Previously we talked about the effects of Covid-19. Now we are going to give you some tips on how to turn these effects to your benefit.
Guiding people towards your website is very important these days since online shopping became the norm. Let’s see how you can do that and how personalisation will keep them engaged with your company or brand.
Welcome to the lockdown party
Even though lockdown drove us away from each other, we quickly got reunited online. According to the World Economic Forum, internet usage got up 50% in some parts of the world, especially in European countries such as Italy, Spain and France. This increase isn’t entirely shocking since almost every aspect of our daily life moved online.
People meet their friends, work, watch movies and search tutorials online, but most importantly they buy online.
This offers your business the opportunity to hop on the train and digitalise.
Guide people to your website
There are a couple of ways to lead people to your website such as search engine optimisation, search engine advertising, social media or long-tail keywords. We’re going to focus on the first two.
Search engine optimisation or SEO is the process of increasing the number of visitors on a website through organic search engine results. To make sure you end up at the top of the search results, you have to improve your website by tweaking certain elements. Create and update content regularly, use specific keywords, improve your title and description metadata and use alt tags. When done correctly, your chances of ending up high on the search lists will increase tremendously.
Search engine advertising or SEA is the process of placing online ads on webpages that show results from specific searching questions. These advertisements will be shown to people who are actively searching for certain keywords, above organic results.
The first thing you have to do is to determine your keywords. These have to be relevant to your business. When you know the keywords you would like to place your bid on, you need to create your advertisement. An ad has a couple of different elements:
- Headline: this is the main attraction and should contain relevant keywords;
- Description text: this contains details about your product and why people should click on it;
- Display URL: this is the URL that will take the searchers to your website;
- Ad extension: this will cause your ad to take up more space and increase visibility.
Next, you have to decide how much you want to pay for someone to click on your ad. SEA uses an auction-based system where businesses have to bid on specific keywords. The more you want to pay, the more frequently your ad will appear on top of the search results page. Your second cost is the cost-per-click. This means that you have to pay every time someone visits your landing page through that advertisement. Again, this depends on how much the advertiser is willing to spend.
Please note that your quality score also plays a huge role in this story. Even if your bid is lower than your competitors, a higher score can help you claim that 1st position. A quality score is a score your ad gets considering its relevance and quality. Your max bid multiplies by your quality score results in your ad rank.
Now we know how SEA works, here are some of the main benefits it has to offer:
- Fast and easy: creating a SEA only takes a couple of hours and it can be adjusted afterwards;
- Effective: by paying to be on the top of the search engine results page, you will experience greater results than by organic search through SEO;
- Brand recognition: since you are now on top of the SERPs, you will be seen more and more;
- High interest: SEA is based on keywords, meaning that people are more likely to interact since they are searching for specific items. This also means that ads are less likely to be found annoying or misplaced.
It’s very important to understand how SEO and SEA can boost your website. Businesses often pay large amounts of money on paid advertising without properly building their website first. Google only showcases relevant and authentic websites and will punish bad ones. Quality content always wins.
Make your website personal
Now that you have visitors, it’s time to make them stay and buy. Personalisation is key in this phase. The corona virus came with a huge uprise in digitalisation, this became more important than ever before.
Why? Because people often miss the personal approach that they receive in-store. Now that everyone moved their shopping habits online, personalisation is a great way to differentiate your business from your competitors’
The first step in personalisation is understanding your customers. Analytics, conversions and a visitor CRM help you better understand the customers. Find out in what phase of the customer journey your visitors will convert or churn and act upon that data.
With analytics, you can measure everything you need to know about your website traffic like advertisement campaigns, conversion, demographics and many more.
By installing conversions, you can measure every action, click or submit. This is a very easy procedure and can be done through no-code installation.
Visitor CRM will tell you the interests, conversions, visits and more of every individual visitor. A visitor dashboard shows specific products or content recommendations for every unique visitor to ensure an easy and personal approach.
The second step is to convert this information into a personalised experience by using a no-code visual editor. This, in combination with AI algorithms, will result in an automated, intimate adventure every time.
Offer relevant products and contents based on the previous step by implementing recommendation boxes across your whole website.
Add personalised pop-ups, images, texts, banners... to create no-code 1:1 personal experiences.
Make these implementations work by A/B testing them before you release them. Analytics from step one will then analyze which results work best.
The final thing you have to do is retain your audience and improve loyalty.
To make people revisit your website, you need to retarget them. Email marketing is still a great way to improve sales and loyalty. Send personalised emails that are relevant to your visitors’ needs. There are only three steps to do so.
First of all, you need to acquire their email address, secondly, you have to learn your visitors’ interests through AI and the last step is to provide quality content. Detailed information and tips can be found in our blog about email marketing.
Note that all these steps can easily be implemented through no-code installation. Every marketer should be able to do this by themselves.
Hopefully, these tips helped you modify your business into a great online gathering place for people willing to buy your products. E-commerce is a wonderful world worthy to explore. It will never be the same as physical stores, but this will definitely help you stay afloat during these difficult times.