Making your site easy to find

Launching an ecommerce website is only the start of building a successful online business. You must consider how people will find your online store and how this differs from a physical store. One important distinction is that when people shop online they tend to be searching rather than browsing. This means they often have something clearly in mind that they are looking to buy. If you want your online store to be one of their options then you need to make sure your website is easy to find. There are many ways to achieve this, but outlined below are some of the key methods you should consider.

There are two marketing techniques that will be familiar to anyone who has ever worked with a web developer; search engine optimisation, and pay-per-click advertising. They are often the mainstay of website promotion, and in many cases the only promotion that is carried out to bring customers to an online store. We will come back to these in more detail as they merit more explanation, but firstly there are many other, often overlooked but effective, techniques for promoting an ecommerce website that do not involve search engines.

Email newsletters

When someone buys from your website you know their name, email address, what they bought, when they bought it and how often they buy from you. This is much more information than you would normally gather from an in-store transaction, and can be used to promote relevant offers back to existing online customers. Email is relatively inexpensive and by sending timely and interesting offers to customers you will keep them coming back to your website to buy from you. Depending on your products and the frequency of purchase it may be appropriate to send a weekly, monthly or quarterly email. You should use software that manages subscriber lists and allows recipients to unsubscribe if they wish.

Printed catalogues

One of the weaknesses of an online store is that it is waiting to be found. Unlike a high street store with a physical presence you need to work much harder to attract attention. Printed mailers that land on the doormat and highlight product offers and remind customers of the website's presence are very effective in generating a repeat purchase.

Customer reviews

A system within your website that allows customers to review your service and products is a good way to build confidence among new shoppers. If you have a nationally known brand then maybe this is less important - but if you are less well known then the positive experiences of existing customers can be a strong influence.

Advertising banners

When someone enters your physical store you don't abandon them at the door - you use signage to direct them to departments or to products that you wish to highlight. Exactly the same should happen within your ecommerce website using clickable banners that direct visitors to relevant offers and seasonal products.

Social networking

There has been huge growth in online social networks, and just as word-of-mouth recommendation spreads offline, it spreads so much faster online. As a technique it is not an easy marketing option, and you need to be careful that promotion of this type is not seen as a cynical ploy and therefore counter-productive.

Price comparison websites

There are some well-know price comparison services that you can use such has Kelkoo and Pricerunner. By their very nature, the focus of these services is on price, and they appeal to a consumer looking for a bargain. If you are the cheapest online then these can work well for you; if you are not then the results can be less satisfying.

There are many more options for website marketing your website, but let's return to search engine promotion in more detail, and the techniques that can build visibility and bring customers into your ecommerce website.

Search engine optimisation

Search engine optimisation (SEO), describes the techniques used to encourage search engines to rank your website highly for your chosen keywords. For this example we will use Google as it accounts for around 70-80% of all search engine queries. SEO delivers what are referred to as natural or organic results within search engine listings. These are the websites that feature in the main part of the results page, sometimes below a tinted panel containing sponsored links. Google decides where web pages will be positioned within the natural results, and it aims to put the most relevant results at the top of the list. Nobody pays for their website to be featured within the natural search results, but there are techniques that you can use to influence your positions. Google looks for relevance, and therefore the more closely matched your website is to your chosen keywords, then the more likely you are to gain good positions.

There are three main elements of search engine optimisation that influence your positions; the coding of the website, website content, and external links.

The coding of the website

Search engines read billions of web pages every day, and the easier you make it for them to read information within you site, then the more of that content will be read and filtered through into the search engine database. A website that is coded to comply with modern standards and meets accessibility guidelines is one that makes it easy for the search engines to read, and is likely to perform better as a result. Information about website coding standards and simple tests to assess your own website are available at www.w3.org. A lot of the work in this area of SEO should be carried out by your ecommerce provider and it is good practice to comply with web standards both for search engine performance and for the usability of your site by customers. There is also what is called ‘meta data' that should be present within the code of your website. This includes page titles, keywords and text attached to links and images.

Website content

Whereas you may not be confident working on the code of your website, one area where you can have a significant influence on natural search engine performance is the text content of your website. Search engines read words, and so the words you use within your web pages will have a profound effect on your search engine positions. Customers use keywords typed into a search engine to find relevant websites; if the content of your website matches the words being used in the search then this increases your chance of being found. Choosing keywords is often a case of listening to customers - how do they describe your products. Use these words to describe products within your website. A good ecommerce system should also allow you to add additional keywords to a product page, so that you can include mis-spellings and slang words without having to show them on the visible page of the website. There are many theories about how keywords should be used within the pages of a website in order to optimise search engine performance but, in essence, using the most popular and accurate phrases to describe your products is likely to result in a good performance

External links

The third key element of developing strong natural search engine results is building a network of inward pointing links to your website. There are many good directory websites where links are either free or available for a modest fee. The search engines view inward-pointing links as a vote for the popularity of your website they can have a significant effect on search positions.

It is important for any ecommerce website to have a strong search engine optimisation strategy. Work should be carried out regularly on the website and results should be constantly measured to assess the effects. This process should be continuous in order to build strong natural search positions over a period of time.

Pay per click advertising

One of the weaknesses of search engine optimisation is that it cannot be guaranteed to deliver results. For this reason it cannot be relied upon as your only search engine strategy. Pay-per-click advertising helps to cover this weakness.

Pay per click advertising (PPC) is a form of advertising that delivers links to your website within the sponsored links section of the search results. These appear down the right hand side of the Google results page, and sometimes across the top of the page as well.

The main features of PPC are that you choose your keywords, and you choose the wording for the adverts that appear when your keyword is searched on. The more you are prepared to pay, then the higher your advert appears in the listing. When someone clicks on your advert then a sum of money is deducted from your account with Google. The exact amount that is deducted is dependent on the value of other bids received for that keyword, so even if you submit a very high bid, you will not pay much more than the second highest bidder at any time. PPC is effectively a constant auction between advertisers. Advertisers who are most successful are those you choose their keywords very carefully to make sure they are targeted towards buyers, and specific to the products they sell. They ensure that their advert wording is accurate and honest so as only to attract genuine buyers, and they manage their PPC accounts carefully to ensure that each advert is converting visitors into customers, and not simply wasting money with visitors coming into the site and not buying.

The internet is going to continue to be an area of significant retail sales growth over the next few years and the ecommerce businesses that will be successful are those with an effective and easy-to-use website, a clear understanding of their customers needs, excellent service combined with effective marketing to develop new business and breed customer loyalty.

 

Pre-register your interest here

Sitemakers Ltd presents the LiquidShop Successful Ecommerce Award. The prize for the winner is an ecommerce website backed-up by support for a full 12 months to help make the venture a success. The winner will be an entrepreneur or business that can demonstrate to the judges that their ecommerce business idea has the most potential for success.

The competition is sponsored by leading names in the ecommerce world, including Sitemakers, Sage Pay, and IMRG. The competition is also supported by Ecommerce Expo, with the winner being announced at the Ecommerce Expo North event at Manchester United Football Stadium on 27 May 2010.

The prize includes the LiquidShop ecommerce platform and website design, hosting and on-going support from Sitemakers for 12 months, Sage Pay payment card services for 12 months (up to 5,000 transactions), ISIS (Internet Shopping is Safe) and IDIS (Internet Delivery is Safe) accreditation from IMRG for 12 months.

If you are running a fledgling ecommerce business or looking to start something new and believe you have what it takes to be successful then this competition is for you. We are looking for strong commercial ideas backed by a robust business plan.

The LiquidShop Successful Ecommerce Award is sponsored and supported by:

If you think you have what it takes and would like to enter then complete the form at the below link. The application packs will be released shortly and you will be notified as soon as they are available.

LiquidShop Successful Ecommerce Award

 

 

 

Online retail just keeps on growing

The current recession has done nothing to slow the rate at which the internet is changing retail business. In a desire to explain these changes, industry commentators create ever more jargon to describe the increasing influence of online retailing. Over the past couple of years, terms such as multichannel retail, cross-channel retail and now even omnichannel retailing have been used to explain these changes. But what does all this mean, practically, for you and your business?

What's in a name?

Whatever you choose to call it; online retailing, ecommerce, or simply selling online is rapidly establishing itself at the centre of the most successful retail operations. It's certainly where most of the sales growth has been seen during 2009. Online sales have grown in excess of 10% for the year, and will have helped some of our larger retail groups to avoid major embarrassment when announcing their overall results in January. Online retailing has also given many small retailers the opportunity to out-manoeuvre their larger competitors, many of which have been struggling to adjust to a new, and fast-evolving retail model. Some of the high-profile retail business failures seen over the past 12 months or so have doubtless been tipped over the edge by reduced consumer spending during the recession, but the majority of these were already compromised businesses without a well-defined and successful online operation. The downturn merely exposed their weakness.

High street retailing is currently undergoing a major transformation, and it is one that favours those businesses that can react quickly to new technology and can take steps to meet the changing needs of customers. Success is in the hands of the agile retailer.

It has only just begun

Most consumers now have a broadband internet connection available to them either at home or at work. And when you look at the peaks and troughs of daily online retail activity, it reflects the pattern of the average day with peaks mid-morning, lunchtime and mid-evening - when people have time to shop online, fitting it in around their chores and other activities. The development of new technology has a large part to play in helping us to understand how online retail habits will continue to evolve. A point in time when most of us have an easy-to-use internet-connected device in our pockets is approaching fast. The phrase ‘easy-to-use' is the key here; traditional mobile phones will connect to the internet - but the experience is far from great, and most people don't bother. Led by the category-defining Apple iPhone, we see a vast array of new, user-friendly smartphones entering the market and seducing users to start using the internet on the move. The impact this will have on online retailing is huge because, if people start shopping online while they are out and about in town, this presents retailers with a fantastic new opportunity to build stronger, more active relationships with their customers.

Building relationships is a fundamental part of human nature, and it is second nature to all successful retail operators. The internet brings new ways to create and maintain relationships with customers. A consumer dealing with an agile retailer can often start a transaction in-store, and complete it at home on the internet or, alternatively, find a product on the internet and reserve and buy it in-store. And we are beginning to treat this type of flexibility as a requirement to retain our loyalty. The relationship is simple - do what we want and we will buy from you. Allow an inflexible system to stand in our way, and we will simply side-step you and shop elsewhere.

Internet research power available in the high street

The internet has allowed us all an unprecedented facility to find just about anything we want to know, almost instantly. As a result that Great British institution, the Pub Quiz, is now threatened by savvy contestants looking up the answers on Google as the questions are read out. This facility for instant research is another key factor that is changing retail. Comparison shopping has become the norm across all retail channels. Physically going into four competing stores to compare prices, even in the same town centre, may take an hour or two. The same task can be completed in as many minutes and is merely a click away on the internet.

As customers have become more cautious about their spending then research is becoming the norm for all but the most mundane and regular purchases. Visit your local branch of Comet and it looks like a reporters' convention; people with notebooks and pens jotting down product names and reference codes before rushing off to locate the best prices online for next-day delivery - maybe even from Comet. The potential threats from this behaviour are obvious, but the opportunities for the agile retailer are also there to be exploited.

Consumer research consistently shows that price is certainly not the only factor that determines an online retail purchase. There are many factors that make up the value proposition presented to customers. Speed of delivery, certainty of price - led by free or fixed price delivery, security of payment, after-sales support and overall confidence in the retailer all play a part. As with all retail purchases, consumers balance their needs, desires and expectations and make decisions about what to buy and who to buy from as a result. Many companies sell online at higher prices than their competitors and still make the sales where they can offer an overall more compelling value proposition to their customers. Quite simply - there is room for everyone but beware, opportunistic high prices are impossible to sustain in the bright glare of internet comparison shopping.

Back to basics

Core retail values have always centred on customer service - providing the customer with the products they want, when they want them and at prices they are prepared to pay. The values of online retailing are fundamentally no different from this and retailers who understand this are currently winning market share. The same customers who buy from you in-store also buy from you online. You can be pretty sure that the customer coming through the door is the same customer who is also buying from your website. The agile retailer recognises this and treats them to the same experience and service, the same offers and makes sure they are aware of all of the channels available to them to browse and make a purchase.

The ability to collect and analyse customer behaviour is the golden goose of online retailing - and one that keeps on laying. When someone buys from you online you know who they are, their name, address, email address, what they bought and when. This level of intelligence is much more difficult to gather from store customers and should be used to present the customer with relevant offers and product information that will then bring them back to your business, either online or in-store. It also provides you with the vital feedback you need to develop the business.

2010 will doubtless see more retail failures, but these will not include retailers who understand and act upon the opportunities that the internet presents to them. Internet retailing currently accounts for less than 20% of all retail spending in the UK, but by 2020 it is expected that the internet will influence over 90% of all retail purchases. It is the agile retailers who will be the success stories over the coming few years.