How to make your virtual store profitable and get your visitors interested and become real customers? In this post you will understand which ways you can lead your visitors towards a purchase decision.
Working exclusively with content marketing strategies for e-commerce for the past year, I have frequently received the following question: Gabriela, of the people who visit my content, how many actually become customers?
That is, what is the conversion rate of blog visitors to customers?
This is a complex question.
After all, the answer depends on the strategy of each virtual store, the type of business, the sales funnel, the way you direct your visitor throughout the content and how you generate enough confidence to make a purchase.
I would even give you the same answer if it were a physical store.
The objective of this post, before delving into specific metrics to accompany the conversion, is to help you understand what is the path traveled by visitors until the time of purchase.
What do virtual stores and physical stores have in common?
Let’s think together in two scenarios. I’ll give you the options and at the end I want you to answer which store probably has the largest number of sales at the end of the month:
1. The Buen Precio store is located in a little frequented street. Not many people go through the door of the store, and when someone finally enters, the seller is not very well prepared to attend, does not know how to answer questions, is inattentive and does not know how to indicate the best product for the customer.
2. The Hay de Todo store is on the busiest street in the city and also has a team of extremely trained vendors. When someone enters the store, the sellers are attentive to help, give advice on the products, share other people’s experiences and accompany the customer to the cashier to complete the purchase.
Which of the two do you think sells more at the end of the month? I hope you answered the Hay de Todo store.
Virtual stores have much more in common with physical stores than you imagine. Both need visibility and must offer good customer service, however, they are processes that happen in different ways.
How to build your store network in Google?
Think of Google as a city. The busiest streets are the keywords with the highest search volume, and the best sellers are the contents that help the customer the most when they buy.
For Google, the currency is knowledge. The most expensive land should be occupied by those who have the best information on a certain subject.
This means that at all times you must ask yourself if the page of your website is answering in a significant way the doubt of a potential consumer.
That is, if your website does not occupy good positions in the search engines, it has content that does not educate your buyer person, it has few ways for the visitor to go through it (it does not have links or banners on the pages of the site) and it is confusing Your sales force still has a lot to improve, right?
How to transform content into your best showcase?
Taking up the idea that Google is a city, each page of your website allows you to build at least one more store, perhaps in the center or on the periphery, depending on your authority and your investment,
But your website is limited in size, isn’t it? The size depends on the number of products and how much you can talk about each one.
When we talk about content published through the blog, and with a strong strategy behind them, we mean unlimited growth. In other words, each content adds a page within your website and each page is just another store that is built.
And the bigger your website is, the more chances you have to appear for that keyword with extremely high search volume.
Starting with a practical example, we can see in SEMrush the results of Barba Brava.
Despite the fact that the site is well indexed, the biggest gateway for the public from Google is through content: 73.39% of the traffic comes from the “blog.barbabrava.com.br” subdomain.
This happens precisely because this is much larger than the domain that depends only on the available products.
We can notice that size difference in Google, even when we compare the Rock Content institutional site with our own blog in Brazil.
It is much more common for someone to become a Rock Content customer through a search like “digital marketing” than searching directly on how to contract Rock Content services.
But, in addition to having good entrance doors, we need the visitor to maintain his interest until he becomes a customer. Therefore, there are other complementary strategies that must be applied.
How to boost your sales force?
Remember at the beginning, when we talk about having a good sales force?
It is necessary that the seller is ready to receive the customer and help him at the time of purchase, thereby increasing conversion and relationship with him.
So who knows maybe I’ll come back and buy again.
Once again, when we talk about a virtual store, your seller is the website itself and its content. Now that you have managed to get the visitor to enter, it is necessary to show them the way to purchase, for that:
1. Answer your client’s questions in the best way
Your content must have a purpose and ensure it. That is, if your client searched about how to choose a men’s shoe, answer any questions he may have on the subject! Present them with options for use, models and even the best environments to use the product.
Sometimes the visitor is not yet ready to buy, and therefore, it is important to have links within the content that lead them to understand more about related issues.
Look at an example in the following text:
Despite the success, some men do not know how to combine their footwear with their clothing. For this reason, we have prepared some tips, get to know them!
2. Produce strategic content
It is very important that your content answers an existing question.
Your content needs to have a strategic purpose for your company, and one of the ways to validate if it makes sense to write about a certain subject is asking the following question: is there a search volume for this keyword?
There are several tools to help you validate the hypothesis and even bring you new ideas. Some are: SEMrush , Google Keyword Planner and Keyword Tool .
3. Spread your content
The more people enter your content, the more you will show Google that you deserve to be in the center of the city, that is, in the top positions, for having valuable information.
Therefore, since you have built valuable content that responds to the doubts of your potential client, use all the contact points you have available to share it.
Social networks
Social networks are an excellent means of dissemination, since there you have an audience that showed interest in your brand. Take advantage also to drive that quality content through ads and do not stop talking to people there.
Email marketing
No one else can take thousands of emails from a brand, only with offers talking about the brand itself, right? Make it different!
Send some emails with valuable content for your audience.
Increase your authority on the subject and stay tuned to your visitors to discover what is important to them and not only to you.
To start, give the visitor the opportunity to subscribe to your newsletter once they enter the blog to read some content. You can put a CTA at the bottom of the page, a central banner, at the top or in the sidebar, for example. Hello Bar is a tool that can help you.
You can also send biweekly or monthly newsletters with the most successful content on the blog. And also some discount coupon to reward the followers of your content.
4. Show that you have a virtual store
In all content you must show that you also have the option of your virtual store, and that at any time the visitor can enter and make the purchase.
After all, the best seller is the one who shows the product at the right time.
For this, you must always invite or show that there is an action available for the visitor to do. This would be the CTA (call to action) , which can be created in different ways.
Here I will mention some of the most common for virtual stores.
Internal links
Remember when we talk about the links that can lead to related content in case the visitor still has doubts about it?
The same serves to invite to know the products.
For example, if Barba Brava did a content on the “use of beard oils”, it would be interesting for them to share the link so that the visitor enters the page of that product when the word is quoted, as in the example below.
Banners are called in the middle or at the end of the article and are more focused on sales.
Here at Rock Content, we use banners throughout our blog content (as you can see in this post), which bring good results for our conversion rate.
You can also display related products that may interest the person, or products purchased by people who had a similar interest to the visitor.
Each visitor will trace their own path within your website, but it is important that you show them the options clearly and help them along the path you have chosen.
To better understand how many people click on each CTA and the path they walk, you can put tracking codes on the CTAs.
5. Take advantage of the built relationship
You already interacted with the visitor, answered their doubts, offered a purchase opportunity and still he did not make the purchase.
What to do? Keep relating to him!
Your seller can’t give up on the first try, right? Send an email with a discount coupon for the first purchase or use remarketing strategies.
The bigger your store is in Google, the more important it is to maintain the relationship with your audience and maximize the chances of conversion.
Measure all results
One of the biggest benefits of working with a virtual store is that almost everything can be measured.
Test your Google Analytics strategy and define numerical objectives for each channel. Start validating which strategies bring you the most return.
In addition to understanding the main metrics of your virtual store, such as the conversion rate, its acquisition cost, you need to know how to measure the results that come from each channel.
So you can analyze your ROI (return on investment) much more effectively.
If you want to go deeper into the topic, I suggest the following reading: Multichannel attribution: understand the contribution of each of your marketing efforts .
Finally, do not think that because it is a virtual store, you only need to register the products correctly and have a good platform to start selling. Just like in the physical store, you need to be concerned with disclosure and good service.
Mainly focus on bringing the best information to your potential client and showing them which paths can be followed.
