In today’s digital world, taking your store online opens up doors for possibilities to grow your business by reaching more customers. An eCommerce store represents an online version of your store and is an extension of your brand entity for the user base. Optimising your eCommerce store will help land more traffic onto your store, improve the overall outlook, and provide easier navigation for your customers. But before you decide to make random improvements, find more about trouble areas using e-commerce data analytics tools like Engage. Pinpoint areas that cause your customers to churn, and revise accordingly.
Before you make any concrete decisions or adjustments to your eCommerce store, firstly, review the insights you have regarding all past interactions. Combine views, session timing, and bounce rate with feedback from CRM to find the most highlighted areas. After which, consult with your focus group of customers to understand if your solutions are practically viable. Once you are done with the research, the next step is to optimise your eCommerce store to maximise customer experience and conversions.
Understanding What Needs to Be Optimised
A common dilemma for eCommerce store owners is not knowing what to optimise. While there is a constant need for improvement, not everything has the same priority or requirements of being fixed. An important way of finding out what the issues are is by reviewing the data analytics periodically and mapping it out according to increase or decrease in performance. Here are some common data metrics that tell you what to optimise:
Optimising for Conversion rate
If you’ve noticed a change in your conversion rate, it is best to optimise your platform to halt it in its tracks. Keep in mind supporting matrices like pages views, order values, traffic sources, and more to find anomalies from trends.
Optimising for Gross Margin
On each unit sold, there is a specific profit margin that is important to grow the revenue stream of the business. Use it as a core metric to set a benchmark for minimum, optimum and ideal performance. If you see numbers depleting, it is time to launch a campaign.
Optimising Cart Abandonment Rate
Your cart abandonment rate shows how many customers are interested in purchasing your product but don’t buy it. Pairing this information with customer insights can help you optimise your offerings, and give customers an incentive to make the purchase.
Optimising for Device Type
Customer experiences can vary based on device type, and whether or not your eCommerce store can optimise according to the device. Test your eCommerce store on various devices like mobile, web, and tablet and find pain points in the customer user journey.
Optimising for Customer Engagement
Engagement is how any business stays alive and relevant in the eyes of the audience. Therefore, this metric is not to be taken lightly and requires you to review comments, reactions, shares, subscriptions, previews, demos, and more. A drop in engagement is a major sign of a possible future decrease in sales, or relevancy, which makes it a primary area of concern for all online businesses.
Make General Periodic Optimization
Additionally, optimization should not be treated as a contingency plan, instead, optimising your eCommerce store generally should be a common practice. Audit your online store to find areas for improvement, and work towards making them more effective one tweak at a time. Optimise our store for audience, acquisition, and buying behavior.
How to Optimise Your eCommerce Store for your Audience?
Profile your audience into different segments and find commonalities that may influence their purchase decision. Do some focus group testing and see where in the user journey does your audience churn, and why. Find which devices are more commonly used, and peak time – promote limited-time offerings to encourage engagement. See whether your audience prefers detailed descriptions or vibrant images and revamp your store accordingly.
How to Optimise Your eCommerce Store for Acquisition?
The acquisition stage helps to power your business, after identifying where most of your traffic is coming from – you need to streamline the user journey for a smooth transition. Reviewing your acquisition data will let you know about which marketing channels you need to use, and what platform is driving most sales and conversions. Find what it takes to make your audience become a paying customer and the least expensive method
How to Optimise Your eCommerce Store according to Buying Behavior?
Once people land on your eCommerce store, find out what they do next, which products do they view most frequently? How much time do they spend on your site? Which page do they click first? Which products are they most interested in? How many customers wait till the end of season sales to buy your product? Gather different insights about the buying behaviour of your customers and map out your yearly event calendar accordingly.
Also Read: How to Work with a Developer to Build Your Ecommerce Website
