Author: Mobile Commerce Press

They say the devil is in the details. This means a disaster is lurking somewhere within your website. And, you are likely to overlook it if you aren’t careful. To help you avoid becoming the next victim of dastardly details, we’ve compiled a few common oversights that can kill your business. It’s all about getting back to the basics to establish a fresh and functional ecommerce website.

Give a Clear Path to Checkout

How many pages do your shoppers have to click through to complete their orders? Just one? Up to five? If you haven’t asked yourself this question before, it’s time you paid attention. This is more important than you might think.

Cart abandonment is the bane of the ecommerce industry. In case you are unfamiliar with this term, cart abandonment is what happens when a shopper gets the end of the sales cycle and bails at the last moment. There are plenty of reasons this can happen. Maybe your shipping costs are higher than the shopper anticipated. Maybe the user just got distracted and hopes to come back later. Or perhaps there are simply too many things happening in your checkout process and they’re thwarting your sales.

Put Important Stuff Up Top

A well-organized ecommerce website anticipates customers’ needs. This is actually pretty easy to accomplish, once you think about it. All you have to do is see your website from your shoppers’ point of view. What are the common questions one might ask when they arrive at your homepage? They might want to learn more about your brand; or maybe they want to find your contact information. Important features such as your “About Us”, FAQ and contact pages should be findable via the top banner. A customer should never have to take more than a few seconds to find these essentials.

Then again, your shoppers might want to peruse your merchandise without delay. Include product categories that make sense for your industry.

Organize Your Shop

There are innumerable ways to categorize your merchandise. If you are selling clothing you could split things up by gender, age group, tops and bottoms, color, etc. But what do your customers want? What strategy best matches their expectations?

If you aren’t entirely sure, try asking them. A short questionnaire via email or following checkout is a quick way to get feedback on your site. You can also peek in on your competitors to see how they’ve organized their sites. Certain trends might pop out at you. It never hurts to gather intel on your rivals.

Compress Your Images

If you are a savvy ecommerce vendor, you know big beautiful images are key to selling your merchandise. Consumers love high-definition photos of models using and enjoying your products; product images from multiple angles; and seeing the product in multiple colors.

Unfortunately, the more images you add, the longer it can take your website to load. Meanwhile, slow load times drive customers away. So, what’s a vendor to do?

Before you start deleting photographs, take a moment to learn how to compress your images for faster load times. This simple tip will ensure quicker page loading, while retaining the quality of your images. Some site builders even include this functionality. If you are shopping around for a new site builder, start by leveraging an enterprise ecommerce solutions comparison to see if this innovation is included.

Restart Your Sales Cycle

Last but not least, you’ll want to find a way to put shoppers back into the sales cycle. This can be done in a few ways. The first is to include a social media button on every page of your website in a highly visible location. Urge your customers to follow you to catch up on the latest products releases and sales. Similarly, you should encourage them to sign up for your email subscription list to enjoy exclusive coupons and discounts.

These voluntarily marketing schemes are easy to employ because shoppers want to hear from your brand. It’s a low-pressure way to follow up with your buyers in hopes of turning them into lifelong customers.

These are just a few of the basics. But whether you’ve been in the game for five-plus years or just a few months, these tips should aid you in your efforts toward establishing a functional ecommerce site.

Developers invest significant time and resources into creating apps that are highly functional and appealing to users. But marketing is the missing link between your product and the world at large. Without the best app marketing strategy in your corner, your app risks falling by the wayside in increasingly crowded mobile app marketplaces. After all, there are millions of apps vying for mobile users’ attention these days.

Driving installs—and, more importantly, meaningful engagement—is a matter of connecting with the right users at the right time in the right ways. Here are a few app marketing strategies to consider before launching your app. 

QR Codes

At their best, Quick Response (QR) codes “ideally act as shortcuts for getting valuable information into the hands of your customers and prospects.” However, it’s important to make sure your usage of QR codes actually simplifies the user’s journey by taking them to a relevant place within your app. In mobile app marketing, QR codes often transport mobile device users to an install screen.

Many marketers feel QR codes have already experienced their rise and fall in prominence. It is worth noting Apple began building in the QR code scanner as a native component of the Camera application, making it more intuitive for iOS users to scan them. Even so, QR codes are far from the most cutting-edge approach to mobile app marketing available today. 

Cost-Per-Install (CPI) Campaign

Put simply, running a Cost-Per-Install (CPI) paid mobile app marketing campaign means you will pay each time someone taps your ad and subsequently installs your app. The primary advantage of this approach is that it’s easy to track—each install results in X amount of additional ad spend. If the acquisition cost is less than the projected lifetime value of an app user under a CPI model, it makes at least some financial sense to pursue this method.

In one survey, over half of app developers (52 percent) chose CPI as their preferred user acquisition model. Unfortunately, data actually shows that many of the users acquired via CPI are “astonishingly low value.” This is because mobile users tend to install apps and use them a handful of times—or none at all. This is especially true in our current marketplace in which many apps use a “freemium” pricing model which encourages users to download apps because there’s no risk.

So, what’s a better alternative? 

Cost-Per-Action (CPA) Campaign

Mobile analytics companies offering CPA acquisition focus more on post-install engagement than installs themselves. To start, this strategy promotes targeting mobile users most likely to engage based on the fact they share characteristics with already active app users. Showing these promising users dynamic advertisements personalized to their demographics, OS and more aims to drive meaningful installs.

But most importantly, marketers pay only when these users engage in desirable actions like creating an account or making an in-app purchase. Unlike CPI, this means you will not end up paying for people to install your app initially and forget about it before further engaging. This tends to boost the lifetime value of your users, which is an important metric in monetizing a modern app.

 App Store Optimization

App Store Optimization (ASO) is a marketing strategy so simple it’s actually easy to overlook. In a world where 63 percent of mobile users discover new apps via “general browsing in an app store,” it’s important to make sure your app is findable and appealing at first sight.

Here are the basics of ASO:

• Title: Should be readable and contain the highest-trafficked keyword related to your app.
• Description: Should be clear, laying out what value your app provides to users.
• Icon: Should convey recognizable branding at first glance.
• Screenshots: Should display your app’s most important features and functionalities.

A combination of the best app marketing strategies, like CPA user acquisition plus ASO, will help you monetize your app through meaningful engagement.