Two strategies that everyone with a catalog must implement
Now that the holiday rush is behind us, it is time to take stock of the holiday sales season. Reportedly around 121 million shoppers were active online on Cyber Monday. Let’s say that only 100 million ended up shopping – it’s still a staggering number. And hopefully your organization captured some of that business – considering you sell to consumers. And if you are a B2B company of course this conversation does not apply to you.
There are several ways to improve sales. In this blog post, let’s discuss two methods that are easy to implement. Every company should have a strategy to leverage the below two strategies. And if you are in a competitive consumer market, these are table stakes. The only ones that can go slow are b2b businesses that don’t exactly rely on sales coming in on cyber monday. So here we go:
Smartphones are the no.1 platform
In 2015, smart phones reached yet another major milestone. Now they are the number one platform that consumers used to make online purchases according to NRF. https://nrf.com/media/press-releases/shoporg-forrester-research-find-smartphones-top-tablets-driver-of-sales-traffic So is your e-commerce store mobile optimized? If not, this project better be a top priority. As the article notes, we’ve consulted with several companies and they have had similar growth from mobile users. Going about not loosing your customers from smart phones, there are two ways to handle this challenge of smart phones:
1. Build your own app.
As the study about points out, the user experience design for a small form factor is just as important – and this is the main reason why the top 100 online retailers have their own apps. Does this mean you have to create your own app for online shoppers? Not necessarily. As a matter of fact if you are a small operation as most of the readers of this blog are, having your own app might be a hindrance when consumers are suffering from an app overload.
2. Build a responsive store front.
As much as this does not come as a surprise, desktops and tablets are just as important. Hence, the reason why your site has to be responsive. Responsive sites use CSS and JavaScript technologies to transform the same site to work with different form factors.
Landing pages are a must
The one must for all catalogers is to improve the quality of their list in order to increase circulation and hence sales. And one way to do that is to improve the quality of landing pages. If you are a brand or a manufacturer, your landing pages can be derived from. Since conversion of your catalog highly depends on the quality of the list you are using, it is imperative that understanding customer demographics and behavior is crucial. And of course the quality of your list can be vastly improved with a few tricks that are necessary for every cataloger.
Here are the things you can do to build your landing pages
1. If you are a brand or a manufacturer, create landing pages for your top 80% of revenue. In most cases, only 20% of your products hit the 80% revenue based on the 80-20 rule.
2. If you are a retailer or an e-tailer, create landing pages for your top brands and your top categories.
Now that we know what products or categories to target on the landing pages, what remains is what to do and what not to do on the landing pages. If you are not familiar ,here is a short list:
1. Use a form to capture your customer information such as email.
2. Capture as few fields as you need but as many as you can get away with.
3. Remove other links from this page
4. Have a call to action
Extra Tip: If you want to improve on the performance of the above, make some room to do A/B testing. This will allow you to better understand your customers preferences and further fine tune your conversion!
In a different blog post, we will cover some well designed landing pages in the industry.
With the tips provided above, you have two strategies when implemented correctly will have a positive impact in 2016. As always if you have comments or questions, email me!