Ecommerce,is defined as the activity of selling products and services online though the Internet, is nowadays it’s an activity that is so widespread that it needs a highly competitive marketing strategy.
Companies from Quebec starting in E-commerce can enjoy numerous considerable advantages. The study on the E-commerce market in Quebec, led in 2015 by the CEFRIO in collaboration with the Institute of Quebec, showed that E-commerce correlates with sales growth, customer growth, geographic customer growth and most importantly,cost reduction (3).
When observing the most successful strategies developed by online merchants, it’s clear that the shift to online commerce must be accompanied by innovative strategies to stand out on the internet.
Evaluate the effectiveness of your transactional website
This study also dealt with the different strategies used by Quebec cyber-merchants, the challenges they encountered,the solutions they developed as well as the processes that in the end are at the stake of the practice.
A recurring problem for cyber-merchants is their general lack of knowledge of the basic of website metrics and metadata obtained from it, so that they can understand, analyze, measure and evaluate the effectiveness of their transactional website. The traffic on the site, the points of entry and exit of the website, the number of visits on products, the conversion rate, the rate of return and abandonment of the basket etc, are extremely important to successfully convert visitors into buyers.
One of the most important questions that must be asked to retailers is: why some users? The answer is a complex one and is intertwined with the users’ purchasing behaviors, and are also dependent on several factors which are in control of the company, but also on the personal needs of the user and the offer from the competition or the type of product or service offered, for example.Companies have much more control over the conversion of users into buyers, it’s at this point that the conversion funnel becomes entirely relevant.
Develop a conversion funnel procedure
To develop your Ecommerce strategist skills, you must be able to analyze the issues in order to integrate the best available tools that way you can influence the decisions of a potential client.
In conclusion, the conversion funnel is the tracking of the buyers at every step. The shape of the funnel therefore represents the gradual decline in the number of users who go through each step until the final one, the purchase.
It helps to understand and optimize the customers’ experience. With a single objective, through a series of trials and tests (and a few errors), you will be able to determine what the best path to be taken by your visitors/readers/prospects/ potential customers is and how to reduce the number of unsuccessful conversions.
By developing a very specific funnel procedure, companies can better understand the tactics that attract users to the online store, from their first visit, to the shopping cart and to finally the payment stage.
The ultimate goal is to guide customers as much as possible through an experience that is consistent with their behavior and that’s in a consolidated logical in its progression.
Although the purpose of this procedure is the profitability of the transactional website, the funnel can also aim to fulfill other intermediate objectives, such as updating tags on Google Analytics and on the website.
For each company its own funnel
The conversion funnel models are diverse and depend on the objectives, the business, the products and the services which are sold. Undeniably, some products and services can compromise lower customer engagement while others create high involvement. For example, a user wanting to buy household products (low involvement) online usually has a more direct, simplified and fast process leading to the transactional website than a user who is shopping for his or her family.
In the first case, the user is not emotionally or financially committed while he is the second case. This is the reason why when planning and purchasing family vacation packages, potential customers consult other users’ reviews, go see the competition, then return to the offer several times over a long period of time.
With the example of vacation packages, an optimal and highly efficient funnel model would focus on: optimizing editorial content for a better SEO, buying keywords for search engines, re-marketing procedures with an after-sales service to sustain a continuous engagement on the part of the website to keep customers satisfied.
For every company out there, an optimal model exists which takes into account the behavior of its customers at every step of the buying process., Even when the funnel is configured, there is always room for improvement. It’s important to keep an analytical eye on the metadata, the ratios (desire/purchases), the links, the pages, the clicked products, the basket/item rates until the confirmation of the request.
In other words, it is not necessary that all roads lead to the products/ services, but these roads must be more enjoyable to embark on for your visitors!
