If you are starting an ecommerce business, you need a strategy for turning your visitors into paying customers. In the marketing world, this is known as a conversion. You’re converting your visitors from latent prospects into customers, and your conversion rate is how many visitors you convert into paying customers.

So how do you actually convince first-time users to purchase a product or service? This comes down to how effective you are at nurturing the customer journey. In essence, your customers need to know, like, and trust you before they’ll be willing to part with their money. How will they trust you’re the best website to choose from? What leads to building this trust? What unique value do you provide to them. Curating this into an effective go-to-market strategy is critical to your success.

As an ecommerce merchant today in a highly competitive market, knowing how to effectively turn traffic into sales is table stakes. In this guide, we’ll tackle seven simple ways to convert your visitors into customers.

1. Know Your Selling Point

What makes you different? If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you’ve heard about elevator pitches and how important they are. An elevator pitch is a short pitch that you’d be able to get through in a single elevator ride. When you’re selling online, knowing this pitch is equally as important as in-person.

The idea here is that less is sometimes more. Too much information can cause visitors to tune out. On an ecommerce website, people don’t have time to scroll through pages and pages of content. It’s time to really hone in on your selling point and what makes you stand out so you can quickly and effectively communicate this to customers. This is something that needs to come across in your store branding, homepage content, and even product descriptions.

2. Create an Email List

"Build an email list" may sound outdated, but they’re still a powerful tool for communicating effectively with your customers. Thanks to social media, many smaller companies feel they don’t need an email list. You already communicate with your followers on social media, so you don’t need any other method, right? Wrong. You don’t own your social media followers, and they can stop following you at any moment.

An email list is a direct line of communication with your interested customers. By collecting emails on your ecommerce website, you can nurture these users through the conversion process. They might not be ready to make a purchase the first time they visit your website, but they might if you email them a discount code in the near future.

We've created a guide for Email List Building with a HubSpot Coupon Popup that you can quickly implement.

3. Segment Your Email List

Speaking about email lists, make sure you’re segmenting. One of the biggest mistakes new email list users make is dumping all emails addresses into a single list. Different users have different interests. They might be at different stages in the customer journey. Always segment your list by interest and more.

(If you integrate WooCommerce, Magento or Shopify with HubSpot via Unific, many list segmentations are included!)

The more you know about your audience, the better equipped you are to serve them effectively. For instance, two segments in the ecommerce world are prospective customers and those who have already made a purchase. These two categories should receive different types of emails, don’t you think?

4. Leverage Social Proof

Social proof is a way to build trust with users. Testimonials, influencer endorsements, and even reviews are all types of social proof. Social proof is worth its weight in gold. You can preach about the wonders of your products and services all you want, but the reality is reviews are 12-times more trusted than your own descriptions. Make sure social proof is shown front and center on your website, especially for your best products.

5. Create a Better Website

If your design is lacking, you’re losing users before they even enter the customer journey. Your website needs to be user-based, which means it’s built for users to navigate easily. Avoid overstuffing your websites and pages with too much content and design.

Less is usually more, especially with online businesses. Depending on what you use to build your ecommerce website, you’ll need to optimize this to work for your audience. If you are using WooCommerce, you can use these tips on where to get the best WooCommerce Support.

6. Build a Blog

Blogs are big for your marketing. They’re another form of direct communication with your customers, and they help you build trust. Your customers have questions they need to be answered. Even as an ecommerce website, you can address customer’s concerns and pain points through a blog.

The more information and value you’re able to give them (no strings attached), the more they’ll trust you to be the best online retailer. Blogging regularly also makes your business seem active, welcoming, and trustworthy. It’s also a great place to showcase your best products in action.

7. Boost Your Speed

Finally, make sure your website loads properly and quickly. If users are left waiting for your website to load quickly, they’re simply going to click away. People don’t have the patience to wait for these things, and they expect websites to work quickly. This is often a challenge on ecommerce websites where there are many elements loading at once.

When your website doesn’t perform well, this looks unprofessional and will build doubts about your company’s abilities. You can’t afford to lose customers in this way. Instead, invest in your website speed and performance. You’re up against big-name businesses like Amazon. Even they experience speed problems and these result in big pushback from users.

Creating a Successful Online Business

Running or marketing your ecommerce business online is easier than ever, but only if you know how to successfully convert users into buyers. It’s not enough to drive traffic to your website. You also need to convert visitors into customers and keep them interested to keep coming back.

From there, you can move into phase of welcoming New Customers, which is one of the many critical areas of focus in an overall Ecommerce Customer Segmentation strategy.

Ready to get started? Try these ideas above. They’ll help you start building an audience and growing sales from the get go.

 

 

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