Your customers’ journey
Long before your customers arrive at your website they will have decided that they want to know, do, find or buy something.
It might be on their mind, even before they start to search for what they want. Their attention could be caught by something they see on social media or they might begin with some fairly vague online searches.
You want them to arrive at your site when they have already moved from general interest to fairly specific requirements. Understanding this point (micro-moment) in their journey will help you to tailor your pay per click (PPC) campaign or website keywords to best effect.
Once they arrive, your page must clearly deliver what they are looking for.
Quality content
If all of your online efforts bring visitors straight to your home page, then you are likely to miss valuable opportunities.
You will have more success if you create well-designed landing pages tailored to your paid traffic. You can also make sure that your customers’ expectations are met when they find you in an organic search by creating clear and specific meta data about each page.
Testing is important. You can significantly improve your results with relatively small adjustments to your landing pages. However, if you don’t carefully plan and measure your results you won’t know what works.
Quality leads
Whether you are looking for sales, subscriptions or enquiries you can learn a great deal about your customers by monitoring and learning from their behaviour.
Your analytics can tell you whether they arrived at your site from a desktop or a mobile device. You can review the relative conversion rates from people who went to landing pages for targeted campaigns or from organic searches.
You can evaluate the overall cost of acquiring your online customers, including the quoting and delivering their requirements, invoicing and customer satisfaction follow-ups.
You might decide to change your tactics for low-value sales.
You can also keep track of how many more purchases a customer makes with you to build up a picture of their value to your business over time. High value customers might be worth greater investment.
You can also learn from the behaviour of people who leave your site before taking the action you want. By looking at the point they left you might be able to see how you could improve your content to maintain their interest.
Learning from experience
Your search engine results are only going to improve by understanding what affects your conversion rates.
Good quality, informative content that is easy for your visitors to understand and use will remain at the heart of your ecommerce site. When you see your conversion rate rising, you can be confident that you are getting this right.
