6 tips to attract new customers and increase your sales on your eshop

A practical guide to increase online sales.

It’s no secret: one of the best ways to increase online sales is to increase the number of visitors to your website.
Especially if your website has been launched recently, users could be few in number initially.

Anyway you can not wait customers come to your site but you need to attract them.
This article shares some strategies for attracting more shoppers to your online store.

1. Provide great products and great content

The primary purpose of an Ecommerce business is to sell products so you could ask yourself why you should create content for your online shop.

“Content” is not only adding posts to your blog, insert some images and YouTube videos.
We are talking about:

1. Product description
2. Images of products and their details
3. Available combinations
4. Reviews

You have to provide not only all the information your users need about your products but also attract and involve them: you have to think to convert your visitors to buyers.

Product description

The first step is providing a very useful, complete but not boring product description; do not be tedious: try to summarize in the first sentences the qualities of your product and make every description readable and involving.
Your users must say: “Ehi, I must have this!”

Obviously, do not copy content from other websites: be original and create unique content always.

Product images

Potential customers have only images to interact with, so product images have to be great and well shot.
Try to offer detailed shots of individual items and let zoom in.
Depending on your items, you could offer a 360-degree viewing mode to let your users interact with or different angles shots.

Available combinations

Do not hide but highlight if a product has available combinations: maybe the user might just be looking for a certain combination!
Make it clear inside product description and adding right photos.

Reviews

Before making a purchase, most users are looking for reviews of a product: reviews are useful and can convert your visitors to buyers.
Buyers love to share their experiences about a product and users love reading that before.

Moreover reviews generate unique content and it helps your natural position inside search results.

2. Attract user’s attention

If you are sure to provide great content and products, your site has to be attractive at the first sight for catching the interest of users.

Have a Great Website

With an internet site, your eshop is accessible worldwide for potential customers 24 hours, 365 days a year.
That’s why you have to offer an high quality website and take care of every single details of your web pages: think your eshop as a real shop!

Be sure to use a professional layout with a great and usable design.
Do not underrate mobile experience: let users browse your eshop with all kind of devices: computers, tablets and smartphones.

If you want to get a professional layout without the high cost of having a website built, you can browse our Prestashop themes.

Make Your Site Easy

Users want to browse web pages easy and find products they want quickly.
Moreover they want to order products without problem.

• Use clean and simple web pages
• Highlight all relevant informations and action-buttons (add to cart, add to wishlist and so on)
• Provide detailed informations about Payment methods, Shipping and Terms.

The power of Gift Certificates and Coupons

If you give away, you get something in return.
This is the case of gift certificates: you can use them in your store in a simple and funny way to get new customers.
You can also use social coupons to be shared with friends through social sites (Facebook, Twitter…) to increase your traffic and tour sales.

3. Open a blog and make it SEO friendly

Write original articles about your products and all related subjects.

Include an headline that users might search for in Google and repeat (not too frequently) keywords from your headline inside your post.
Focus on 1-2 keywords for each post so you won’t be penalized by search engines.
Use your keywords in Title of your blog post and repeat them throughout your post: be sure you use your keywords in a natural way without excess.

Use Seo-friendly URL but do not change URLs for SEO purpose: your URL should reflect your title and be sure the keyword you use in the article is present.

Use Meta Description to give a summary of content of your post.

Use ALT tag for your images: be descriptive and add useful information; moreover name your images using right and suitable terms (avoid blank spaces between 2 terms and use hyphen “-” instead).

4. Send newsletter to your contacts

Newsletter is one of the most important marketing tool to keep your users and customers up-to-date about your new products, special offers and articles.
Newsletter can help you to:

• Generate loyalty
• Increase number of users
• Generate new sales

One of the reasons that pushes an user back on a site is because of this site is constantly updated.
Here some suggestions:

• Be Free
  At the beginning is always a right solution starting with a free service until you’re ready to offer a highly professional service.
• Be Easy
  Let your users subscribe and unsubscibe as easy as possibile.
• Be Short
  Choose a short number of content you want to send and try to highlight the relevant points.
• Write new and original content
  Even if there is not a predetermined number of rows, favors a clear and concise summary.
• Be Steady
  Once a month might be a good solution. An electronic newsletter is like a magazine so do not betray the trust of your users delaying days of the publication.
• Use images
  Images included should be used to attract the reader’s attention and to ease reading.
• Use HTML but be quick
  HTML format let you use images and graphic to get a better result. Anyway provide a fast-loading page.

5. Be Social

Social media sharing is a must.

Share, share and share

Share your blog posts and products on social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest; do not forget Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and the other ones.

Moreover, encourage your customers to share their (positive) experiences at your store.
You need positive buzz and this will create what your eshop needs.
Positive experiences create positive opinion and can turn simple users into customers.

Ask Users and Customers to Forward to a Friend

Enable a button to allow your users to forward your posts, products and newsletter to their friends.
It can be useful to share your content and to improve your newsletter audience.

6. Maximize Search Engine Visibility

Search engines are the first tool used by people when searching for a product online.
Customers search for discovering the best price, best conditions and reviews about products they are searching for.

So your first goal is to understand for what keywords your website is comparing with the others and what results your keywords get.
In other words you have to know “where you are now” inside search results.
Make sure that you have some form of analytics set up on your website.

Keywords

The first step is keyword selection.
Identify what keyword is on each page and select a keyword that describes its content accurately.
It’s an important step since keyword cannot be too generic or it will not drive quality traffic to your website.

Template Structure and HTML markup

Different structures and HTML markup have a different impact regard to the results in search engines.
Use a semantic structure and tags according to their functionality:

• <title> tag: it’s the title of your page and becomes the link appearing on the serach engines results.
  Be sure it explains the content of your page and contains your keyword(s).
• <h1>… <h6> heading tags: they are used to define HTML headings and go from <h1> to <h6>.
  Be sure to put keywords inside them but keep a natural reading.
• <a> tag: used to define links and links are a very important point in Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
  Be sure to have keywords in the anchor text of you links.
• <alt> tag: it’s an alternate text for an image, if the image cannot be displayed.
  Search engines cannot read content of images but they read content of their <alt> tag so you can use it for providing description of the image and connecting theme to the keywords inside a page.

Duplicate Content

One of the important thing to do is avoid to have duplicate content on your web site.

This aspect refers not only to content but also to the URL of the page.
It can happen that the same resource can be achieved through different URL: if we have www.yourdomain/main-category/your-product and www.yourdomain/main-category/child-category/your-product, search engines will see these pages as dusplicate content and it can damage your position in search engines results.

You can solve this problem using:

• 301 redirect to send both users and search engines to a different URL from the one they originally requested
• canonical link element by specifying the “canonical”, or “preferred”, version of a web page

Page Speed

The faster a page loads the best score receives from search engines.

Broken Links

A link may become broken for several reasons. The simplest and most common reason is that the web page it links to doesn’t exist anymore.
This element can damage your position in search engines results.
You can use the W3C Link Checker to discover the presence of dead links in your site.

Sitemap

A sitemap is a web page that lists hierarchically all the page of a website.
Created to facilitate user navigation, it has become increasingly important to make easy the job of search engines crawlers.

The best thing you can do is creating an XML sitemap and submit it to the search engines according their rules.
You can perform a search to find what kind of sitemap online generator can fit your need.