Will online stores completely replace brick-and-mortar stores?

E-commerce through online stores has been taking market share previously dominated by brick-and-mortar stores. But what does this mean for their future?

Tips for boosting your conversions in 2021

Building and running an online business successfully takes a lot. It therefor becomes extra more frustrating when someone leaves your shop without buying anything, whether you are getting them via content marketing, paid ads, or any other sources. A high traffic site is worthless if visitors are not converting into loyal customers. This is why optimizing your website, landing pages and ad copies is important. Understanding your conversions rates is the first step to your e-commerce site’s success. An e-commerce conversion is recorded when a desired event occurred on your site. This is more often a sale, however, it might be sometimes adding products to cart or signing up for a newsletter. All these actions encourage your leads to go through the site’s sales funnel. Some of the most common conversion metrics for an e-commerce website include: purchase from the site adding products to the cart adding an item to the wishlist signup for newsletter social media shares any KPI your business counts valuable By calculating the conversion rate based on these attributes you can understand if your strategies correspond with your company’s goal or if it needs to be changed. Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) refers to how effectively you convert your website visitors into paying customers, leads, or other metrics by the actions they take on your site. CRO is only one metric among many that can—and do—determine the success of your website, and a high conversion rate does not necessarily equal business success. After all, a website that has had only one visitor would have a conversion rate of 100% if that visitor converted, but a single conversion will not keep the doors open. Relevancy, relationship, your business vertical, cost of your product, cost-to-value ratio, copywriting and user experience all influence your conversion rate. Hierarchy of conversions Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, CRO has a hierarchy of conversions. The basic functionality of your website makes up the foundational layer and runs all the way up to the most specific CRO tweaks and adjustments. To quickly run through the different steps in the CRO hierarchy starting at the bottom and working our way to the top. Is your site functional, accessible, usable/user-friendly, intuitive and persuasive? When optimising your site for conversions, it’s important to start with the first step (functional) and make sure that is fully covered, before moving on to the next step and so on. Once you have these basic needs covered, you can apply the following tips to further increase your CRO: Communicate your value proposition – This should clearly communicate the benefit, or value, that the product or service in question will provide. You want to make your website visitors feel like they want what you offer. Improve page speed – Page speed is a prominent part of the core web vitals that Google intends to add to their existing search signals. Remove unnecessary formatting and properly size and format your page images to ensure your page is ready when your customers want it. Streamline page design – Distractions can stop your customers’ journey to the check-out page dead in its tracks, so don’t bombard your page visitors with too much at once! An efficient, streamlined page design not only looks more professional but also makes your customers feel like they’re in control of their site navigation. Mobile-first strategy – Assume your customers will buy using their mobile devices and then design your site and strategy accordingly. A site that’s attractive and easy to navigate on mobile puts you in a prime position the moment your potential customers are ready. A/B test your messaging – The words you use on your site can have a huge impact on your conversion rate. The language you use must speak to your ideal customers and demonstrate an authoritative understanding, not just of your brand and product or service, but of their needs as customers. Social proof – social proof is merely people doing what they see other people doing. It’s why we’re more likely to try a new restaurant if we see that many others are eating there. Make testimonials and positive user reviews readily available and visible on your site to let potential customers know they’re not in uncharted waters.   Happy selling! The Publisher Management Team

2020 the year that e-commerce explodes?

If it scares you to think that (e-commerce wise), everything you’ve planned, worked on, sacrificed and hoped for in 2020, depends on what happens in the next 35 days, it’s because it is. The end of October is upon us and with exactly 35 days to the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, it’s time for online businesses to shift into top gear, put on those running shoes and  successfully execute what is left of their 2020 marketing plan. Personally, I find it hard to re-focus my mind on Christmas and the holiday season. The last 7 months have felt similar to a black hole swollowed up a big chunk of the year, and now we’re fast-forwarding to the busiest online shopping time of the year. But there is some good news. Analysts predict that 2020 will be the year that e-commerce explodes. “For the last four years, e-commerce growth has averaged between 13% to 17% increase, and last year it was up 14.7%. This year it will go ballistic, somewhere around 25% and it may go higher,” says Rod Sides, Deloitte’s vice chairman and U.S. leader retail and distribution. Given the uncertain state of the Covid infection rates, many people still plan to stay home (or close to home) this year for the holidays, which means that money will be diverted towards buying gifts, tech and home improvement items. Even those affected by the economic downturn said in a survey that they still plan to spend as much or more than they did last year. Of course this expected boom in online shopping will put retailers’ online strategies to the test. Those that use real-time data to understand individual consumer preferences, make changes the data shows are needed, and effectively leverage multiple channels will be much more successful in securing consumer spend this holiday season. Customers are demanding personalized engagement and get increasingly frustrated with retailers sending them offers for a recently purchased item and irrelevant offers, or failing to recognize them as existing customers. The expected boom  will put a tremendous amount of pressure on retailer supply chains, as they need to shift resources out of stores and into fulfillment centers to process unexpectedly high numbers of orders. The physical supply chain may not be able to handle the flood of orders and making those deliveries. So while there lies a huge opportunity, there are also a number of big challenges for retailers, but if they get it right will reap the rewards this holiday season. Onwards and upwards! Daniel Gross – CEO

Tips for a successful Valentine’s campaign

You may feel like you’ve only just packed away the Christmas tree, but Valentine’s Day is exactly two weeks away and with the average South African expected to spend over R700 on gifts, publishers and advertisers alike will want their piece of the Valentine’s pie. Competition for eyeballs and customers is fierce, but there ARE things you can do to help your product or offer stand out from the crowd. Equally there are tactics that are best to avoid. We take a closer look at the Valentine’s do’s and don’ts. Do try Try “Him & Hers” messaging in your marketing. Men and women are different when it comes to Valentine’s, with men on average spending double what women spend. Product categories also differ with men spending more on jewellery and clothes, and women buying more dinners out. So make sure that your affiliate marketing uses different messaging to funnel men and women to different products on your e-commerce store. Do learn your social media demographics. If you use different social media channels for your affiliate marketing (and you should), knowing the breakdown of the audience on each platform can help you not only target your messaging, but showcase the right products for each group. Facebook skews slightly toward women as 83% of women are on Facebook, compared to 75% of men. Instagram has an even wider gap with 38% women to 26% men. Do adapt your messaging accordingly. Do feature gift idea lists. Shoppers are always short on time and love it when you make their lives easier. Maybe start with ’10 Valentine’s Gift ideas for Women’ and as you get closer to the day change it to ‘Forgot to buy a Valentine’s Gift?’. Don’t forget single people. Pet lovers often use Valentine’s Day as an excuse to treat their sources of unconditional love. Recently single people might be looking to treat themselves with some luxury items. And don’t forget the rise of Galentine’s Day, a fictional-now-actual alternate event that many women and men come together to celebrate in a communal and different way. Don’t only share popular products and services. Obviously, there are some products and services you won’t be able to escape mentioning in certain fields. But when you can, branch off and share things that not everyone else is talking about. Not only will this make you seem knowledgeable about your niche, but it also give you less competition. Don’t focus solely on sales. Of course you want to make money, but at the end of the day nobody wants to be ‘hard sold’ to. So although it might be tempting to simply promote, promote, promote, also keep in mind the kind of content that will get your readers coming back to you. Share things with them that they’ll find helpful, like how-to guides or insider tips. Happy selling! The Publisher Team