Markets are moving online. Largest categories of online retail globally include apparel, consumer electronics and computer hardware. The fastest-growing categories include grocery, beauty & cosmetics, home appliances, and furniture.
Online retail in India was $15 billion in 2016 and estimated to be $200 billion in 2026.
India is the largest growing market globally in e-commerce.
Online retail via mobile will grow to reach $1 trillion in 2020 whereas online shoppers in India would reach 475 million by 2026
eCommerce has tremendous potential. But, how do you get a share of the pie? What does it take to enjoy success in eCom market?
3 Keys to eCommerce Success. 1. Generate visibilityIn early days of eCommerce query-based traffic dominated sales. "Query based” means people type in a search term (a query) and are then shown an ad relevant to their search, like on Google.
Since Facebook and now Instagram, there has been a shift to contextual advertising where you choose whom you want to target with your ads based on context.
There are 4 major players who provide contextual advertising:
To generate high visibility across these four channels, you need to focus on the following aspects of your communication
Targeting: Choose granular targeting over broad targeting. Try to segment your audiences and test multiple audiences. Whether it is Google Ads or Facebook Ads, they provide tools for identifying audience segments and targeting them via multiple campaigns / Ad sets.
Creative: While designing creative for your Ads, place text on upper third or lower third of visual. Use faces of real people as it tends to generate higher click-thru rates. Make sure that the landing page should be contextual to the Ad Creative i.e. it has the same visuals / creative used in the Ad.
Building a sales funnel:
A “sales funnel” is an eCommerce lingo / term for a series of web pages that you send people through in a specific order to elicit a specific response. In other words, it’s a deliberate sequence of engagements designed to get people to say yes to your offer.
There are many ways to optimize the sales funnel and move the site visitor to the checkout / purchase page.
An eCommerce website usually has these pages - Homepage, Product category pages, product pages, check-out page and thank you page (post-purchase). Each of these pages can be optimized to increase conversions / sales.
Homepage: The homepage is a good page to establish your brand and tell first-time visitors what past-customers think about your brand. Here is what you should include on the homepage of your eCommerce website
Product Category pages: The product category pages is where you need to include a lot of SEO related content. Most of the eCommerce websites have atleast 1500 - 2000 words of content describing the product category.
Product pages: On the product pages, you need to have a hero shot of the product, a product description, and a product sales video—all above the fold. People prefer to consume content in different formats: some like to look, some prefer to watch, and others to want to read, so we cater to all media formats.
Under the main product video, we could have what we call “third party pitch videos.” These are essentially PR pieces that were done about our product/brand. It always helps to have more than just us saying our product is great.
For product details, we need to have long form content. You can scroll down the page and consume content and images as you go. There should also be a call-to-action at the bottom of the description so that users don’t have to scroll up to click add to cart.
You could also have a very strong social proof section on the page that includes traditional reviews as well as customer testimonial videos.
These videos can be acquired by sending past customers to an incentivized video review page. You could email people after they buy and offer to give them a gift certificate to our website in exchange for a video review of the product they just bought.
Like Amazon or other ecommerce websites do, we should have a cross-sell section where we offer people additional / related products.
3. Engaging customers in a conversation that turns them into repeat customersIf there is one long-term strategy that you should focus on with eCommerce, then it would be to get repeat purchases. The cost of acquiring a new customer is significantly higher than the cost of retaining your customers.
How do you go about retaining customers?
Here are the few tactics you can implement for retain your customers: