Every day more and more owners of online shops and websites come to us with a very simple question: “Why isn’t my site working, or why isn’t my e-shop selling?”
Everyone who asks these questions (and since you are reading this article, you may well be one of them) has built a website, paying more or paying less for it, but they all have one thing in common: they are not working their site properly.
But what does it mean to work my site properly?
What do I need to do to get more sales or reach more customers through my website.
To answer that question, we first need to look at what kind of site or e-shop we have and what products or services it sells. If you don’t want to deal with it, or don’t have the basic know-how, we are here to help.
What kind of website do we have and what does it sell?
It makes a big difference whether the products we sell are well known to the general public, and it makes a big difference whether we produce our products or services ourselves.
We are not talking about audience targeting here, even though it is one of the most important things if you don’t want to waste your advertising budget. We are talking about simpler things, which we analyse below and split into two categories
- Your site sells well-known, branded products
- Your site sells unknown products and services
I sell products that are well known to the general public through my website
If you sell well-known products, the first thing to do is sign up to price comparison sites such as Skroutz and BestPrice (the big product search engines in Greece). That way you immediately get a targeted audience searching for your products, and possibly sales straight away. Of course, this is only the first step.
As a second step, you could run remarketing to the customers who come from these comparison sites and show them ads to get them to buy your products.
Finally, alongside all of this, you need a proper presence on social media, and you need to do your work well so that you get good reviews, become known to the general public and gradually establish your presence in the market.
I sell products or services that I produce myself or that have no brand name
Things are harder here, but the profit can be much bigger.
The first thing you need to do is convince your potential customers that you are not scammers and that you will send them the products, if you have an e-shop, or provide the online service they buy.
The second key thing you need to convince your potential customers of is that your product or service is good. In general, you need to convince them that you can do the job they want and that they need your service or product.
All well and good, but how do you do all of this?
The main thing you need if you plan to work online is a significant budget, either for Meta ads (Facebook and Instagram), or for search engines (organic or google ads), or for price comparison sites.
Once you have the budget, you will need either to put in the time and knowledge to run the advertising properly yourself, or to spend some money so that someone else (for example, an agency like WebMate) runs the ad campaigns and handles your e-shop’s wider issues for you.
What can you do quickly and easily to improve your sales right away?
The things we will look at are what you need to do, and they are absolutely essential if you want to start selling and making an impact online.
- Product content
- Articles on your website’s blog
- Social media
- The right site structure
- Website speed
- Site colours
Let’s look at each of these in more detail, one by one:
1) Give your products content
How will you persuade customers to buy a product if you don’t have plenty of photos of it, or detailed descriptions of what it does and its dimensions? If it’s a service, to persuade a potential customer you need to explain in detail what they will gain from your service and why it is better than others. In both cases, the ideal is video that shows exactly what you offer and what your products or services do. If you want to take it to the highest level, you could create a YouTube channel, group similar products into playlists and make product presentations showing how they can be used, worn or what they offer.
2) Write articles, and write long ones
By writing articles you can climb to the top positions in Google’s rankings , as we have discussed in earlier articles, and you also show your customers that you know your products and services inside out. Your articles should be long and include multimedia so that they hold the reader’s interest without boring or tiring them. Every site needs an active and well-run blog
3) Social media with the right approach
On social media your first goal should be what is called branding, meaning recognition, mainly for your business, and only then sales (which of course are very welcome too). Write about things that interest your customers and keep a consistent style. Don’t wear your customers out with too many posts or stories, and don’t only try to sell products.
4) The right structure and the right content for your site / e-shop
Some things go without saying, but we still need to mention them. The images on your website should be optimised for speed, while still looking right at the highest possible resolution. Your content should also be long and serious, and it should actually say something, meaning it should offer value to the site’s visitors. Going one step further, the whole structure of your site should be correct and rich, so that visitors can quickly find what they are looking for
5) Website speed
If your site is slow, don’t expect potential customers to “wait” for you: quite simply, they will go somewhere else. DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO MAKE YOUR SITE FAST. If you make it fast, you will also get a bonus from Google, because you will climb higher in the search results.
6) Website colours and icons / logo
Besides its content, your website needs the right colours and attractive icons. The right colours are, first of all, the ones that don’t tire the people reading your site. Secondly, the right colours are the ones that make the experience pleasant for readers and, together with the website’s logo and icons, give your online presence character and make it recognisable.
I don’t have time to do all of this on my site
We can agree that if you are on your own, you won’t be able to do all of the above really well without putting yourself under pressure. That’s why there are a few options.
- Do what you can and hand the rest to an outside partner
- Hand everything to an outside partner
- Push yourself and do everything on your own
Unfortunately, there are no secrets online, and everything above is absolutely essential in an online world where competition keeps growing. If you want someone with experience to take care of your website and e-shop and really help you, just get in touch with us
If you have already spotted the problem and want a plan for increasing your e-shop’s sales, carry on there.
If you have found the problem and want a plan for growing your e-shop’s sales, read on there.
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