E-commerce Marketing Tips for Optimizing Stages of the Buying Cycle

People who want to have a successful online business will learn a lot from e-commerce marketing news. Take this article from Entrepreneur (@Entrepreneur) explaining the buying cycle and how it can be used as a guide to optimize an e-commerce site. It’s a good idea to read the full article but here’s a summary.

The Buying Cycle

Every customer goes through the buying cycle when purchasing an item. The cycle goes like this: awareness of needs, assessment of alternatives, alleviation of risk, decision, achievement of results, and then back at the beginning. A person who visits an online shop and ends up not buying appears to have left the cycle while on one of the stages. By studying what happens in every stage, the business owner can understand customer behavior and optimize the site accordingly.

Four Tips for a Successful Online Business

An ecommerce site can be adjusted in many ways to have the best chance of success. A business owner can use e-commerce marketing tips to enhance the success rate of the site. Another article from Entrepreneur presents four tips to make a profitable online business.

Maintaining a list. An email list is a valuable asset for any online business owner but doesn’t get a lot of attention. Building and maintaining a list are activities that should not be forgotten. The good thing is that many tools are accessible to make this not only easy to do but also easy to integrate into online shopping mechanisms, such as Mail Chimp and Infusionsoft.

Don’t set aside SEO. Search engine optimization help drive traffic to the site and this means more potential customers. When people are searching for products over the internet, they are well into the needs awareness stage. As the results come in, they are now assessing alternatives and those at the top of the results are more likely to be checked out.

Testing. Testing allows a business owner to know what works and what doesn’t, what to enhance and what to let go. Through continuous testing, the overall marketing strategy can be adjusted and refined over time.

Make the site usable. A confusing site will drive away potential consumers. The buying process must be clear and easy. Many online businesses lose customers at the checkout. People already presented an intent to buy but left because the process isn’t streamlined enough.

Following the above tips will improve the chances for success of an online business. Keeping updated with the latest insights from information resources, like Marketing Digest, also help.

 

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