11 Ways To Grow Your E-commerce Site

For small to medium market businesses, eCommerce is a great opportunity to enhance both your brand and your bottom line.

Even if your store sells unique and amazing products, that doesn’t mean your products will sell themselves online. Making sure your store grows in a monthly basis is another key task that you, as the store owner, need to be responsible for. These 11 optimization breakdowns should guide you through getting your first hundred customers.

CRO — Conversion Rate Optimization

One of my favorite topics, conversion rate optimization is all about moving the needle higher on your site’s KPIs (key performance indicators). A/B and multivariate testing is key to CRO, but the strategy behind what is tested is critical. It involves a deep understanding of user behavior and expectations, with a healthy hatred towards relying on gut-feel to make decisions.

WAO — Web Analytics Optimization

While tools come equipped with a number of metrics and reports out of the box, did you know your web analytics should also be optimized? A web analytics audit by a professional can help uncover sources of data inaccuracy like inaccurate cookies, rogue caching servers and tagging issues which can be overstating or understating your data. A strategist can help you set up the proper goal funnels and data filters, create custom reports that matter, and help work through complex issues like subdomain tracking and connecting data from other systems.

WPO / WSO — Web Performance Optimization / Web Site Optimization

So nice, they named it twice. Whatever you choose to call it, performance optimization is often the “forgotten” piece of the optimization pie. WPO is a technical job, requiring ninja coding and IT skills. It may also involve third party services like CDNs (content delivery networks) to cache content for quicker retrieval. While it’s not marketing per se, it’s essential to it. No matter how souped-up or stripped down your landing page is, a slow page load speed will quickly send visitors elsewhere. As a marketer, you need to know what to ask your IT counterparts to help you with

EMO — Email Marketing Optimization

This form asks customers by email to Google a specific keyword and click on the company’s search result in exchange for a %X discount. The premise is that click through rate is a ranking factor for organic SEO, and such a campaign is a way to boost it. Hey, it could work!

PRO — Product Returns Optimization

Okay, I admit I totally contrived this discipline — it’s an acronym to describe a discipline I believe should exist. We always talk about driving sales, but what about preventing sales that will only be returned? There are at least 6 ways you can go PRO: product descriptions, images, video, customer reviews, site tools and features and customer support.

CSO — Customer Service Optimization

Again, a fabricated acronym — but let’s face it, most e-business’ customer service can be improved — whether in the call center or on-site through self service and FAQ availability and usability. And customer surveys are to CSO as web analytics is to CRO.

APO — Affiliate Program Optimization

Though I don’t hear the industry labeling “affiliate program optimization” with the acronym APO — it has a nice ring to it, no?

APO is continuous improvement that involves recruiting the right affiliates, improving relationships with your top referrers, combatting spam and parasite-ware, properly attributing multi-touch sales, developing and testing offers and creative, and so on.

SSO — Site Search Optimization

Site search is another often overlooked area of optimization, but it could provide greater gains than even landing page improvements, depending on the condition of your tool. Even if you have a rock-solid thesaurus and never show zero-results found, testing and improving the presentation of your results, and their ranking order and refinement options can go a long way.

PSO — Paid Search Optimization

Like SEO, PSO (more commonly called SEM for search engine marketing) requires an ongoing strategy with several activities at once. After creating a proper account structure and configuring appropriate settings like geographic and device targeting, there are ongoing tasks like keyword research (including negative keywords), bid management, copywriting and landing page testing, analysis and keeping up with the moving target that is search engine advertising that must be mastered.

PSO is no DIY task — whether your team is in-house or outsourced, practitioners must be experts. But even if you’re not doing the hands-on account management, it’s important you understand the industry and best practices so you can better evaluate if your SEMs are doing a good job.

DFO — Data Feed Optimization

Shopping engines are search properties of their own and can send higher converting traffic than organic and paid search, since referred visitors have already seen your product image and price vis-a-vis competitors’. But shopping engines require their own TLC. Enter DFO — the practice of managing data feeds across various engines (each with their own requirements, traffic mixes and click prices) whilst optimizing for each.

MCO — Mobile Commerce Optimization

Now more than ever e-commerce businesses are interested in mobile commerce, as consumers flock to tablets and smartphones and are becoming more comfortable with the mobile web. But it’s not as easy as changing a few style sheets to get your site to render nicely on mobile phones. Optimization requires measurement (mobile analytics), strategy (prioritizing devices and platforms, designing unique mobile features and functionality) and development (mobile sites and/or applications for various devices).