Overlooked Web Store Tips for Shrinking Marketing Budgets

Yuck. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 6 months, you’re well aware that things have been pretty bleak.  And, if things weren’t bad enough, we now have this to worry about. In any event, with shrinking marketing budgets and smaller resource pools, the pressure rests on many e-commerce experts to pick up the slack for their paid advertising brethren. Take heart, you may be hiding profitability and untapped customer segments begging to do business with you. You just have to roll up your sleeves and dig into your site traffic.

More often than not companies set up analytics packages for their sites, review the out of the box standard reports and think their good to go. Actually, with a bit of digging, there’s gold in them thar hills.

Review your top visited product pages. You may be surprised to find  quite a disparity between these pages and your top selling products. If things don’t match up, make a list of the product pages that are getting the traffic, but not the sell through.

Take a good hard look at these product pages, one at a time. What is the barrier to customers taking the next step in the sales process and adding the product to the cart? Some points to think about include reinforcing warranties and guarantees, pre-sales support questions, trust symbols like SSL verification, etc.

Review the design and layout of these product pages to make sure THE number one focus of the page is to encourage potential customers to take the next step in the purchase process – probably add the product to the shopping cart. Don’t try to capture, sell and close all on the same page. Too much happening all at once will frustrate and confuse even the most persistent shoppers.

Take look at your product mix. Are high margin, less popular products getting a fair shake? Many times these products are pushed by the wayside for hot selling, less profitable stuff. Make a point to give high margin products a spotlight on your site and in your marketing.

Cross-sell, up-sell and virtual bundles are a great way to increase average order value, maintain profitability, increase conversion ratios and in many cases give a great value-add to your customer. Look at these opportunities in key areas of the site like product pages as well as the cart. Don’t just throw potential options at your customers either. This is where attention to detail is where sales and success is won and lost. What do you think a great accesssory to that lime green smoking jacket could be?

Value added shipping and fulfillment options are a great way to close the sale as well. Free shipping thresholds or expedited shipping is a great way to capture the sale and increase customer satisfaction all in one fell swoop. Conversion at a cost, that’s for sure. But in many ways less expensive than traditional demand generation tactics.

If you’ve got some tips of your own, contact me, or comment below. I’d love to carry on the conversation.