Last Updated on Mar 25, 2020 by James W
Why am I not a billionaire yet?
What do you do to increase your store’s popularity and recognizability, to attract customers and make sales jump? That’s right – you go to the advertising agency. Hundreds of store owners invest in wild massive marketing campaigns. Well, I can tell, because it’s me on the opposite sideof the barricades, doing ads for clients who want their stores to thrive. Unfortunately, not all of our clients are grateful and happy after all. Some of them come back a month later,slobbering and turning red, with a ton of questions, but the main one is the same: why am I not a billionaire yet? I’ve seen this dozens of times, actually, and as far as my curiosity goes, I’ve succeeded in analyzing our clients’cases and it became my job. I’m an analyst now, and when an e-commerce business owner comes to us asking for help with his store’s promotion, I do a research and do my best to explain why it can go wrong.
Give me a reason
From the beginning, please! Assume that the agency has done a great marketing campaign, people like it, although it’s not like the 1984 ad by Apple. Potential customers are visiting your website, but, more than a half of them leave empty handed! The bounce rate is huge, that’s a fact. First of all, you need to learn your mistakes and fix them as fast as you can, starting with the obvious ones.
Do you have enough of the products in the assortment? Are they competitive enough? And what about pricing, shipping, billing, delivery? Believe it or not, but some of our clients have made major strategic mistakes at some point and it haunted them ever since.
Oh, navigation, how can you be so heartless?
After reviewing the obvious reasons, you should proceed with the advanced ones. And that’s when we take a closer look at your website. Your online shop can be not as fancy as Tiffany’s, in fact, e-commerce stores don’t necessarily need a glamorous design. What they need is a simple and understandable layout, some easy on the eye colors and good navigation. I’d like to talk about the navigation thing a little bit more.
With navigation remember just one thing: you cannot reinvent the wheel, no matter how you want to conquer people with uniqueness and originality. Stay humble is the best advice I can give. Don’t ask developers to make the site painful to look at, instead, make sure to check out of the must-have list fundamentals, like
- friendly urls
- hover ‘mega menu’
- active links for categories and subcategories
- search
- suggestions
- good HQ media
- smart cross-links
- filters
- tags
- sales and discounts
- landing pages for categories and manufactures, like Magento shop by brand etc.
You’ll be surprised how many customers stay and explore the website further eventually making a purchase just after fixing the frustrating menu.
Usually, that’s it. People come and buy, our client is happy. I notice that ‘freshly baked’businessmen seek for something so inventive and original, they forget about average customers, the target audience. It’d be stupid to say that risk takers always lose – Steve Jobs is a phenomenon proving those words wrong. But before painting your online store acid green, give it a thought.
