Deciding to take a business online is always exciting. Over the last decade, online customer base has increased leaps and bounds. Therefore, client satisfaction, marketing strategies and staying on top of search engines has become equally crucial. There is so much to plan, manage and prioritise. However, e-commerce is vast.
Therefore, before we delve into details, let us first familiarise ourselves with a comprehensive vocabulary of terms every online business should know. We have put together a list that covers some crucial key e-commerce terms to help you get started.
B2B
An exchange of products or services between two businesses, through a commercial transaction-based process is what entails the “Business-to-Business” umbrella. Now let’s say this is a business deal between two software companies or even hiring professionals for designated roles. The B2B model focuses on providing products or services; so whether it is a food manufacturer purchasing salt or an app designer working for a big corp; it is all B2B. B2B can be great way to start your own business, be your own boss; all while making great profits.
B2C
Tell me, who doesn’t shop online? The model of doing business directly with the customers, but using the online medium is the only difference between a transaction at POS(point of sale) and e-commerce B2C. In reality, whether you shop at a mall or online, it is B2C. However, in the e-commerce B2C world, if the infrastructure is not built properly, you will run out of business sooner than you think. Customers respond well to a standard order processing system. Anything new and you scare them away. When it comes to this form of online sales strategy it has to be simple, flexible, agile and the most important – quick! B2C e-commerce is undoubtedly the fastest growing sectors of economy and those who have gotten it right are making big bucks.
Blog
Raise your hand if you want more visitors. Well, who doesn’t want that? A website covers all the information related to what you do, offer and who you are. However, this remains static. Now ask yourself what you should be doing to engage more customers to your website. Perhaps, create quality content and keep it updated often? Bingo! But there’s more. Let’s see why blogging is the most cost-effective marketing tool –
A blog post equals to an indexed page on the SEO engine. Which means, another opportunity for you to show up on the search engines.
- Blogs helps drive traffic to website.
- Blog content helps social media presence ongoing.
- Blogs help convert traffic into leads.
- Blogs help establish brand awareness and loyalty.
Need more reasons why you should start adding blogs to your website?
Keywords
Search engines function on keywords. So they have to be what customers are searching for. For instance, if you are specifically selling eggless cakes ensure that your website or blog contains popular keywords like “eggless cakes”, “eggless cakes in pune”, “eggless cakes in Patel’s bakery”, “eggless cake recipe”, “cake without eggs”, “layered eggless cake”, “doll shaped eggless cake”, etc. These keywords are used as metadata to describe images, text documents, database records and web pages. So you see; we are making sure that we cover the phrases or words that best describe who you are, where you are located and come up in search results that best describe what you do.
Long Tail Keywords
It is true that using long tail keywords are the best way to connect with customers. Because it is those three to four keyword phrases that are very specific to what you are selling. You must have observed that when you specify exactly what you are looking for, search results are more filtered and accurate than the ones obtained by searching with a single word. For instance “furniture” is a very generic word. But if you specify “contemporary organic wood art-deco”, you are likely to pop-up in the first few search results. Which means if customers get what they are specifically looking for, they are actually going to buy it. Roughly, 70% of page views are the direct result of long-tailed keywords.
SEO
Your website is always associated with keywords. Keywords can be one-word to phrases or anything relevant to your body of work. SEO is a set of techniques, primarily a disciple, employed to achieve best ratings on search engines through the use of specific keywords. The SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) game is all about online visibility and how to retain top score. A high ranking is crucial for any businesses online success.
Web Analytics
Web analytics is a simple task of analyzing data through software that gives a thorough understanding of how your social media accounts, website, ad campaigns and other marketing initiatives are performing. Some popular analytics tools are Google Analytics, Quill Engage, Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, SumAll, Clicky, Crazy Egg, FollowerWonk, etc. For instance, Google Analytics service generates data about the website’s traffic, traffic sources, conversions and sales.
Viral Content
Anything that instantly becomes an online sensation is called viral content. It could be anything from an outrageous video to image to messages or any other form of infographics. There are number of ways to create viral content and keep users attention engaged. Some off the hand tips could be an eye-catching title, emotionally charged content, illustrated texts, etc. Haven’t we seen enough of memes going viral within hours!?
Call-To-Action
Any content, image or text that encourages the reader to perform an action is CTA. Now you may want your readers or users to do anything; read the blog, attend an event, make a purchase, sign up for a discount, etc. Hence, your CTA buttons/text/images are inarguably the most important aspect of your website. Why? Because CTA improves conversion rates. It’s essentially a signpost letting users know what to do next. For instance, “Sign Up For Our Newsletter”, “Visit Our Shop Today” or “Click to Avail Discount” instantly triggers the brain to take that action. Without an eye-catchy CTA, users are likely to abandon the website failing to accomplish their task and your sales.
Bounce Rate
Haven’t we heard of this term enough already? But why is it so important? Bounce is the single-page session that implies a single request. This means you hit the page but left without doing anything further on the website. Think, is that what you want? Exiting your website without a CTA? Most web-owners fear a high bounce rate because it implies that your online strategy of increasing sales is collapsing. In website terms, higher the bounce rate means your goal for the page isn’t fulfilled. The ideal norm is to keep it low, for obvious reasons. Now you next question must be how is this calculated? So,
Bounce rate of a page = Total number of bounces on a page/ Total number of views on the page
General rule of thumb is –
80%+ is very bad
70 – 80% is poor
50 – 70% is average
30 – 50% is excellent
20% or below is likely a tracking error
Click Through Rate
Firstly, CTR helps retailers understand the effectiveness and performance of keywords, ads or email campaigns. Secondly, this percentage is a ratio calculated as clicks/impressions, i.e. clicks on a specific link or ad to the total number of visitors browsing through that page or ad. For example, if the ad is displayed 100 times and clicked upon 5 times, then the CTR is 0.5%. Across all industries, the average good click through rate is considered as 1.91% for a search ad and 0.35% for a display ad.
Pay Per Click
Noticed the ads that appear alongside Google search results? If yes, then you are already familiar with PPC; interchangeably also known as cost per click. PPC is essentially a way of buying visits to the website. It’s really hard to earn website visits organically; hence it is smarter to invest in driving traffic through PPC than waiting for organic clicks. How does it work? When someone clicks on your ad, you pay the current cost-per-click from your budget. It is really important to set the objective of your campaign and choose from effective platforms like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, etc. for your targeted audience.
Cost Per Click
Also known as cost pay per click is an online advertising model used to drive traffic to websites. This cost is what advertisers pay to publishers for each click in the PPC campaign. PPC and CPC are sometimes interchangeably used.
Social Media
Statistics say that 84% of B2B businesses use social media in some form for promotions. Social media is the most cost efficient and compelling way to promote and advertise your business. In the age of thorough competition, you cannot ask what is social media going to do for me but rather leverage on the fact how much can I explore social media! Social media is the quickest way to reach customers through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media channels. Using social media boosts your sites SEO ranking, drives traffic to your website, helps in building long-term relationships and helps you get noticed on a global platform. This means your customer could be sitting in any corner of the world and watching your business updates via his phone. That is, if you keep posting fresh and catchy content regularly.
Responsive Design
Customers are viewing on all kinds of technology platforms. So no matter the size of screen, your website must adapt to the resolution and give customers a positive viewing experience whenever they visit your site, on whichever device. Also, your site must be easy to read and navigate on mobile devices, laptops, iPads and any other handheld or desktop device. This way, customers tend to stay longer than abandoning the page or navigating to your competitor’s website. Oh, and by the way, Google does let users know if the website is mobile friendly or not. That’s a pretty good reason to ensure that the website is responsive, eh?
That’s a lot for one post! Stay tuned to know more on the web world terminologies. The next post in this series will be all about terms associated with technicalities of creating a website.