E-commerce New Years resolutions

Four key points to focus on in 2017

The end of the year is the time for reflection, especially for your ecommerce site. The best way to plan for the new year is to review your annual data and find your strengths and weaknesses to determine where to focus your efforts, and which investments will have the highest ROI. Here are four key points to focus on and analyze going into the new year:

Are you addressing the increasing use of mobile traffic?

It’s no secret that mobile usage is on the rise, and if your site is not set up for mobile use, you’re missing out. But it’s not as simple as that. While people are using their smartphones more and more, the conversion rate on average from desktops is still three times higher. The two key reports to look at are how much mobile traffic do you get? And, how does your mobile conversion rate compare to desktop?

These two reports are critical to understanding how your site is addressing the rise in mobile traffic.

Understanding trends is fundamental to addressing these reports. Two essential things to take into account are; Mobile users are impatient, per Search Engine Watch visitors on a desktop will stay 3 times longer, view more pages and have half the bounce rate. Additionally, 46% of mobile users reported said they were unlikely to return to a website if they had any trouble with it in the past.

They also tend to be younger than desktop users, and more receptive to branding. Keep in mind, although people ages 18-34 earn far less than the 35-55 group, they still spend the most on average of any age group online (Kids these days!).

By analyzing these reports and bearing in mind the demographic trends you can determine how you are keeping up with the mobile traffic and what you can do to optimize.

Understand where your traffic comes from

Tracking where your traffic is coming from can lead you to one of your easiest decisions. In preparing for the new year, check where your traffic is coming from and act upon it; For example, if you are getting a lot of traffic from Instagram consider integrating your ecommerce store with Instagram, if you are running a Magento site, it is easier than you think.

When analyzing your traffic sources to make such a decision, it’s important to compare a few details about these sources. First, which generate the highest user engagement. But that’s not enough; that must be compared with which source brings in the most revenue. Additionally, you’ll want to see which have the highest conversion rate vs. the lowest and which determine which drive the highest value transactions.

With this information in place, you can play to your strengths, find the source that is driving optimized traffic and determine what you can do to replicate that experience across other channels and mediums.

Are you keeping up with Google?

Google keeps updating their algorithm, and your success depends on how well you keep up with them.  Google is putting a heavy premium on site performance, and they are rolling out their mobile first index experiment right in time for 2017; This year it is time focus on optimizing your site performance.

Learn to make your site faster, speed matters. People like fast sites, so Google is making the site speed a ranking factor, so how fast your site is plays a role in your SEO.

You’ll also want to clean up your site; all missing files generate a 404 error and you will pay the price. Broken Link Check and  Screaming Frog are great tools to run your website through to find these errors.

There has never been a more important time to keep up with Google. Make 2017 the year you stay ahead by optimizing your site’s performance.

Are you remarketing to your customers?

There are plenty of marketing strategies to help your client base grow, but it is extremely important that you retain your foundation, your customers. Repeat clients are the backbone of a profitable businesses; according to SumAll, businesses with 40% repeat customers generated nearly 50% more revenue than similar businesses with only a 10% repeat customers.

How you target them makes or breaks your success. Loyalty and rewards programs have been proven to be essential to client retention and are becoming part of the supporting brand and shopping experience. Sweet Tooth is an ecommerce loyalty platform to build a loyalty program online.

Another method is taking data-driven marketing actions. Springbot turns your store’s data into actionable marketing campaigns by tracking the results and helps you get smarter and smarter with each marketing action you take. They analyze your demographic, social, purchase data and revenue in real-time, helping turn every visit to into a valuable data getting you closer to a sale.

So, before the ball drops and the new year is here, taking these few steps will help you usher in your most productive year yet. Cheers to a new year!