The online selling world can be a crazy experience for a consumer.
With the explosion of digital commerce, an over saturation of ads, shops, funnels and any other number of applications designed to engage your wallet are positioned in front of you countless times a day. With the shift to at-home working and the amount of time the average person spends online every day, that experience has become even more intense for consumers in recent history.
So what can an eCommerce owner do to help elevate themselves amongst the noise while making consumers’ lives easier?
Be Direct. Be Consistent. And, keep it simple.
Here are a few tips for navigating the digital commerce ecosystem.
A linear Sales Journey
The path from eyeballs to shopping cart should be straight forward and an easy to follow navigation flow for users. The key pieces to fall in line to ensure a linear sales journey:
-
- The Trigger: This could be a google ad, a social ad, website banner, in-app banner, etc… any digital space designed to take the user somewhere else with a click. This is the beginning of the sales journey.
- The Landing Space: This is generally a landing page, but could also be a shop or other destination. Wherever you’re sending the user, ensure the landing space is designed to absorb the traffic and ensure the traffic flow is continuing to push forward.
- The Purchase: You’ve been successful in getting a user to click on your ad and make it to your selling environment, don’t lose them now! Make sure the path to purchase is clear and concise. This entire journey should be user friendly. Make it a comfortable & familiar experience.
Consistency
Maintaining consistency along your sales journey is a hugely important element to keeping a user engaged. Consistency amongst the messaging, look and feel of the sales journey, calls to action and purchase offering is vital to a sales conversion.
Setting and Maintaining Expectations
This goes hand in hand with creating consistency in your sales journey. Set the expectations in the trigger stage of the sales journey for what it is you’re trying to achieve and follow through on the expectation along the way. If a user clicks your ad expecting to see a purchasing opportunity for potatoes, they better land somewhere that they can purchase potatoes. Consistency and expectations are two of the biggest factors in maintaining trust amongst your audience.
Calls to Action (CTA)
What do you want your user to do next? This should be very clear along the way. At every stage of the sales journey, you’re going to ask the user to take an action: there should be no confusion about this request. If you want the user to seek further information about a product “learn more”, if you’re looking for the user to make a purchase, “ buy now”. This isn’t the place to get cute with your ask, be direct with your CTA’s.
Contact
Make sure it’s really easy for a user to get a hold of you for any purchasing issues. There’s nothing more frustrating than a lack of support. There should be a clear contact number or email that has a quick response attached to it. Automation is something you should consider and it’s a good idea to consult with an agency who has experience in this.
Make Sure Your Tools Work
This seems really obvious, but make sure everything is working. This goes from your trigger ads right to the eCommerce website. If something breaks during the purchasing process, that’s a user experience that’s tough to come back from.
Keep consistent and keep it simple – and you’ll help the user make an easy decision.
