How to increase traffic to your e-commerce site? Learn from the top players.
Internet giant Google and Singapore state investment firm Temasek Holdings predicts Singapore’s e-commerce market will be more than 5X which is US$5.4 billion (S$7.5 billion) within a decade.
Sailing in the same boat as Singapore are five other South-east Asian countries — Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia, forecasted to have e-commerce markets worth more than US$5 billion by 2025.
The primary factor enabling this surge is, of course, the rise of Digital. Considering the website of each of the E-commerce stores are their storefronts, how does one measure its digital performance and improve them to stay ahead of the game?
Apart from Amazon and Taobao, the true local sites like Qoo10, Lazada, Carousell and Hardwarezone.com shows that website traffic drops as bounce rate increases along with reduced daily page-views per visitor and daily time on site.
If you are an e-commerce SME or start-up, the technique to sustain digital growth can be quite complex.
You might like to keep in mind some key performance indicators if you want to thrive in this business (I will come to it later in this article).
Definitely, there are lessons to learn from the e-commerce giants who are getting extremely aggressive to consolidate their position in this region.
Future trend predicts that these players will work towards strengthening their ecosystem — lines will blur between B2Cs, marketplaces, tech companies, mobile wallets, logistics & supply chain and social media to some extent.
These changes will definitely impact your business at whatever level it might be now. Some ground rules: Your business should be very strong digitally if you cannot do that in-house find a partner who can help you grow.
Now lets come to the real question — How to increase web traffic?
1. Increase Search Visits
2. Reduce Bounce Rate
3. Increase Unique Page views per Visitors
4. Increase Daily Time on Site
Apart from these we also think that site’s backlinks plays a major role but let’s just keep it out of the discussion for today.
Now let’s just try to answer, how do we control these metrics and improve web traffic?
Improve the way your business or the products appear in the search engine. Focus on SEO for a more sustainable approach. SEO can work really well if you know who are the target consumers or else your effort might be wasted in the huge ocean of services delivered online.
Who is my target audience?
This is probably the very first step in shaping your business model — B2B, B2C or B2E. The next step would be targeting them online and when you find them, make sure that they spend more time on your website. Reduce your website’s bounce rate with targeted traffic.
Social Media is not just a platform to generate buzz or promote your company but it is the powerhouse of user data. If this data can be accumulated and analyzed in the right way you can unlock the massive potential to understand, predict and optimize the way the business is functioning.
Social Media Intelligence and Analytics tools are the go-to solutions and can be the starting point to target your customer and plan online promotions, especially in a B2C business model.
Always target to engage your consumers. The first impression of your website might just be the impression that remains in consumer memory for a long time. So work hard to make sure your website is designed properly — the UI (user interface) and UX (user experience) can not only attract new consumers but make your existing consumers come back for more. While doing all these do not forget the absolute necessity to be seamless and efficient on mobile platforms. The website should be responsive and it would probably be judicious to invest in mobile applications.
Brick-and-mortar retail is big in SE Asia and e-commerce penetration is still low compared to China and US. Many e-commerce businesses are going off-line by having full-fledged physical stores or pop-up stores or click-and-collect centres.
Cash is still king and consumers look for multiple options like cash-on-delivery (COD) and mobile wallets. There are also alternatives like GrabPay or Go-Pay.
All these strategies need constant improvement and development, so while you are planning these be farsighted to develop an automated format that will not only reduce the burden of constant supervision but also will be much accurate and real-time during future iterations.
Remember, a lot more can be done but my suggestion is to keep your basics right and plan judiciously in advance.
