not be willing to navigate out of the IG app just to shop on your eCommerce site.
The marketing possibilities that will result from having an Instagram and Facebook Shop are endless. Once your Shop is functioning, you can tag specific Shop items within your social posts, Stories, and even in the description boxes of your Facebook Live broadcasts.
Our final marketing tip today will help consumers emotionally connect with your brand, which is necessary if you want to gain and retain loyal eCommerce customers. Feature your company’s values in your marketing campaigns. In other words, we recommend that, first and foremost, you advertise what you stand for. Once you convey to your audience your brand’s ethos, then you can suggest relevant products that they might be interested in buying.
Of course, not all of your marketing campaigns and social media posts need to be focused on the issues that your brand cares about, but a portion of them should be. This will benefit your sales, too, because while the sneakers that you sell might not be a “conversation starter,” the social issues that you care about certainly will be.
The more comments, likes, and engagement your social media posts accumulate, the faster brand awareness will spread online. And the resulting brand recognition will attract website visitors and increase eCommerce sales.
Do you need help marketing your eCommerce website? FTx 360 offers a full suite of eCommerce site development and marketing services that can help drive online traffic to your website and convert visitors into customers that return to shop time and again.
Our web designers work with scalable, easy-to-use eCommerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce. Allow our skilled experts to revamp your site to optimize conversion rates.
If your website already functions beautifully, but your conversion rate is low, consider trying our digital marketing services:
● Organic SEO—Our affordable SEO services will insert targeted, relevant keywords into your website content to generate organic, refined, and consistent eCommerce traffic.
● Local SEO—Our local SEO services can optimize your web pages according to the location or locations that you want to rank in to drive organic traffic.
● Social Media Marketing—Our social media specialists can design and implement outstanding social media marketing campaigns for your company that will attract users, convert followers into customers, and turn customers into brand ambassadors.
● Product Copy Creation—Our creative content writers can produce accurate, SEO-friendly descriptions for your products and services that will engage your website visitors and boost your sales.
● Payment Gateway Integration—Our webmasters can integrate the leading payment gateways into your eCommerce site so that you can provide your online shoppers with multiple payment options and secure transactions.
Contact our marketing specialists to learn more about how FTx 360 can help you stand out within your industry, retain customers, and plan for long-term success.
Customer experiences culminate in either satisfaction or disappointment. The result that ultimately follows is either increased business revenue or dismal eCommerce sales. Customer experience, or CX, is that critical.
You want your customers to have positive experiences when engaging with your brand online, but you might not necessarily understand what eCommerce elements will contribute to providing your website visitors with such an excellent customer experience that they successfully complete the online checkout process.
You can improve the customer experience you provide eCommerce website visitors by following these five tips:
● Offer Personalized Website Navigation
● Provide Customized Browsing Experiences
● Feature Customer Reviews & Testimonials
● Enhance the Checkout Process
● Build Brand Affinity with Valuable Content
In this article, we’ll walk you through all five, supplying you with in-depth steps you can take to implement each improvement into your eCommerce site.
Personalization has become the central goal of marketing and sales strategies in recent years, though the concept of personalization is nothing new. In fact, the retail industry has been committed to increasing personalization as much as possible, and Facebook along with most social media sites also offer personalized posts, page recommendations, and advertisements. By personalizing a consumer’s experience, no matter what the platform, you can increase engagement as well as sales. Realizing the importance of personalization, especially how it impacts revenue, is an important first step. The next step that naturally follows, of course, is implementing as much personalization as possible, and this includes personalizing the navigation experience of your eCommerce website.
Offering an eCommerce visitor a website experience that’s custom-made just for them is the best way to describe website personalization. When a visitor discovers that your site features products, information, and content that’s relevant to their interests, they will be more likely to explore your site, spend longer on each web page, and end up purchasing your products. The more often they visit your eCommerce site, the better the personalized experience they will have thanks to the site’s ability to leverage their prior visitor data such as their past purchases and item categories that they browsed.
How can you enhance your eCommerce site with personalization and personalized navigation? The right web development and web design team can accomplish the following:
● Optimize the Landing Page—Since your eCommerce landing page will be an online visitor’s first encounter with your brand, you can improve the first impression you give by adding a personalized touch. For example, greeting the visitor using his or her first name can add just enough personalization to increase their interest in your specific brand within the market.
● Integrate Unique CTAs—One of the most effective ways to guide your website visitors from one web page to the next is by integrating unique calls-to-action on the eCommerce web pages that need it most. Carefully crafted CTAs have the power to encourage website visitors to sign up for discount alerts, subscribe to your newsletters and blog, take a survey, and experience a free trial offer.
● Automate Relevant Content Recommendations—Suggesting relevant product recommendations to your website visitors takes time. Your eCommerce store won’t have enough stored data to make relevant recommendations to first-time visitors. However, with the right machine-learning A.I. in place, the site itself can collect valuable visitor data as consumers return to your eCommerce store time and again. This data can then be used automatically to suggest products that visitors will be more inclined to buy.
Elaborating on the concept of personalized website navigation and content, you can improve eCommerce customer experience by providing your site visitors with customized browsing experiences. Your eCommerce store isn’t the only website that your target audience visits when they want to find specific products. The fact of the matter is that nowadays it’s so easy for consumers to find the products they want online that the products themselves don’t impact customer experience as much as the actual website’s functionality, features, and customized browsing capabilities do. By offering your eCommerce site visitors tailored content that features relevant products, you will help your visitors to bond with your brand.
A way to quickly integrate customized browsing into your eCommerce site is to display “recently viewed items” along the margin of each web page or across the bottom of each web page just shy of the footer. This tactic doesn’t rely on your visitors creating login accounts, which is why it’s so beneficial. As a site visitor checks out your products, the site’s A.I. can store browsing history data and automatically display the top 3 or 5 items under the header “Recently Viewed.” Depending on the technological capabilities of your eCommerce site, you can also integrate a site visitor’s recently viewed items under the header “Pick up where you left off” when they return to your eCommerce store in the future.
You can even customize the browsing experience further by implementing these features on your eCommerce site:
● Personalized Product Pages—Personalized product-detail page recommendations show eCommerce visitors items that are similar to those they’ve viewed as well as complementary products to those they’ve already added to their prior orders. This personalization feature gets even better when recommended items are tailored to the current or upcoming season, an upcoming holiday, and even the visitors’ birthdays.
● Customized Upselling & Cross-Selling During Checkout—Once a website visitor has made it to the checkout page, you have succeeded at collecting valuable data about them that you can use immediately. By understanding the items they’ve added to their shopping cart, you can automatically suggest helpful add-on products or opportunities to increase the quantities of their products in order to receive bulk-order discounts.
● Quick Glance Wish List Items—Including a Wish List on your eCommerce site is a great way to motivate website visitors to create a login account. Once they do, they can start adding items of interest to their Wish List and easily change Wish List items whenever they want. Try displaying your shoppers’ Wish List items on the margin of every web page they explore. When their Wish List items “follow them around,” they will be reminded to add them to their shopping cart.
Online shoppers take customer reviews as seriously, if not more so than real-life recommendations from their friends and family. In fact, online customer reviews are one of the best digital forms of word-of-mouth marketing there is. Reviews can either translate into sales or a damaged business reputation, depending on what’s said, since most online shoppers are in the habit of reading reviews as part of their purchase decision process. Small businesses and local companies that understand the importance of high-star and five-star customer reviews know to leverage them on their Google My Business pages, Facebook pages, and their website, all of which you should definitely do, too.
Featuring positive customer reviews and testimonials on your eCommerce site specifically cannot be overstated, and yet a lot of eCommerce businesses fail to do this, assuming that their Google My Business and Facebook reviews are enough. It’s always a good idea to include customer reviews and testimonials on your website, but there are a number of ways you can accomplish this. For some businesses, it’s appropriate to create a Customer Reviews tab on their navigation panels. These customer review web pages consolidate all of the positive reviews that the business has collected over the years. But this isn’t the only option.
If you want to feature your online customer reviews in creative ways, try one of the following ideas:
● Add Relevant, Scrolling Customer Reviews to Your Website Footers—There’s no way to predict or guarantee that website visitors will navigate to a Customer Review web page, which is why it’s a great idea to incorporate your best, shortest customer reviews on all of your eCommerce web pages. Try featuring the top three reviews, for example, within the footer of your site in such a way that they automatically scroll.
● Use Relevant Customer Reviews on Your Product Pages—You might not have customer reviews for every product you sell on your eCommerce site, but for those product reviews that you have collected, why not feature each on its correlating product page? Doing so can help convert an on-the-fence visitor into a buying customer.
● Include Customer Reviews About Specific Upsell Products at Checkout—Similar to the last idea, when you include a positive customer review along with a product you’re recommending during the checkout process, it’s kind of like having a little, digital salesman in your corner. The customer review can help convince your shopper to add the upsell product into their shopping cart.
ECommerce shopping cart abandonment is real. In fact, roughly 88% of lost eCommerce sales are due to visitors abandoning the checkout process for one reason or another. Factors such as having to provide too much information or seemingly unsecure payment gateway processes can give shoppers cold feet at the last minute. This is all to say that while enhancing the checkout process can impact overall customer experience for the better, you have to be really careful about what you enhance and how you enhance it. The last thing you want to do is further complicate the online checkout process, which will only increase the chances of your shoppers abandoning their shopping cart before they complete the purchasing process.
Now that we got that disclaimer out of the way, how can you enhance the checkout process on your eCommerce site without jeopardizing your sales? It might seem counterintuitive, but speeding up the checkout process is the kind of enhancement your shoppers will appreciate. Don’t force visitors to create a login account just to complete the checkout process. One-click checkout systems are far more popular than elaborate ones. That being said, by offering a Live Chat support box, providing different payment method options including PayPal, and keeping any associated shipping fees transparent, you will naturally improve customer experience.
In addition to the suggestions we just mentioned, you can also experiment with the following eCommerce checkout enhancements:
● Use Urgency and FOMO—There’s a reason why eCommerce brands launch flash sales. By offering products for a limited time, shoppers become triggered by a fear of missing out, or FOMO. You can implement this same concept for the checkout process of your eCommerce site to reduce shopping cart abandonment. Simply include Deals of the Day item recommendations with countdown clocks that show when the sale will end.
● Highlight Security and Trust Seals—Guest checkout should be an option for your eCommerce store visitors, but in order to push the sale through, it helps to establish trust first and foremost on the checkout page. Prominently display the trust seals of your payment gateway providers and highlight the security of your site.
● Offer Discount Codes for Upsell Products—A great way to incentivize shoppers to follow through with completing the checkout process is to offer discount codes they can use immediately. Instead of providing one discount code to all shoppers, try rewarding shoppers for following through with specific calls-to-action, such as when they acted on an upsell product that was recommended during the checkout process. By assigning a unique discount code to each upsell product, you can also track which promotional products are moving the fastest.
What improves customer experience more than when a brand goes out of its way to build meaningful relationships with its customers? Building a relationship with your eCommerce customers can increase customer loyalty and ensure long-term, mutually beneficial relationships. By identifying with your customers’ emotional reasoning and addressing the causes they care about, you will create opportunities for them to organically bond with your brand and feel a sense of affinity towards your business. It’s all about sharing common values with your customer base.
The average customer’s process for making decisions about which products to buy is influenced by their emotional reasoning, their pragmatic reasoning, and their behaviors. In other words, a shopper needs to feel good about buying a product and also know that the product will meet their needs. When, how, and why they follow through with buying the product has to do with their unique behaviors. That being said, you can persuade your shoppers to buy into your brand by speaking to their emotional side, and the best way to do this is to offer the kind of content they’ll care about and value.
The following are specific content ideas that you can weave into your eCommerce web pages to improve the overall customer experience of your site:
● Touch Upon Causes that Reflect Your Brand Identity—Social intelligence is regarded more highly than IQ in 2021. People have become extremely conscientious of social issues and everyone seems to have a fully formed opinion on the matters they care about most. While you wouldn’t want to alienate one audience in favor of another, you can use your website content to touch upon the social causes that reflect your brand’s identity. Doing so will help like-minded customers to view your brand as more than a business. They will view your brand as an ally and trusted voice.
● Stay on Message—Once you know your audience and have established your brand’s voice, you can then feature clear branding messages in your eCommerce content that help your shoppers connect with the purposes behind the products you sell. This type of content strategy helps to build brand affinity because shoppers will feel like they’re joining a community just by purchasing your products.
● Use Videos, Social Media Feeds, and Blogs—The more engaging and interactive your eCommerce site is, the better the customer experience will be. While you don’t want to overwhelm your web pages with too much flashy content, embedding relevant videos here and there, as well as featuring a social media feed where appropriate, can provide visitors with content they find valuable.
Does your eCommerce website offer visitors an excellent customer experience? If your site is lacking a responsive web design, engaging content, personalization features, impressive customer reviews, and an enhanced checkout process, then you should give the eCommerce marketing experts at FTx 360 a call.
FTx 360 offers scalable, easy-to-use eCommerce platforms, including Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce that are designed to accommodate rapid business growth. Our eCommerce Marketing Services provide:
● Customer Website Design—We create innovative and user-friendly eCommerce websites that deliver positive shopping experiences.
● Responsive Website Development—Our designers and developers build eCommerce sites that work seamlessly on all devices and across platforms.
● Product Copy Creation—Our creative content writers produce accurate, SEO-friendly descriptions for products and services that engage customers and boost sales.
● Product Management—Our technological capabilities encompass the full spectrum of product management, integrating flawlessly into your eCommerce website.
● Payment Gateway Integration—Integrating the leading payment gateways into eCommerce, FTx 360 provides secure transactions with multiple payment options.
● Performance and UX Reporting—We provide continuing optimization services and work to identify areas of your eCommerce website that could be improved so that you never stop broadening your reach.
If you’re ready to upgrade your eCommerce site, our developers and designers can create a unique, reliable, and fully customized eCommerce store for you that offers an excellent customer experience and delivers a consumer checkout follow-through success rate that far surpasses your current rate. Contact us to get started.
Have you ever walked into a house and fallen in love with the atmosphere? Everything from the home furnishings to the stylized decor to the archways that connect each beautifully laid out room contributed to the wonderful experience you had while there. At the time, you might not have been aware that an architect had to draw up blueprints and contractors had to construct the home, first and foremost, in order for the interior design team who came in next to paint, furnish, and decorate. You see, your experience at the house, which left a lasting impression on you, would not have been possible without the architect and the contractors who built according to the blueprints.
In the same way, the specific experience you have on any given website would not be possible without the architect of the website, otherwise known as the lead web developer, and his or her team of builders who are the web developers that actually construct the website by writing coded language.
Producing a final website is not possible without a web designer, or website design team, just as a house would never go on the market until the walls had been painted, the floors tiled, and the overall decor arranged to give the best impression to prospective buyers. Today, we are going to focus on web developers, but if you would like to learn more about web designers, check out Web Design Trends, which goes into detail on the subject.
In this article, you will learn about website developers, what they’re responsible for, and what they can do for your business. Frontend, backend, and full-stack web development skills are just the beginning of what professional website developers bring to the table. They also create the basic structure and presentation of a website using website scripting languages. All-in-all, their work greatly impacts SEO, inbound marketing, and even revenue increases. Keep reading to discover everything there is to know about web development and what hiring a web developer can do for your company.
A website developer is a skilled programmer who specializes in building “World Wide Web” applications, i.e. websites.
The anchor of a website, which is the bedrock that web developers build upon, is a URL. In today’s competitive market, all websites use “custom domains.” A custom domain, also referred to as a vanity URL, is the branded website name that appears in the address bar of every web browser. Custom domains are not free and must be purchased by a qualifying provider and registered.
There are three primary types of web developers who build out custom domain URL websites. These are frontend developers, backend developers, and full-stack developers. Let’s take a look at what each of these three types of developers do.
The term “frontend” refers to the “visitor-side” of a website. When you visit a website, everything you see from the layout to the color scheme to the CTA opt-in forms appear thanks to the work of the frontend web developer. Because frontend developers are responsible for the UI, or user interface, they tend to work closely with the site’s web designer. Frontend developers use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to craft the best UI possible, which we will take a closer look at further in this article.
As you might have guessed, just as the “frontend” developer is responsible for everything website visitors will see, the backend web developer is responsible for everything that happens behind the scenes in order to make a website function. Their territory is often referred to as the “server-side,” because backend developers work on the “guts” of the website within the server, application, and database. In order to ensure excellent UX, or user experience, backend developers collaborate with frontend developers as they develop code.
Highly experienced web developers generally go beyond offering either frontend or backend development services. Instead, these developers learn both sides of the development equation. Any website developer who offers frontend as well as backend web development is called a “full-stack web developer.” Known in the industry as development geniuses, full-stack web developers do it all because they know it all.
Whether you hire front-end and back-end developers or hire a single full-stack developer, your web developers should be mindful to build MarTech into your site for you. Shorthand for “marketing technology,” the term MarTech refers to any marketing software solution that helps marketers research, strategize, execute, analyze, and optimize their campaigns across all digital platforms. MarTech combines marketing with technology, and oftentimes marketers will consolidate multiple MarTech solutions into a stack, known as a MarTech Stack. The purpose of utilizing MarTech is to improve engagement with customers and drive sales, and yes, really smart web developers will build your website with your future marketing strategies in mind.
Every website presents an interface to the visitors who navigate from one web page to the next. The presentation of a website’s basic structure is the result of web developers using programming language to write code. The most common programming languages in use today are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Let’s take a look at each one so that you become familiar with web development jargon.
“HTML” stands for “hypertext markup language.” This programming language has been considered the standard markup language for websites since the 90s. You can think of HTML as the foundation that must be laid prior to building a beautiful house. Providing the basic structure of a website, HTML is the bedrock that other technologies, such as CSS and JavaScript are fixed upon.
Short for “cascading style sheets,” CSS directly impacts the experiences visitors have when they interact with a website. CSS programming language modifies and enhances HTML to define the website’s layout, formatting, and overall presentation. This programming language is considered a cornerstone technology for the World Wide Web. Like HTML, web developers are experts in CSS due to the fact that reliable, functional, well-performing websites cannot be built without this essential language.
Another crucial layer to constructing a website that performs excellently is JavaScript, a complex programming language that is used to control the behavior of different web page elements. What do we mean by that? JavaScript’s logic-based programming language is how web developers include opt-in boxes, newsletter signups, and other CTAs on websites. Without JavaScript, websites would not be “interactive.”
No matter which programming language your web developer uses—HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or a combination of all three—they should be mindful to include coding that offers a “responsive web design.” This term refers to technology that automatically resizes, rearranges, and adjusts website content so that it displays correctly on all mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, iPads, and other handheld devices. Also known as “mobile optimization,” responsive design is a necessary aspect of web design and development.
Website developers have a massive responsibility—to provide the best user experience, or UX, possible. Since web developers construct the layout of a website, which involves working closely with website designers, they are responsible for creating visually interesting and experientially engaging web pages that load fast and perform excellently. This means that web developers take extreme care when developing landing pages and optimizing websites for their inbound marketing potential, which includes coding opt-in forms and other marketing CTAs right into the web pages
themselves. Let’s take a look.
Landing pages have many synonyms, such as a lead capture page, squeeze page, and destination page, to name a few. Whichever term is used, this type of page refers to a single web page that’s
used as part of a digital marketing CTA for lead generation. For example, when an internet user clicks on a SEO search result, marketing email, or online advertisement, they are directed to the landing page that the web developer has set up. Landing pages typically display content that’s relevant to the user’s search or the ad the user clicked. And yes, a savvy web developer will be your best bet for including lead generation capabilities like this on your website.
A savvy web developer is also your best bet for connecting effective inbound marketing channels to your website. Inbound marketing strategies include content marketing, SEO, social media, blogs, and other digital marketing methods that draw consumers into a business’ marketing funnel. Inbound marketing campaign content places an emphasis on personally connecting with consumers and solving consumer pain points, which indirectly promotes the business’ products and solutions. Put simply, inbound marketing is any strategy that helps potential customers discover a business or
brand.
As we mentioned, opt-in forms and other CTAs are coded right into your web pages by your web developer. These forms and CTAs appear on websites and function as data collection tools. When a lead fills out an opt-in form on your website, information about the lead is automatically gathered and stored for you to leverage in the future during your marketing campaigns.
Web developers, as you can see, are truly responsible for the fate of the websites they develop.
SEO, or search engine optimization, refers to the objective of driving online user traffic to a website by elevating the website’s standing with search engines such as Google. Ideally, businesses want their websites to appear on the first page of Google’s search results whenever a user is looking for a company like theirs. Using relevant keywords within web content optimizes search engine ranking. Keywords are words, phrases, or questions that a Google user might type into the search bar in order to generate a list of possible websites relevant to their search topic. The term SEO only applies to non-paid, organic search results. Web developers contribute to the SEO of the websites they develop.
As a business owner, you want to maximize your daily site visitors. A “site visitor” is any internet user who lands on or navigates through your website. Websites collect valuable visitor data, including IP addresses and cookies, to determine how many unique site visitors have visited each web page, where those site visitors came from, and what actions they took while visiting the website. This is data you want, which means optimizing your website for SEO is a must. What can you do with visitor data? A lot. By analyzing the number of visitors that land on your website, you will learn important metrics such as the overall visitor frequency along with crucial demographic information. This information can then be leveraged during the creation and publication of additional website content to improve website traffic and increase sales revenue.
Launching a blog is easily the most worthwhile strategy in terms of integrating new SEO into your business website, so be sure to ask your web developer to include a blog on the site they develop for you. By featuring a blog on your website, you will organically begin to build brand awareness, improve SEO, drive website traffic, and increase revenue. Short for “web-logs,” blogs are actually considered an original social media platform for two reasons. Posts can be published frequently to immediately engage an audience, and discussions are often triggered based on the articles’ content. These discussions unfold in the comments section beneath each post. By including opt-in forms within your blog posts and automating the publication of each article, you can effectively convert website visitors into loyal customers.
Another effective SEO strategy involves using “dynamic content” on your website, and any web developer worth his or her salt will program your site using dynamic content. Also called adaptive content, dynamic content refers to the component on web pages that changes the page’s content based on visitor data, behavior, and preferences. Because these content changes can be automated, dynamic content keeps site visitors engaged while freeing up marketers to focus on other tasks. Changing the content naturally updates the web page’s SEO, which can improve search engine ranking.
Business owners who want to avoid hiring a web developer and who are not prepared to learn how to use HTML editors and in-line coding themselves might opt to use a WYSIWYG website building platform instead.
Instead of writing web page code and building your website from scratch all on your own, you could opt for a What You See Is What You Get, or WYSIWYG, website building platform. These user-friendly platforms come with rich text editors, drag-and-drop editors, and point-and-click editors. In other words, a WYSIWYG platform will enable you to quickly build and edit your website once you have chosen a template from their CMS. Let’s take a look.
CMS, or content management systems, provide users with technologically simplistic templates. These templates can be edited with drag-and-drop features, as we mentioned. The user-friendly nature of website builders with CMS allows the user to construct a fully functional website or eCommerce store without the help of a professional web developer. This is due to the fact that the CMS platform itself handles all of the basic backend infrastructure. Once your WYSIWYG website is established, the CMS software platform will help you create, manage, modify, and schedule all of your content in an organized, easy-to-execute manner.
Let’s take an in-depth look at “point-and-click” editors, “drag-and-drop” editors, and mobile-optimized responsive website design so that you’re fully informed in case you choose to go the WYSIWYG route.
Point-and-click editing is a design feature that empowers the user to add elements of code into web pages without having to formally program that code into the backend. Point-and-click editor allows the user to easily add plugins, source buttons, and code snippets among other widgets to the pages of their website or eCommerce store without having to rely on a web designer. Businesses can also invest in free-standing point-and-click editors to create, write, and revise their Wikipedia pages and other online business encyclopedias.
A drag-and-drop website builder enables users to create a website without having to learn CSS commands or write code. The user simply selects a basic layout theme from a library of professionally designed templates and proceeds to drag-and-drop widgets, fill in text, and make other alterations to personalize the site for their business. Drag-and-drop website builders give business owners the freedom to build their websites exactly as they want and easily update their web content without having to rely on a web designer or agency.
A mobile-optimized responsive website design template is a build-your-own-website template that has been designed to display correctly on all devices for optimal viewing. The templates themselves are coded to automatically adapt to any screen size and orientation so that the website looks great, functions well, and is easy to read on computers, smartphones, and tablets. If you opt to build your own website instead of hiring a professional web developer, then be sure to choose a web building platform that offers mobile-optimized responsive web design templates.
At the end of the day, your business website has the potential to be your most powerful digital marketing tool. When visitors land on your website, they read the home page, navigate through the entire site, and decide whether or not to purchase your products and services based on their experience interacting with your website. For this reason, making sure that your website performs excellently is the most important thing you can do for your business.
Is your website performing as well as it should? Our article, What Do Customers Look For in a Website? can help you determine where your site stands in the eyes of consumers, so be sure to give it a read.
If your website or eCommerce store isn’t performing as well as it should, you could try your hand at constructing a new site using a WYSIWYG web building platform like Squarespace, Wix, or Weebly… Or you could have the website development team at FTx 360 handle your site for you. Our web developers work hand-in-hand with artistic website designers to produce stunning websites that strike a perfect balance between beautiful and functional, and our websites always load properly on mobile devices. Contact us to check out our portfolio or get your project started with our web development services today.
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On a global scale, approximately 547,200 new websites are created every single day. As of the publication of this article, 24 million eCommerce sites across the world are actively selling products. According to data compiled from IBISWorld, U.S. eCommerce sales reached $211.5 billion in the second quarter of 2020, which represents a 44.5% increase compared to the second quarter of 2019.
The eCommerce sector, regardless of industry, is extremely competitive. The market is growing exponentially. But don’t worry. Your eCommerce business isn’t automatically doomed to get lost in the fray. There are plenty of marketing strategies you can implement today that will increase sales tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year.
In this article, we’ll show you how to promote your eCommerce website using 5 marketing ideas that work.
Search engine optimization is a marketing method that uses targeted keywords and longtail keyword phrases to elevate a website’s ranking on search engines such as Google. SEO typically refers to organic, non-paid keyword strategies. The desired result of any SEO effort is to increase a website’s online visibility and traffic. Check out What Is SEO? to learn specific SEO strategies, including how to generate relevant keywords.
49% of marketers report that organic search engine optimization has the best ROI of any marketing channel, according to Search Engine Journal.
Devising an SEO strategy for your eCommerce site includes three areas, each with its own steps:
● First, you’ll have to do a little research to figure out the frequently searched words, terms, and phrases that search engine users typically type into the search bar. You can identify these SEO keywords by using Ahrefs, Amazon, Google, or any SEM tool.
● Next, you’ll need to create new content with the keywords you’ve selected. You could revise your eCommerce Home Page using keywords, or spruce up your product descriptions with them. This second step of plugging fresh keywords into your site should become a periodic practice.
● Finally, you’ll need to analyze the impact of those SEO keywords, using Google Analytics or another tool that measures the success of your SEO strategy.
Multichannel marketing for an eCommerce company refers to diversifying your sales platform. Yes, your eCommerce site is obviously your primary sales platform. But in today’s competitive market, businesses succeed online when they meet their customers’ wants and needs, including their preferences for where they want to shop. Facebook has made buying online extremely convenient, and the same can be said about Amazon. By opening a Facebook Store, you can cater to consumers who want to shop there, and others that prefer to visit your website can access it through Facebook via the URL you provide.
By the year 2040, an estimated 95% of all purchases will occur online through eCommerce, according to Nasdaq.
Spread your brand across multiple channels to diversify your sales and income streams. Follow these steps to get started:
● Research where your potential customers are congregating online. Are they on Instagram the most, or do they fill up the comments sections of YouTube? Find out so you’ll know where to focus your efforts.
● Focus on the top 3 channels where your potential customers spend their online time, then develop posting strategies on those platforms. By engaging users, they will begin to view and interact with your brand, which will lead to sales through those platforms if not your eCommerce site.
● Since multichannel marketing is all about creating different paths for consumers to travel in order to get to the purchasing stage of their shopping experience, it’s okay to start small, as long as the customer journey is easy and rewarding.
If you have an advertising expense budget, the best way to allocate your funds in 2021 is into podcast advertisements. Yes, it’s true. Regardless of the overall popularity of a podcast, the fact of the matter is that podcasts garner very loyal audiences, and those audiences tend to be comprised of specific demographics. This means that the podcast itself has already corralled your ideal customers, and by buying ad space, you can speak to all of them at once.
54% of podcast listeners will lean towards buying products that were recommended on podcasts, according to Edison Research.
Narrowing down the best podcast to invest in requires a little research. Start with these initial steps:
● Contact podcasts that are relevant to your industry to find out the size of their listenership and the costs for different ad spots. The ad sales department should be able to send you a demographic report that organizes their audience by categories such as age, gender, location, and interests, among other variables.
● Choose the most affordable ad spot. This could be a shorter pre-roll or post-roll spot, which will play at the beginning or end of the podcast episode. Pricier spots typically play in the middle of the podcast when listenership is the highest.
● Lastly, you’ll need to record a high-quality audio ad that meets the technical requirements and standards of the podcast.
In terms of regularly generating fresh, targeted, relevant keywords that harness the power of SEO and directly impact your eCommerce site’s Google ranking, nothing beats a blog. Launching and maintaining a blog is a highly effective promotional strategy. Blogs expand brand reach and online presence, as well as help to validate the business as a credible authority. All of which will lead to consumer trust. For detailed tips on blogging, be sure to read Creating a Remarkable Business Blog.
63% of online consumers in the U.S. have made a purchase based on recommendations from a blog, according to the Content Marketing Institute.
Summarizing the article on blogging referenced above, here’s how you can promote your eCommerce site by adding a Blog tab and posting on a regular schedule:
● When creating the content of each blog post, aim to follow the “information, inspiration, call-to-action” format. This means that the content should inform the reader by first addressing a “pain point” they’re experiencing and then suggesting solutions to fix that particular pain point problem. The suggestions should “inspire” the reader. And finally, the article should wrap up with a call-to-action that encourages the reader to purchase the product that will “solve” their problem from your eCommerce site.
● Be sure to work your keywords into the written content. Keep the paragraphs short so that the article is easy to read. Use headings, subheadings, and bullet points to list information, all of which ensures easy reading.
● Break up the text even more with images, photos, and graphics. Include a “subscribe” button at the bottom of each post, and as you collect email addresses, be sure to use them wisely when you promote your recently published blog posts.
Over the course of 2020 and into 2021, the use of “chatbots” has risen as a prefered method of customer relationship management and customer service. Meaning, your eCommerce site visitors would probably appreciate being able to ask straightforward questions and get fast answers via a chatbot box. There are two kinds of chatbots—purely robotic or a live person. Depending on the size of your eCommerce business, you may opt to use one or both types of chatbots. A live person might not be able to accommodate a great volume of inquiries. Remember, consumers expect fast responses, so if there’s any chance your employee will take longer than 5 minutes to reply, then the safer route would be to integrate a machine-learning A.I. “robotic” chatbot.
Roughly 50% of consumers have ended up making an eCommerce purchase after interacting with the site’s chatbot, according to Drift.com.
The success or failure of an A.I. chatbot completely depends on whether or not your eCommerce site visitor can tell they’re talking to a machine-learning robot. The point being, even if you use an A.I. chatbot, you want your website visitors to believe it’s a real, live person. Here are some tips to keep you—or your hired chatbot developer—on track:
● The chatbot should exhibit a discernable degree of empathy when appropriate. Firstly, the bot must be programmed to use language properly so that it can smoothly speak with the customer typing on the other end of the box.
● In order for the chatbot to function properly, i.e. provide appropriate, relevant, and accurate answers to customer questions, the chatbot first must be programmed with all the necessary information. Also, it should be “trained” to ask the customer to provide more details when required. Remember, better answers equal better service.
● Train the chatbot to answer frequently asked questions. Depending on the nature of your business and the products you sell on your eCommerce site, you’ve probably noticed that customers tend to have a range of specific questions. Chatbots can, in fact, be trained to answer those specific questions.
Additional marketing methods that can greatly enhance your efforts to promote your eCommerce website include:
Are you ready to get your eCommerce marketing strategy started? FTx 360 offers SEO marketing and optimization plans for eCommerce businesses. Contact us to speak with a professional marketing strategist today.
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