Build a Multi-Million Dollar Ecommerce Business

Your blog is important because it transforms you from another website trying to sell to an authority. And it’s an incredible opportunity to educate and build rapport with new and existing customers. Some other benefits of blogging include:

• Boost your search engine rankings: Write high quality posts relating to your web store, you’ll start to build organic traffic from the keywords in your post.

• Educate your customers: Use your blog to answer the most common questions you get on your e-commerce store so you can point people towards those posts and even anticipate your questions before they ask them.

• Build your brand and culture: Your customers want to know what you’re about and often the about page isn’t enough. Your blog is the perfect place to really showcase what your brand is about. Highlight your personality through the tone of voice you write with and use this as an opportunity to humanize your brand.

• Get Social: You can use your blog to build your social media channel followings and attract new customers with high quality content. Encourage people to share your posts and don’t forget to share them yourself on your social channels.

Strategies for Using Facebook To Boost Your E-commerce Store

Setup Your Promotion Schedule

To integrate Facebook, you must set it up with the rest of your content marketing schedule. This means having a healthy mix of regular updates, promotions, and links to different types of content.

What Type of Content Should You Post?

The most important thing to remember when running your Facebook business page is that people are on Facebook for one reason: They want to waste time.

It’s been proven that most people do not like clicking off of Facebook to external links. This means you need to train your audience to click your links.

Facebook is a chaotic mix of business and personal updates. The way they’re jumbled together requires a new kind of marketing funnel to lead visitors through for better conversions. You can’t expect to convert visitors by posting links to products on your page. They need to be courted through the process, now more than ever.

The Facebook Fan Acquisition Funnel:

1. Fans hear about your product.

How? Facebook ads, guest posting, fans sharing your posts, fans engaging with your content.

2. Give fans a reason to like your page.

What can your fans expect from you after they’ve liked the page? What are they going to gain from liking your page? Will they receive special discounts? Will they be the first to know about new products? Can they get great customer support on your page? Is this a place where customers can be involved in creating your next product?

3. Once they’re a fan, engage them.

Give your fans a reason to like, comment, or share your posts. This requires some creativity on your part because you are not only competing with all the other companies out there, but you’re also competing with your visitors’ friends and family updates on Facebook.

4. Move fans from participating to purchasing.

The last step is to help fans make the transition from participating to purchasing. You can share a product or sales page from your website, or use Facebook ads to target your existing fans for products.

There’s one thing that makes e-commerce store owners more frustrated than anything: the constantly changing landscape of Facebook ads. Because of the constant changes, this list only included the top 20% of strategies that have shown the best performance.

There are 3 big pitfalls that will guarantee your Facebook ads aren’t successful:

1. Unorganized set up of ads and a lack of testing

2. Lack of a dedicated budget for ad spend

3. Not spending enough time managing Facebook ads

Here’s how to get started making more money through Facebook ads, by focusing only on the essentials.

Strategy #1: Mixing Paid and Organic Reach

In order for your ads to work, you need an active, engaged fanbase: The more you increase the engagement of your page, the more people will see your posts organically. You can increase your fan page engagement by spending as little as $10/day on Facebook ads. Target pages with similar audiences and test engaging post content to see what works.

Strategy #2: Sell Directly

The second strategy is to sell directly from Facebook ads. If you have an information product and a webinar to help sell that product, use Facebook ads to get people registered for your webinar.

This strategy works well to target new and existing customers. Send traffic to a specific product page or landing page so you can track the results.

Launching a new Adwords campaign can be exciting but also overwhelming.

When set up and managed properly, AdWords can be one of the best sources for new customers. It can also be a waste as many advertisers have watched tens of thousands of dollars get flush down the AdWords drain due to mismanaged campaigns.

Google Adwords can be overwhelming when you first get started. But don’t worry. It will all make more sense when you get familiar with the admin panel and setting up campaigns.

The biggest mistake people make is that they only set up one campaign, then a few Ad Groups, with a bunch of keywords.

Highlights from this Module:

1. Get granular with the structure of your adwords account. Follow the blueprint laid out in this section.

2. Relevancy is the most important thing you can focus on with your ad account, your keywords and all the way down to your ad headline and body.

3. Make sure keywords match words in ad’s copy: headline and text.

4. Make a list of site wide negative keywords and add to your account

You can’t have a successful e-commerce store without paying attention to your competitors.

But you can also waste a lot of time tracking your competitors data that won’t ever move the ROI needle for your business.

So how do you focus on actionable, competitive intel?

In order to maximize the impact of your competitive intelligence, start by asking what the strategy is for spying on your competitors. Do you want to zero in on a specific niche? Go after a new market? Introduce a new product? Capitalize on new trends? Figure out if new laws will affect your store? Once you know what your goal is, it’s time to start your recon work.

Once you have a list of your top competition, start asking questions based on your goals and each stage of the buying process. Focus on marketing, customer acquisition, browsing and buying experience, customer service and post-purchase experience.

Your most important metrics depend on the current goals for your website. For example, if your goal is to increase conversions, you’re going to be paying attention to different metrics than if your goal was to increase the number of new unique visitors to your site.

You need to pay attention to everything in your store, but the most important thing is to know exactly what your metrics mean. It’s easy to see everything (using tools), but extracting insights out of your metrics can be complex and difficult.

You can track cart abandonment by setting up goals in your analytics with the goal being number of purchases completed. You can also see the number of exits in the exit pages tab by looking at the URL’s of the shopping cart pages throughout the checkout process.

Your homepage is going to make an impression. Good or bad.

How do you guarantee that it makes a positive impression? By answering a few critical questions. But because you run your site and are probably in it every day, don’t rely on your own answers. Ask others or survey your audience to find the answers to these questions.

Does your homepage have a value proposition that your audience can grasp in less than 5 seconds?

If so, your page should answer the following questions for customers:

Who are you?

What can you do for me?

Why do I care?

To sum it up, your homepage should answer the question, “what’s in it for me?” Once you figure out what the exact value is that your user can get out of your site is, test it repeatedly and communicate your value proposition throughout your entire site. Visitors arrive at your site from different pages, so making sure you communicate your message on each page is vital.

There are several places throughout the buying process where you can build trust with your shoppers. This will not only increase first-time purchases, but return purchases as well. According to Google, 70% of people now look at reviews, which is just one type of social proof, before purchasing. Here are the biggest trust elements you can add to your store to help gain your customers confidence.

No one wants to be first to a party, and the same is true for your website–where trust is already difficult to earn. The goal is to give the visitor total confidence to make an informed purchase on your site.

There are many types of social proof you can include on your site. Here’s a breakdown of each category with specific examples and uses. (SOURCE)

Your site’s navigation bar is one of the first impressions your visitors have of your website. Your goal is to help them find what they want in as few clicks as possible. The more you can simplify your navigation, the easier it makes your products to locate, resulting in increased sales.

Know The Link Between SEO and your Navigation

Google wants your users to find what they’re looking for in the easiest and fastest way possible. Building your navigation properly will help both your customers and your SEO value.

Category Pages and Filtered Search will make all the difference

Once your visitor lands on your category page, what’s next? It’s important to help your visitors narrow down their search as specific as they want.

Search Bar vs. Navigation Buttons

The navigation bar strategy is not complete without a site search bar. Many visitors want to bypass category buttons and type in exactly what they want. Search engines have taught us to type in what we’re looking for, so it’s crucial you provide that option on your e-commerce store.

Keep Navigation Mobile Friendly

Your mobile visitors are even less patient on your website. You should work on limiting the number of clicks a mobile user must take to find what they are looking for in your store.

Removing Navigation from Checkout

The shopping cart process might be the most important section when it comes to generating sales for your business. A popular theory is to create a clean checkout process.

More than one third of visits to online stores now come from phones and tablets and this number is increasing everyday. (source: custora) Now you need to not only know how your site looks on a computer, but also on virtually every screen size from a mobile phone to an iPad.

The primary strategies that will help optimize your store for the best experience on mobile phones and tablets are:

1. Ensuring your website has a responsive design
2. Optimizing the speed of your website
3. Ease-of-use during the checkout process

Why it’s important

Mobile and tablet browsing are still young. But at the rate of adoption, you can’t ignore the impact they’re having on your e-commerce store. According to Monetate, year-over-year, tablet commerce increased 51% between Q1 2013 and Q1 2014. Growth in mobile commerce, meanwhile, was 41%—an impressive number, but already trailing behind tablet.

Because you have an online store, you need understand the importance of testing your website to see what’s working and what’s not. This is extremely important because unlike many non-product based businesses, your ENTIRE business lives in your store.

In order to get the most out of your website testing, it’s important to break this chapter into 5 main types of website tests. Also, included are examples of why and how to use each one.

Heatmaps

Heat maps provide a real (not assumed) assessment of what’s really happening on your website. The results of heat maps show up for mouse movements such as clicks, mouse overing, scrolling patterns and more.

Surveys

Your customer's voice is one of the best sources for gaining knowledge. They’ve already trusted and purchased from your store, and finding out what they liked and didn’t like is the “low hanging fruit” when it comes to testing.

Usability

It’s easy to find ourselves writing copy and designing web pages that we like, but we fail to realize that our customers might be seeking something else. Remember, you are NOT your customer.

A/B Testing

The words “A/B test” are thrown around often in the e-commerce world. Why? Because conversion is the lifeblood of your business. If something could work better to increase your conversion, you want to know!

Browsers

It would be nice if everyone used the same browser, but the number of different computers, tablets, and phones has resulted in dozens of combinations. Those devices also display your website in different ways depending on the type of browser being used.

You’ve probably heard the old saying, “forget about your weaknesses, focus on your strengths.” You should try to apply (almost all of) that to your e-commerce products. Of course you can’t neglect your other products, but for now you’re just going to concentrate on the highest revenue generators.

If you have products that you know are selling well, it’s much easier to dissect what you’re doing right with those.

Here’s how you should think about it: What would a 5% increase in sales to your top performing product look like compared to 5% increase for a low performing product? Obviously, you’d make significantly more with your top performing product.

Pricing strategies need to be an integral part of your business if you want to scale and continue to make money. Businesses can bring in 10+ million dollars a year in revenue but make zero profit if they’re pricing strategy is wrong.

This chapter is broken into two sections. The first section will cover your margins, and the second will cover strategies for promoting sales.

The best ecommerce websites create an online experience that is emotional, guided, and clearly encourages visitors to add a product to their cart. It’s not complicated, but it is easy to overthink. Just follow these strategies one-by-one to start increasing your conversion rates immediately.

One of the biggest limitations to conversions is friction.

Friction-->Hesitation-->Confusion-->Abandon

You can reduce the amount of hesitation and confusion your users experience – and ultimately reduce shopping cart abandonment– by removing friction. Friction can come in the form of overall site design, colors, layout, text, button text, links, too many/few options, organization, messaging, headlines, titles, and many others.

For example, conversion studies have shown that the less clicks to checkout there are, the higher your conversion rate will be. So, if you need to spread things out across multiple pages, give the shopper a visual indicator of how far they’ve progressed.

Why is Reducing Friction Important?

Improving your shopping cart multiplies the entire website's value, so following key guidelines for usability is well worth the investment.

What is Retargeting?

Generally 2% of shoppers convert on the first visit to an online store. Retargeting brings back the other 98%. It works by keeping track of people who visit your site and displaying your retargeting ads to them as they visit other sites online.

How does retargeting work?

Technically all that is necessary is to place a JavaScript tag in the footer of your website. This code creates a list of people that visit your site by placing anonymous retargeting "cookies" in their browser. This list allows retargeting vendors to display retargeting ads to your potential customers as they visit other sites.

Who is retargeting good for?

Retargeting generates greater online sales by keeping your brand front and center and bringing "window shoppers" back when they're ready to buy.

People who are coming from retargeting don’t buy right away. Otherwise, they would have bought or taken action when they were on your site the first time. Some people get impatient and think retargeting isn’t effective, and they bail out too soon. Commit at least 30 days to see your results.

Remarketing is when you send an email to someone– who visited your store and placed an item in their cart–reminding them to come back to your store and complete their purchase.

You can’t do more to express your interest in buying than adding products to a cart. These are people that you have every reason to believe are super interested in buying your products.

But for some reason, they didn’t buy. In fact, an estimated 70% of all orders are abandoned.

By deploying email remarketing (not to be confused with retargeting), you can recover the abandoned sales if you’re willing to communicate in a meaningful way with the customer.

The reasons for abandonment vary, and these runners may be first-time visitors or repeat customers, so you can’t approach them all the same way.

Your customers are all you have. If you don’t serve your customers the best you can, they’re just one click away from buying from your competitors’ website.

The biggest brands continue to make customer service the number one goal of their business. Great customer service is the top priority of leaders like Zappos, Southwest Airlines, and Nordstrom. Yes, they sell shoes, airline tickets, and fancy clothes, but that isn’t the only reason you’re buying from them -- you value the way you’re treated as a customer.

Here are three elements to focus on to deliver an unforgettable experience for your customers:

Live Chat

Did you know that live chat has the highest satisfaction levels for your customers? In fact, in a study, 73% of people who used live chat were happy with their experience.

Support Tickets

If you’re a small shop, The only person to handle your emails, customer support, and inventory is you. However, when you start to grow your business, it’ll become harder to keep up with all of the customer communication.

Phone Support

When you pick up the phone to talk with one of your customers, it instantly builds rapport beyond anything your website could ever do. It’s a lot easier to get mad at a website and go somewhere else than to get mad at someone you’re talking to on the phone and hang up on them.

Unless your e-commerce store sells downloadable assets or other services that are immediately fulfilled, your shipping and fulfillment process is the single most important deliverable after your customer completes an order.

Have you ever noticed that immediately after they complain about the price, your customers complain about your shipping? Your customers want instant gratification and you can achieve this with fast order fulfillment and clear shipping policies.

In this module you'll learn two areas that you should focus on to ensure your customers have a positive experience, order fulfillment and shipping procedures.

Customer reviews have become the next best thing to being in a store and actually touching a product. Just how important are they? In a recent study, 79% of consumers said they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. (source)

Reviews can be difficult to implement because they are the only things you can’t control on your site. But for the same reason, they offer a degree of transparency that is critical for your customers. It doesn’t matter if it’s booking a resort or ordering a new razor, your customers want to read about each other’s experiences. They are looking to answer the questions they have about your product, no matter how big or small.

I want to personally thank you for taking for taking this course. I believe that small changes lead to larger successes. Remember to start making small changes and you will start to see your momentum gain.

Please leave any questions you have about this course or your store in the comments on the right side of this course. I'll be personally answering them as quick as I can!