10 Solutions for Your Online Store That Will Increase Sales

The combination of best practices and Synerise improve the look and work of your e-store website and sales level.

It is easy to forget about the traditional online stores websites, which are still important in e-commerce. Regardless of the industry and the nature of the activity, usually it is accompanied by a website, which is responsible for many functions – including sales. Because of that, your website should be competitive, useful and to some extent – unique. From this text, you will learn what solutions for online store are necessary to achieve such an effect. We will show you how to use advantage of the Synerise platform, which helps in marketing automation and implementation of the omnichannel strategy. The combination of best practices and Synerise functionality opens up to broad opportunities to improve not only the look and work of your e-store website, but also the customer satisfaction and sales level.

Running an effective business in the Internet is a difficult task today. Strong competition, information overload, changing rules of SEO and finally the increasing reluctance of customers to traditional forms of advertising (ie. banner blindness) – all this is a serious challenge, especially for companies that do not have well established position in the market yet. Depending on the quality of your online store, product or service, you will be forced to make a number of changes or improvements. We decided to prepare a list of the most necessary elements of a good website that you can use to analyse your own sales service.

10 essential solutions for online store:

1. Effective and intuitive website structure – we start from the issue, which concerns actually some of the basic elements of a website. Regardless of the other elements, your website should contain: a main menu (with a catalogue of products, links to key subpages, etc.); a search engine (positioned in a visible place, offering hints and context functionality); an additional menu (should include additional links to detailed pages) and a link/button to return to the home page or return to the top (it reduces the need for scrolling), preferably in the form of button that follow the user.

2. CTA buttons (call to action) – encourage users to take a specific action and, in principle, are the essential element of any website. In the case of e-store that are the well- known „Add to Cart” and other buttons, responsible for interactions of a customer with a website, for example filling in a contact form or subscription for a newsletter. The basis of a good design of CTA is to ensure of their proper description and visibility among other website elements. After the integration of a website with the Synerise Platform, you will gain insight into the activities of your customers, including shares associated with the using of the CTA buttons.

3. Forms – the use of CTA in combination with Synerise allows the discovery of only a portion of customer behavior on the website. If you want to better know the visitors of your website, you will have to implement the forms, such as registration, subscribe for the newsletter, contact forms and those allowing to evaluate the product or service.
The customers base created this way is more complex, which in turn allows for more effective lead management, more accurate segmentation (grouping) of customers and conduct effective communication. This has a positive effect on the condition of the business and give you an opportunity to increase profits. Preparing forms you need to remember that some customers will not share their detailed personal data. What is more, long and complicated forms discouraged, so limit the number of mandatory fields to the necessary minimum.

4. Newsletter – not every person that visit your website is ready for immediate purchase. However, it is worth stay in touch with these users and interact with them through properly prepared (automated and personalized) messages. Therefore, you should put on your website a form allowing to subscribe for the newsletter. Synerise will help you here. Our solution is complex, because it allows you to configure and operate newsletter sending, has an intuitive templates creator and many other options to help you prepare effective and efficient mailing. For example, to encourage user to subscribe for the newsletter you can put a dynamic, personalized content that appears on the pop-up.

5. Dynamic content – advanced marketing automation platforms, including Synerise, allow processing a large amount of data in real time. One of the measurable benefits of the use of such solutions is the ability to embed dynamic content on the page in form of pop-ups or dynamic parts of the website. For example, thanks to Synerise you can design the appearance of the pop-up and you will set not only a place (subwebsite) and the moment of the appearance of the pop-up, but also exactly specify to which customer it will be shown. As a result, the user experience is even better suited to their current needs.

6. Confirming information – in the era of fierce competition, important is to show all strong points of the company or products. Therefore, make sure that at the website there is a visible information that indicates the best features of the offer and show it in a positive light. For example, it can be a positive feedback from your customers or business partners, but also awards or certificates.
Show your customers that you guarantee them not only the highest quality of the products, but also the security of data and transactions. The links to privacy policies, owned security certificates or popular online payment systems available on your website will certify this. Do not forget to add full details of your business, including a phone number in the form of a link click-to-call, which allows customers to quickly dial a number by clicking on it (smartphones owners will appreciate this).

7. Effective product presentation – if you sell specific products then you need to take care of the right way of their presentation. The absolute minimum here are as large as possible and a good quality images. Some customers want to see the smallest details of a product before making a purchasing decision. If you will have the poor quality of the images, then the chances of sales falling to a minimum. Traditional photo is not everything. Increasingly, sellers provide 360 degrees pictures, and even video presentation of sold things. When designing the layout of the page, avoid stock photos of things and people. If you want to show something, let it be credible.

8. Customers engagement – one of your goals should be to engage customers and interact with them. This can be done on the website, for example, by recommendation systems and evaluation of products, but also an appropriate communication strategy (personalized and direct announcement to customers; display information about promotions, new products or discount codes, etc.). Synerise offers in this regard a number of interesting features. The platform not only helps in better understanding of customers and their habits, but provides a number of tools with which you will interact with them.
Besides the already mentioned newsletter service and dynamic content, you can use the Campaigns module. Here you can prepare different types of marketing campaigns, based on beacons, push notifications, text messages or emails. We also offer support for dynamic screens in a mobile application, which you can associate with the website of your online store. As a result, you gain access to several communication channels from which you redirect your customers to the e-store, for example by sending them promotional codes to the shopping cart. As you can see there are many possibilities, and in conducting effective communication with customers storytelling may be helpful.

9. Rewarding customers – do not forget to thank the customers who filled in the form, who decided to subscribe for a newsletter or made a purchase. Try to communicate with users using the language of benefits. Also remember about more measurable forms of benefits: promotions, contests, special activities and additional materials (e-books, infographics, blog posts) through which you make that your customer will feel appreciated.

10. Meeting the standards – at the end we want to mention the issue that is often overlooked, and in fact is extremely important. Your website should comply with current standards and safety validation code, and fit to mobile devices (it is good to have responsive version, that is RWD) and the needs of disable customers (adapted version). If you want to check whether your current website meets the latest design requirements, use the following free services: Validator.w3.org, Google Webmasters Tools, Developers Google as well as Wave webaim.

Wrapping up:

Presented list is not final. Depending on your specific needs, as well as the status and purpose of your website, you can implement different solutions. This requires in-depth analysis and the list of presented key elements may be the starting point. In the lack of any of them, you should seriously consider some corrections on your website. Please note that some of the proposed solutions can be implemented through the integration of e-shop website with the platform like RPM (Revenue Performance Management), which combines the functionality of a CRM system (supporting Customer Relationship Management), tools for tasks management, marketing automation system and analytics platform, like Synerise for example. Do not hesitate to contact us if your changes require of such an integration – we will help!