In 2019 in France, e-commerce represented more than 100 billion euros with more than 190,000 merchant sites registered by the FEVAD (Federation of e-commerce and distance selling). It is a developing sector that is constantly growing every year and is expected to benefit from the economic recovery following the deconfinement. However, due to the health crisis of the Covid-19 coronavirus, some e-commerce operators have seen their sales fall (due to difficulties in supply and delivery in the logistics chain) and the industry has been impacted by changes in consumer habits. In this post-confinement period, now more than ever, numerous e-commerce sites need to boost sales rapidly and increase their businesses to ensure a promising future.
But then, how can you improve your e-commerce site to successfully sell more following the deconfinement?
Here are our 4 tips signed by Botmind!
1. To take care of your product descriptions
First, an e-commerce site must put all its products or services online as swiftly as possible to keep customers away from the competitors. Updated stocks on the site help reassure customers about product availability. Each product sheet must also include certain key elements:
- the keywords of the product must be well-positioned
- the category of the product allowing you to find your way around the site
- high-quality photos that accurately show your products as customers can neither see nor touch them.
- the comprehensive and concise description of the product that sells and encourages the visitor to take action (also with a better SEO of the product).
The visitor must identify the product at a glance thanks to these key elements aimed at boosting sales, especially in these difficult times. A study carried out by Generix Group in 2018, revealed that accuracy of information was considered a fundamental element of a successful customer experience for more than ⅓ of the respondents (36%).
Startups which can assist you:
- Octopulse : boost your traffic thanks to the optimization of your SEO to have good visibility on the internet by improving your position on Google and by choosing the right keywords.
- Partoo : increase your traffic by updating your information on Google My Business (logo, photos, description, schedules, website link, news, customer reviews) through a simple and intuitive management platform.
2. Create meaningful content for your target audience
In a market where competition is intense, the creation of content enables you to be better referenced and to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Even with a beautiful visual identity and quality products, if your e-commerce site does not have enough traffic, boosting sales can be complicated. This requires a good natural referencing allowed by the high quality of your content. It helps to generate qualified traffic and therefore sell more. Visitors interested in your content is likely to ensure a high conversion rate.
Content creation has several forms:
- Reusing customer-generated content: sharing photos of your products on social networks, customer reviews, and recommendations, customer quotes…
- Do “guest blogging”: promote your brand through content posted on blogs with a link to your website (these blogs should have the same target as you but sell a different product that will allow you to establish a long-term partnership).
- Set up a remarketing system: a person who lands on your site but does not buy immediately can receive some additional content to try to convert it.
- Use paid tools such as Adwords and Facebook: to promote content or a new page, you can pay for an ad to be referenced in Google’s ads.
- Push content on the chat channel: by setting up a virtual agent who acts as a sales advisor, content can be placed on the pages where the user is present (personalized advice, product features, payment methods, etc.).
Botmind allows you to integrate a virtual agent on the chat channel that will be able to make product recommendations according to the visitors’ expectations and give personalized advice, always to boost sales.
Pushing personalized content via these different means can help enhance the knowledge of your visitors, as long as the right balance is found between the relevance of the message and the privacy intrusion of the Internet user. In any case, the content you publish gives you credibility and showcases your expertise to your target audience.
3. Create user-friendly pathways
An e-commerce site must have a clear presentation and an accurate comprehensive categorization of products to help you find your way through the site. The home page is where the key information should be present. The objective of this page is to provide a solution to your customers’ common problems and then convince them that your brand meets their needs. The user paths make it easier to navigate the site by offering a streamlined experience for visitors from the very first page. As a general rule, the site should offer the user as few clicks as possible.
The rule: a minimum of clicks => a maximum of sales
Good user experience makes site navigation easy and interactive thanks to visible buttons that encourage purchase, personalized filters, easily identifiable tabs… Visitors must find the information they are seeking swiftly, while also wanting to extend their browsing on the site to discover new products. In this post-confinement period, user paths are a way to boost sales by capturing the attention of prospects.
Discover the infography about the impact of Covid-19 on the e-commerce sector in France?
Finally, to optimize your site for better customer experience, make sure you have a responsive site, i.e. one that can be adapted to mobile devices. According to BDM Média, ⅓ e-commerce shoppers will be buying on mobile in 2019. Just like on the website, the user paths must be self-explanatory with buttons, descriptions, and beautiful photos to make people want to buy and sell more.
The startup that can help you:
- Tapbuy : Deliver an optimal mobile payment experience by removing the friction points for consumers and increasing the number of mobile conversions.
4. Optimize your customer support
Investing in customer service is important in e-commerce because it is the only source of information that customers can have when making a purchase or even afterward. It allows you to listen to and understand the customer, answer their questions, and make them want to experience your site again. Through customer service, you can also create statistics on the most frequently asked questions, and the most common problems encountered. In this way, by detecting customer feedback, you can improve your customer journey through optimizations made on the site such as the implementation of a FAQ. It allows customers to find out information independently at first, and if necessary, advisers are always available to answer more complex questions.
This FAQ system, or Knowledge Base, is very useful and allows advisers not only to save time but also to focus on complex requests. With automation of this FAQ through a virtual agent on your site, you further improve the customer experience on your website. The virtual agent answers frequently asked questions and when it is not able to provide an answer, it transfers the request to a customer service adviser. This automation is particularly advantageous in the post-confinement period, as it helps you automate your customer support to build customer loyalty and bring customers back to the site to generate more sales. This automation solution connects virtual agents and customer service representatives on the same chat channel. The customer asks his question and gets an answer in all cases, either by the virtual agent or by an adviser. The automation of the FAQ is hence a tool for customer satisfaction to boost sales.
Thanks to Botmind, we enable you to have an optimized customer service through the integration of a virtual agent on the chat channel: automation of customer support by answering frequently asked questions.
Conclusion
Regardless of your e-commerce business sector, boosting online sales necessarily involves increased organization and continuous work on the returns of your customers. By respecting these key actions, you can sustainably improve your post-confinement sales now but also continue this work overtime. These 4 tips will allow you to achieve good customer satisfaction with better customer loyalty, a factor of re-purchasing. To sell more on your site, the most successful way is therefore to consider customer expectations and try to meet them. With consumption habits changing during the health crisis, you need to understand what their expectations are regarding e-commerce purchases and adapt to their needs. This will allow you to make your e-commerce site more profitable post-confinement, in a first step, and continue to increase your sales for the future, in a second step.