If there’s one thing that’s true today, it’s that there really is no shortage of e-commerce websites. So it is essential for Heads of Marketing to find innovative ways to stand out in this cluttered market. To achieve that, not only do they use their creative sides to attract new visitors, but they also focus on web performance and SEO.
However, as the technology in this areas becomes more and more particular, Heads of Marketing tend to multiply the apps they’re using and the companies they work with. Instead of doing everything internally, they tend to build their marketing castle with bricks from their own teams, a web agency, an SEO agency, and their hosting services.
As a result, they can easily loose sight of the big picture, of who is doing what exactly, thus leaving them clueless regarding the priorities to be set in order to continue their growth.
But that’s a thing of the past. Not unlike Neo in “The Matrix”, they are more and more eager to choose the red pill, and finally take back control. They want to know what’s truly going on with their website, in all its aspects and specifics. They don’t want to be confined to a distant overseer position that doesn’t understand the technical challenges that an online store presents, and rely too heavily on others opinions to decide what’s good or bad for the future of the business.
So, hop into the Nebuchadnezzar, and take back control of your websiteâs processes, with the following 3 tips.
You will attract more visitors if you know who they are
Firstly, if you want to attract more visitors to your store, you have to target them specifically. No more nets thrown haphazardly in the big sea of the internet. You should start by analyzing the profile of your customers and understand what their origin is.
Some marketers leave this analysis to external agencies. These agencies collect the data and then paint a portrait of the typical customer. But that’s not the only solution.
Other marketers use attribution tools to take back control of their data and due the analysis internally. This allows managers to see how visitors find their website and what lead them to buy. More precisely, an attribution tool assesses if a marketing campaign is successful or not.
Take a well known attribution tool like Mazeberry for example. It displays performance indicators, and sort all the data it receives in order to identify the most valuable indicators for you to use. Google Analytics, and Bizible are also interesting for this task or Merchandising.io for a more specific “product performance” view.
Managing an advertisement process efficiently can greatly help cut back the customer acquisition costs, so attribution tools can become a powerful asset in a marketers toolbox. They can reduce the customer acquisition costs by up to 15%.
You really need to schedule the publication of your content
Now that you are able to track the origin of your visitors and to know which meta-tags you should improve, you must keep your visitors on your website.
But these users have a limited amount of time to dedicate to your site, and are likely to visit at a particular time of day. Given this, scheduling the moment you post your content into their mailbox can really improve customer retention. However, to do this, you will need to dive into some metrics to understand what and when to reach your prospect as a way to have a maximum of impact in a minimum of time.
And that’s when automation tools really comes in handy. đ
Usually, these tools will give you precise indicators to identify the marketing channels (emailing campaign, social networks, paid publicity, …etc.) that bring the most visitors / customers / leads to your website.
They also allow you to preset messages to post on the best-known social media sites, manage your emailing campaigns, …etc. An automation tool like HubSpot, for example, even offers you automatically to post on the most relevant time (determined by the results of your previous marketing campaigns)! But itâs not the only name in the field. Datananas, IKO System, Hatchbuck, Hubspot or Marketo are also great options as automation tools.
If used correctly, these tools greatly increase the chances of conversion.
You need good analytics to know if each page is Web Performant
An online store has to be updated regularly, to add new articles or change some prices for instance. But the more your website grows, the more you put yourself at risk of experiencing slowdowns and unavailability periods. Also, a slow website usually entails a deteriorated customer experience (Well yeah! Nobody likes to wait long when shopping online!), and we all know that, that it leads to a significant loss of visitors, and thus, of sales.
And that’s when you enter the world of web performance and optimization.
You want to expand your online store, and attract more and more customer, but without losing any speed or quality of UX? Well optimization is there for you.
But before optimizing your website, you need to find out where do the issues come from.
“Should I focus on the homepage, or the cart first?” “Are my web developers responsible, or my hosting provider?” To answer those questions, you may want to use a piloting tool. These tools will allow you to monitor your store and extract the data relating to the performance of your website. This is the purpose of tools like Google Analytics, Pingdom, Dareboost, Blackfire (a tool with a definite âtech/devâ vibe, that goes very deep into application optimizations) or Quanta.
As an piloting tool, Quanta extracts both real user data (using Google Analytics) and backend, frontend and server metrics from e-commerce websites, analyses it, and identify the root cause of the slowdowns. The tool, intended for Heads of E-commerce and Marketing Managers, aims at helping you prioritize the best-suited optimizations needed for your website, by presenting the data in clear business dashboards, with actionable indicators.
So that’s it for these 3 tips to take back control of your e-commerce business growth!
Now you are truly ready to set aside the blue pill, and delve into the truth of your data. To take good decisions, don’t be afraid to delve into the technicalities of your website anymore, and check out these solutions, as they will help you concentrate on your real job: managing your team and your development strategy.