4 Ways to Boost Your eCommerce ROI

When you are first getting started with e-commerce, every sale may be a rush. However, as you build a stable income stream, you want to make sure you are devoting your time to actions that make the most money. Here are 4 ways in which you can boost your ROI, investing into your own business in ways that will continue to pay dividends long-term.

One of the cheapest ways to gain traffic is to rank well in search engines and to have a site whose content appears for the search terms that are most connected to your target demographic. Therefore, brainstorming your best search terms, evaluating where you rank now, and beginning to create content toward those keywords is a great start. This content should also be, above all, useful to your potential customers: there is no point in bringing them to a website that they will then find confusing and useless. Creating interesting, helpful content aids in bringing down your bounce rate while keeping customers looking at your site longer.

Even if you began your e-commerce business with SEO and usability in mind, the algorithms that allow people to find your site change all the time. A great simple way to test your site’s usability is to assemble a focus group – ideally, your target demographic, but anyone unfamiliar with your site can also help – and have them record their screens while they use a search engine to look for a product you offer. These videos can show how and when potential customers get confused or distracted and stop seeking your product.

While paid social media ads may seem like a big investment, the key to these ads is to experiment with different extremely targeted demographics and limit your budget to only a few dollars for each experiment. One great way to consider who your target demographics might be is to evaluate what you already know about your current paying customers: if their age, location, or gender is consistent, start with that parameter.

Within Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other major social media sites, there are powerful analytics tools that allow you to both find an extremely small segmented audience and look for other audiences with a proven track record for clicking on similar ads. Most of these sites allow you to either post official ads or simply “boost” a social media post that you know was popular from your own site. When you find an ad strategy that yields paying customers, innovate from there to improve further or boost that result, while no longer spending anything on ineffective test ads.

Customer satisfaction surveys have shown that two things (at least) take them from “ready to buy” to “ready to keep looking.” One is not knowing whether they can return the product for a full refund; not being upfront about your return policy can cause a prospective customer to leave. The second is simply an arduous or surprise-filled checkout process. Hidden fees, multiple pages, or buggy credit card reception all can allow people in the process of paying you money to simply abandon the transaction. Smooth these parts of your process so much that they don’t think twice about clicking “submit payment.”

As you diversify your offerings for your e-commerce business, consider how you can tie up-sells (additions to the product the customer is considering) and cross-sells (similar or related products that also might interest the customer) into the shopping experience. These need not be unfriendly or in-your-face, but should arrive, via features like an in-screen pop-up, after the customer has shown substantial persistence in buying their original item. You can save the effort of having to funnel two customers to purchase if you can get the same customer to purchase two or more items, and many popular e-commerce platforms have the tools for cross-sells and up-sells built right in.

With these strategies, you’ll find that your same e-commerce business brings in more buyers and retains those buyers for future, repeat sales. As an e-commerce business owner, you only stand to gain from investing time and small, targeted spending in gaining the best possible supply of customers. If you’re ready to boost your business ROI in the shopping realm, give the ecommerce online digital marketing experts a call at Intero Digital today!