Online commerce is all about traffic flow. The more people you direct to your product page, the higher the conversion numbers, the higher the sales. But standing out can be difficult, whether you’ve got an Etsy or Amazon store or you’ve got your own original ecommerce site. Competition is fierce—and this is true for both online and physical commerce. Are marketing strategies like ecommerce video production and ad buying worth investing in? We look at the numbers to see what’s proven.
PRODUCT VIDEOS
Perhaps one of the biggest blocks for online ecommerce and retail is uncertainty. Aside from shipping restrictions or complicated checkout processes, incomplete product information is one of the main reasons behind abandoned shopping carts. People won’t buy a product if they don’t know the company, don’t know how the product works, or don’t know how it will work for them.
The answer? Product videos. According to Ecommerce Nation, one of “the most effective ways of increasing e-commerce conversion rate is by addressing the uncertainty through product videos.” Investing in ecommerce video production can boost the purchasing confidence of 52% of shoppers who visit your store, making them more likely to place an order. In fact, according to Adobe, people who watch videos are 1.8x more likely to purchase something compared to those who don’t or can’t engage in video content.
As far as preference goes, the answer is obvious. If video is available, 60% of visitors admit they would watch it before reading static text. You don’t necessarily have to get rid of all your textual descriptions, but statistics show that including a product video may be in your best interest.
BUY MISSPELLS OF YOUR DOMAIN
Suggested by TrustaFact Co-founder Bryan Lovgren, buying misspells of your domain could dramatically increase traffic. It’s not uncommon for people to misspell a brand they’ve just heard of or have read about in passing. Unless your brand is on the level of Nike, Adidas (and we would argue that some could still misspell Adidas as Addidas or Adiddas or thereabouts), Sony, or Samsung, the chances of people spelling it right on the first try are pretty low.
Think of all the possible ways people could misspell your brand name. Owning their domains means that you can easily reroute typos to the correct page. Lovgren uses swimwear line LimeRicki as an example. Let’s say the common misspellings of this would be “LimeRicky,” “LimeRikki,” “TheLimeRicky,” and “Limricky.” If each misspelled domain gets even just fifteen visits every month and you own those four extra domains, you’ve increased traffic by 60 views each month.
That may not seem like a lot at first, but that’s 720 extra views every year. If your conversion average is 1 in every 10 visits, that’s 72 new clients. Now up the ante by buying 10 possible misspelled domains. That’s 150 extra each month, 1,800 every year, and 180 new customers to add to your base.
USE APPS TO PROMOTE AWARENESS AND DRIVE TRAFFIC
In 2016, Instagram added the possibility for users to shop directly via their Instagram feed. It recommends products and items based on the user’s likes, follows, and hashtags. Shopping is as easy as clicking on the ad to be redirected to the ecommerce website or product page. Pinterest did something similar by introducing Buyable Pins, which allows people to buy products “without ever leaving Pinterest.”
Using apps like Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram can significantly drive your ecommerce sales forward. Pinterest alone already has some pretty strong statistics going for it, with the order value of their sales averaging $50 per sale and 93% of their users using the platform to plan purchases. According to Shopify, Pinterest also happens to be the 2nd overall source for all social media traffic to Shopify stores.
Online retail will always be a highly competitive industry. Driving traffic to your website is hard, but it’s definitely not impossible. Investing in marketing strategies such as ecommerce video production, social media apps, and buying misspelled domains may seem to cost a lot upfront, but statistics prove these moves are definitely worth it in the end.
