Tag Archives: store

Why Your Online Store Needs Omnichannel Marketing

Posted on January 31, 2019 by Hosting

The post Why Your Online Store Needs Omnichannel Marketing appeared first on HostGator Blog . Your online store is up and running. You’ve got a blog, an email list, and social media accounts on the platforms where your ideal customers spend the most time. You’re marketing your store through lots of channels, but are you coordinating those efforts or missing opportunities? Omnichannel marketing can help you connect all your marketing pathways for better results. Here’s a primer on what omnichannel marketing is, how it can help you grow your business, and how to begin. What Is Omnichannel Marketing? Despite the “omni” in the name, omnichannel doesn’t (and shouldn’t) mean marketing in every channel in existence. And it’s not the same thing as multichannel marketing, which is—you guessed it—marketing in multiple channels. Instead, omnichannel marketing creates a single, holistic view of customer behavior by collecting and analyzing data across channels to create customized offers and consistent customer experiences in every channel where they encounter your business. For businesses, the benefits are more and better data for more effective promotions, more conversions, and a greater likelihood of attracting the kinds of shoppers who make more purchases. SAS found that consumers who shop in more than one channel spend “ three to four times more than single-channel customers do .”     Imagining Omnichannel Marketing Here’s a simple way to think of the omnichannel approach to building customer relationships. Let’s say the owner of your favorite restaurant knows your name, your favorite table, and your partner’s favorite dessert order. When you see her in your neighborhood, she always says hi and asks how you’re doing. That’s roughly analogous to an omnichannel customer experience—the restaurant owner always recognizes you and keeps up with how you’re doing and what you like, even when she’s not actively trying to sell you dinner. You’re probably going to dine at her place often and enjoy it. But what if she only sometimes gave you a warm welcome at the restaurant and didn’t recognize you at other times, or made it weird at the grocery store by telling you about her restaurant like you’d never been there? How likely would you be to dine at her restaurant again? That’s the kind of awkwardness and lost business that omnichannel marketing can help avoid. Think about how your marketing channels work together and where you can improve.   How Can You Make Your Marketing Omnichannel? The first step is to gather all your data in one place, or as few places as possible, so you can get a good view of how people find your store and shop there. Using the same payment service provider across all your sales channels—web, social media, in-store—can go a long way toward setting up your omnichannel marketing situation. That’s because payment providers (like Square) collect data you can use in your marketing efforts. This omnichannel sales data can help you get started by providing the same types of data in the same format so you can easily track customers’ purchase behaviors in each channel. It can also streamline your loyalty program so customers can earn and use points online and in-store if you have brick-and-mortar or pop-up locations. Once you’ve got your sales data centralized, check in on your web and social media analytics. Google Analytics is the best-known tool for website traffic analysis , and you can use it to analyze your email and social media data, too. To keep things simple, you can use a WordPress plugin like MonsterInsights to bring your Google Analytics data into your WP dashboard . You can also use the Google Analytics tracking code for your site in your marketing emails. For example, Constant Contact walks its users through the process of adding the code , checking links for known issues, and gathering data from email campaigns to see who’s opening your emails, what they click, and what they buy. Google Analytics can track your social media traffic, too. Neil Patel’s walkthrough of Google Analytics’ social media reports is filled with details you can apply to your omnichannel marketing program. Maybe the most important thing is that Google Analytics can report on conversions sorted by your goals. And it breaks down conversions into last-interaction and assisted categories, so you can see whether a particular visitor from social media to your site bought during that visit or later on. With all of this traffic data and your sales data, you’ll have a better map of how all your channels work together (or don’t yet) to bring customers to your social media channels, your email list, and your store, and what those customers do along the way. Then it’s time to start refining and testing your efforts so that the journey from potential customer to loyal customer is as easy as possible. For example, you can use your data to improve your customer segmentation for more highly targeted and specific email and social media campaigns. You can also use this data to create more effective retargeting ads —another way to ensure that your customers and site visitors see the things that interest them and make them want to return to your store.   The Omnichannel Marketing Takeaway Discussions about digital marketing and data analytics can get very detailed and technical. If you’re interested in going down that path, there’s a world of information online for you. If you’d rather keep things simple, here’s the takeaway: Omnichannel marketing uses data from all your channels to show you where your customers go and what they do so you can get to know them and keep up with them. Omnichannel marketing uses data from all your channels to make your customers feel recognized and welcome through personalized and targeted email, social media, and other campaigns. Omnichannel marketing tools that collect and analyze your data are inexpensive or free. With good data and and a carefully thought-out omnichannel approach, you can give your customers what they want, earn their loyalty, and grow your business. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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How to Sell Products Online in 6 Easy Steps

Posted on September 21, 2018 by Hosting

The post How to Sell Products Online in 6 Easy Steps appeared first on HostGator Blog . Deciding to start an online business and begin selling products online can be an exciting experience. However, this excitement can soon be replaced with overwhelm if the proper process isn’t followed. There are a lot of considerations and research to be done if you want to learn to sell products online the right way. Below you’ll learn the proper steps to take before you launch, during launch, and how to set your online store up for long-term success.   1. Decide What to Sell Choosing the right products to sell will make or break your success online. As a result, you should spend a lot of time during the research phase. It can be helpful to choose a product or market that you actually care about. With more and more competition every single day, choosing a market you have passion about will give you a leg up, as you’ll be willing to go the extra mile. Ask yourself: What kind of products would I love to sell? What would be my dream niche to serve? What industries do I have experience and knowledge in? What pain points currently exist in the market? Do my products provide a practical solution? This should give you a list of products or markets that you’d love to serve. With this in mind it’s time to get a better picture of the existing market, so you can decide how to compete and position yourself.   2. Research Your Market You probably already have an idea of some of the competitors in your space, but now it’s time to take a deeper dive. You’ll be looking for companies that sell similar products, what makes their approach unique, the methods they use to market themselves, and how they speak to your target market. Find your top competitors and make a list with the above elements in mind. This will not only help you better understand how to market and sell your products, but you might be able to uncover an underserved portion of the market hungry for your products. Beyond having a deep understanding of your market, you’ll also want to thoroughly understand your customers . This will make the sales and marketing process much easier. Ask yourself the following questions: How old is my customer? Where do they live? What’s their gender? How much money do they make? What’s their occupation? What other interests do they have? How do they spend their time? What are their beliefs about the world? Why do they buy products like yours?   3. Decide How to Ship Your Products With an idea of what you’re going to sell, the existing market, and your buyer preferences, it’s time to think about how you’re going to ship your products to them. The first is hiring a manufacturer to create your products for you. This can lead to a more custom product, higher quality control, and less cost per unit. But, you’ll have to spend more time creating your product, working out manufacturing issues, and figuring out shipping. The second approach is relying on dropshipping . With this approach, you’ll be purchasing other people’s products and selling them through your online store. The drop shipper will also fulfill and ship orders on your behalf. This approach will have lower overhead costs, and less work overall. However, you may have to operate on slimmer margins and will have less quality control over the final product.   4. Build Your Online Store Now it’s time to start building your online store. You’ll have a few different approaches to take. You can build your own online store through WordPress and a tool like WooCommerce. You can sell products through an existing platform like Etsy, or Amazon. Or you can use an eCommerce website builder to easily build your store and manage your products. For the sake of this tutorial, we’re going to assume you’re using a website builder. This approach will give you the freedom of customizing your own site while helping manage all of the technical details for you. With an eCommerce website builder all you have to do is select a theme, customize it to your liking with the drag and drop builder, upload your products, and press publish. You’ll also be able to manage your inventory, handle tax, and shipping rates, and even integrate a payment processor.   5. Craft a Marketing Strategy Simply publishing your site online isn’t enough; you need to craft a marketing strategy to help get the word out. It would be impossible to cover every single aspect of marketing your online store in this post, but here are a few questions and considerations to get you moving in the right direction: What marketing approaches will you take? Social media? Content marketing? Paid advertising? Influencer outreach? Guest blogging? How will you get customers to buy from you again? A royalty program? Subscriber discounts? How will you convert traffic to buyers? Regular promotions? Product and upsell suggestions? What will make your strategy successful? Rising traffic? Conversions? Email list growth? As you can see you have a lot to think about when it comes to marketing your store and ensuring it’s success over the long run.   6. Launch and Execute The day has come to finally launch your online store and start sharing your products with the world. Even though it probably feels like your work is finished it’s actually only just begun. All of the preparation work, research, and website building has been leading you up to this point. Continue to execute and experiment with your marketing strategy and optimize your site based on user feedback, analytics data, and the kinds of products they’re actually buying. Selling products online is a journey and you’ve just taken your first steps. Hopefully, you’re now better equipped to create and launch a successful online store. Get your store up and running quickly with the GATOR website builder. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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The #1 Way to Prepare Your Website for Holiday Traffic: Upgrade Your Hosting

Posted on September 4, 2018 by Hosting

The post The #1 Way to Prepare Your Website for Holiday Traffic: Upgrade Your Hosting appeared first on HostGator Blog . Is Your Site Prepared For Holiday Traffic? Time To Upgrade Your Hosting When you’re getting your online store ready for the holiday shopping season , there’s a lot to plan, like Black Friday deals, seasonal products, and marketing campaigns. Remember to include the store itself in your holiday prep, too. For customers to find and buy your holiday deals, your site has to stay up and running—no matter how many shoppers show up. It also has to stand up to hackers who try to sneak in with the holiday crowd. Here’s how to prepare your site to handle heavier than normal traffic, give your shoppers a great experience, and keep your store secure.   Can Your Site Handle the Traffic Numbers You Expect? Black Friday isn’t just crowded in brick-and-mortar stores. More than half of US shoppers made at least one purchase on Black Friday in 2017, and the total haul for online Black Friday sales last year was more than $5 billion. That’s a lot of people going online. If your hosting plan includes monthly limits on how many visits your site can have, you could find your site hitting its traffic limit on the biggest shopping weekend of the year. And if you can’t quickly scale up your site’s capacity to serve a throng of shoppers, your site could slow to a crawl or even crash. What to do now: Look for real-time scalability that you can activate with a click to keep your site online and running smoothly even when goods are flying off your virtual shelves. Or look for an upgraded hosting plan that doesn’t cap monthly site visits so you can turn all your attention to your sales over the holidays. Are You Protected Against Downtime? If your site does go offline during holiday sales, shoppers may only come back later if you have products they want and can’t get anywhere else. We’ve blogged about the importance of creating exclusive deals for Black Friday , and we just discussed why hosting scalability matters. But there’s another thing that can lead to site crashes—hardware failure on the host’s end. It’s not common, because web hosts work hard to maintain their equipment, but it can happen. If it happens during peak shopping times, your business could suffer unless your host has a seamless Plan B. What to do now: Find out if your hosting plan includes failover capability . Failover means your host is ready and able to switch your site to another server if there are any issues with your current one so your site doesn’t go offline due to issues on their end. Failover switches from one server to another are usually seamless, but some include a brief downtime during the transition. If your plan doesn’t include failover protection, it may be time to upgrade.   How Fast Do Your Store Pages Load? Page load times are now a real factor in search results , so if you want your store to get found, it needs to get fast. When shoppers arrive, fast page loads can keep them in your store. The Financial Times found that just a one-second increase in page speed boosted engagement by 5% , showing that any improvement in load time is worth the effort. Some page-speed improvements you can do yourself, like optimizing the images on your WordPress-powered site . When you’re planning page-speed improvements, keep in mind that your product pages will be the first place shoppers land in your store if they find you through product search results. But images and videos—the centerpieces of product pages—are often the slowest elements to load, and 40% of shoppers will simply leave if your page takes more than 3 seconds to load. After you optimize your images, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to check your pages’ performance and get more suggestions for improvements. Your site may need more improvements that can only come from upgraded hosting, like proper cache configuration, top-of-the-line hardware, and optimal server density. What to do now: Check your site’s performance on PageSpeed Insights . Use the recommendations Google generates to talk to your hosting service about upgrading for load time improvements.   Does You Have Site Security for Your Online Store? Shoppers aren’t the only ones who flock to online stores during the holidays. Data thieves and other malicious actors know that during the holidays, merchants are so busy filling orders that they don’t notice or don’t have the resources to deal with data theft attempts and malware attacks. The last thing you need during peak sales season is a data breach or denial of service attack that throws your business into chaos when it should be racking up sales. As with page speed, some site security practices are up to you, like ensuring that you’re running the most up-to-date versions of your store platform, plugins, and related software. The devices you use to work on your store should be updated and fully secured, too. And we all know that it’s important to use secure, unique passwords . But there are ways your hosting service can help, too. What to look for: Does your current hosting plan include regular scans to detect and remove malware from your site? Is there an upgrade option that protects your store even further by guarding against DoS attacks that could crash your site?   Does Your Host Provide Website Analytics? Maybe the only thing more important for retailers than strong holiday sales is a serious post-season analysis of holiday sales activity. Much of this will draw on your Google, email, and social media analytics, but some of it should come from your site itself. Is it easy for you to find and monitor your site’s traffic trends, uptime, page load speed, and other performance data? You’ll need it to see what works during this year’s holidays and to plan how you can improve for next year. What to do now: Check your dashboard to see what kind of site data is available to you. If you’re not seeing the type of performance data you’ll need to refine your site, talk to your host about upgrade options. Be Prepared with Upgraded Hosting Make sure your hard work on holiday products and promotions pays off. Get ready now to welcome holiday season shoppers, give them what they want fast, keep your site safe, and gather valuable data. Give yourself the gift of an upgraded hosting plan now, before the holiday rush begins. Learn more about HostGator’s cloud hosting and dedicated server plans . 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How to Avoid Shopping Cart Abandonment on Your eCommerce Site

Posted on August 27, 2018 by Hosting

The post How to Avoid Shopping Cart Abandonment on Your eCommerce Site appeared first on HostGator Blog . Shopping Cart Abandonment: The Bane of eCommerce If brick-and-mortar shoppers ditched carts full of stuff the way online shoppers do, most big box store checkout lines would be a deserted, impossible-to-navigate mess. Around 70% of eCommerce shopping carts with products in them are abandoned by shoppers before checkout. Why do shoppers do this, and how can your store make them more likely to buy what they put in their carts?   8 Tips to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment Here’s a checklist of improvements that can make more of those loaded carts convert.   1. Invest in a great mobile customer experience. More than half of the web’s traffic comes from mobile devices, and consumers are getting comfortable with shopping on their phones. Or they would, if it were easier. That 70% average figure for cart abandonmen t is for desktop users. For mobile users, the cart abandonment rate is more like 85% . Why? Pop-ups, slow page load times , and requirements to key in lots of personal data—these are all hassles even for desktop shoppers who have a mouse and keyboard and no data plan limits to deal with. For mobile shoppers, those hurdles are often roadblocks. Find out how to make your online store more mobile-friendly .   2. Make your product pages work smarter and harder. Customers who are ready to buy right away tend to search for specific products rather than particular stores. That means when they click on a search result for “alligator dog costume,” they’ll go straight to your product page without ever seeing your homepage. But if all they see on that page is a pup in a gator suit, they make not follow through on their intent to purchase. To build trust and make their decision easier, include a simple summary of your shop’s shipping and return policies, a link to live help, and related products so they can get in, get their gator costume, and get back to their busy lives. Chewy.com does this by promoting a shipping deal high up on its product pages, just below the product photo and price. When users scroll down, they also see a short written description, a horizontal slider gallery of related costumes, reviews, and finally, a customer service number and email link.     3. Make returns easy and free. Customers are more likely to buy if they know they can return it easily. That’s especially true for clothing, shoes, and expensive items like jewelry. Tiffany & Co. tops each page on their mobile site with a note about their “complimentary shipping and returns on all orders.” That reassures customers that they can go ahead and make that splashy gift purchase; if it doesn’t work out, they can always return it. Small store owners sometimes say they can’t afford to offer free returns, but as more e-retailers get on board, sellers who don’t offer free returns will be at a competitive disadvantage. A better approach is to figure out how to adjust your product pricing to factor in the cost of return shipping.   4. Make live support easy and immediate. Sharing your customer service phone number and email addresses is always a good idea, but navigating back and forth on a smartphone between a product screen and a phone call or email is a hassle. If customers have questions about something while they’re shopping on their phones, an on-screen live chat is easier than a phone call and much faster than email, meaning customers are more likely to get the info they need before they leave your site and their cart behind. Pura Vida Bracelets does a good job with live CS chat. Shoppers can tap the chat bubble that floats on product screens to ask questions and get answers.   5. Automatically apply promo codes. Don’t make your shoppers backtrack during checkout or navigate away to an aggregator site looking for coupon codes. That’s how you lose conversions as people get frustrated, get distracted, or find a better deal somewhere else. Instead, try an approach like Vistaprint’s. Mobile shoppers see that the current promo code has been applied to their purchases as soon as they land on the site, with an option to shop with a different promo code also on the landing page. 6. Make checkout ridiculously simple. Give shoppers the option to check out as guests, rather than forcing them to create an account. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been stopped from making a mobile purchase with a new merchant at the mandatory “create an account” step. That’s when I remember that Amazon already has my info and probably also the item I’m trying to buy, so I’m gone. Letting your shoppers validate their identity and pay with a few taps or swipes raises the likelihood of closing the sale. Consider allowing shoppers to sign in with Facebook or importing their PayPal shipping information to save time. Anthropologie’s mobile site, for example, lets shoppers opt into the full mobile checkout process or just go directly to PayPal: 7. Follow up on abandoned carts. A ditched cart doesn’t have to be the end of the story. Sometimes shoppers intend to follow up but get distracted. A reminder and an offer can bring them back. You can do this through ad retargeting, follow-up emails, and Facebook Messenger if you’re using it for customer service. Choose only one method per cart, though, and limit the number of follow-ups per cart. No one wants to be stalked by a garden shed or pelted with multiple emails.   8. Track your results. How will you know if your plan to reduce cart abandonment is working? Metrics! Get a benchmark average for daily or weekly cart abandonments versus completed orders before you begin. Then continue to track those numbers as you make improvements to your site, product pages, policies, support, promo codes, checkout process, and follow-up efforts. Over time, as your store experience gets easier for your customers, you should see fewer deserted carts and higher conversion rates. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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New Apple App Store Guidelines Will Impact SMBs Using DIY Tools

Posted on December 11, 2017 by Hosting

New Apple App Store guidelines state that apps created from “commercialized template or app generation services” will be rejected from inclusion in the App Store as of Jan. 1, 2018. Continue reading →

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