As we wind down this calendar year, our ecommerce focused blog featured important content on:
- 8 Ways to Decrease Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates
- 3 Ways to Recover Abandoned Carts
- Marketing Orchestration
- Fraud Prevention Strategy
Look out for our Top Ten Posts of 2013 and 2014 Ecommerce Predictions coming soon. For now, please enjoy this great content from blogs across the Internet. Topics include improving product pages, online sales tax, pricing strategies and general digital marketing advice for 2014.
Conversion Rate Optimization: Product Pages
What makes great ecommerce product page copy? | Econsultancy
Product pages are the link between your marketing efforts and your checkout process. While your email, search engine and social media marketing campaigns provide information about your product and persuade customers that they want it, and your checkout process / shopping cart indicates that they really want it, product pages are the intermediate space where the decision to convert is often made.
“Paying attention to product page copy can help improve conversions rates, as better copy can be more informative and persuasive.”
How do you improve your product pages? One piece of practical advice offered in this post is to first identify your most popular pages, the ones that really convert and receive a high volume of traffic. Now change the metadata on those pages. Then monitor the traffic and conversion rates for those pages and see if they receive higher amounts of traffic and produce higher conversion rates after the change.
The results of this test will give you some insight into which keywords and phrases are best for you or lead you to more success or drive revenues. The results of this test will also pave the way for future success when you run tests to bring deeper pages to the fore.
Another important test to run is the position and size of your product page copy. What is the ratio of font size to product image? Should product descriptions be limited to, for example, 140 characters or 100 words? This same web content manager notes however that, ” … product copy nowadays probably ranks lower in terms of influence than images, videos, reviews and ratings, pricing, promotion, page layout, delivery and returns info.”
Online Sales Tax
Guide to State Sales Tax Changes in the New Year (January 2014) | Avalara Blog
“52% of accounting professionals surveyed said that completing a marathon would be easier to accomplish than completely understanding sales tax laws for their company.”
Death and taxes, right? No one has ever avoided either. Well, many US ecommerce merchants avoided the latter for quite some time, relying on tax free sales to put many a brick and mortar company out of business. With the approval of the Marketplace Fairness Act by the US Senate in May of 2013 and the growing authority of the Streamlined Sales Tax Project, your bottom line may soon feel the effects of the changing online sales tax landscape.
This blog post from Avalara provides a list of different US states who are updating their online tax laws. Make sure your ecommerce platform can handle these changes to your shopping cart and checkout process efficiently and correctly.
Mobile Apps and Subscription Pricing Strategies
A Missing Revenue Stream From Mobile Apps – NYTimes.com
This piece from New York Times illustrates the troubling issue of switching business models, especially for popular mobile apps. It tells the story of a software merchant who was relying on a single upfront payment to sell her product. Eventually, due to development and maintenance costs, she turned her product into a freemium subscription service.
However, it’s important to understand that freemium is not a business, but rather a marketing tactic. The important thing for software merchants to do is evaluate their costs and examine the market to see if freemium is right for their business.
Online Marketing
Online Marketing Megatrends in 2014 (Tim Ash) | Monetate
2013 was the year of identifying which channel your customers were using and understanding the best content and form for a marketing message in that channel.
That trend will continue in 2014. The ability to more precisely understand what your customers want is stronger now then ever. This year will find video advertisements occupying Facebook feeds as they continue to evolve and search for the right way to connect buyers and sellers. Google results will also evolve and display richer results.
Tim says digital markers should no longer rely on keywords as the major influence to help people find your important pages. Rather focus on content that answers customer questions. This tactic will help your pages display prominently in Google’s SERP following the Hummingbird update. Also, without the ability to analyze keywords through Google Analytics, site search data is more important for finding out what things site visitors are looking for.
