Do you have an online store? Need to increase sales? It’s not easy.
You need to make your store impressive – and functional – to get money in the (virtual) till.
That means having great eCommerce tools.
You can’t run a successful eCommerce store without them. From inventory to payment gateways, it takes a lot of functionality to maximize sales volume.
So if you’re struggling to boost sales, investing in the best tools is probably the solution.
In this post, we’ll discuss 10 must-have eCommerce automation tools for every store.
They’re proven to be effective and will enhance your customer experience while increasing sales volume.
#1 Readability score checkers
How’s the content on your site? The best content needs to be easy to read and should have something important to say to your customers.
If customers can’t digest your content, then they aren’t going to make purchases.
But first – what do we mean by ‘content’?
We mean everything. The whole shebang.
Landing page copy, blog posts, and testimonials, sure. But also the stuff people forget – the text that appears when someone completes a form, the text in your footer… even the text on your 404 pages.
The keyword here is ‘digestible’.
High-quality content is great but visitors to your site don’t have the time to digest what the content means.
That’s where the readability score tool comes in. It’s vital to ensure that the content is very easy to understand.
People only give you a few seconds to sell to them.
A readability score will help you understand whether your content is understandable in the shortest time possible.
This is a sure way to boost sales and have visitors spending more time on your site. Here are the main features of a readability score tool:
● Analyzing text: The text analysis feature fixes the use of adverbs, correct use of passive voice eliminates jargon, and identifies unclear messages.
● Scans the entire website content
● Analyses the URL
● Rates emails
● Readable robots identify tests that need fixing saving time
● Evaluates your email campaign and returns suggestions for optimization
● Comes at annual and monthly prices
This kind of work is an important part of customer retention automation. After all, the majority of most eCommerce stores’ come from existing customers, not new ones!
#2 Canva
Canva is a graphic design tool that can help you to massively enhance the appearance of your site. Visibility is essential on any eCommerce platform.
Displaying and promoting your products requires a lot of attractive visual material. Most eCommerce stores share products on various social media platforms.
You need those products to be visually appealing.
Canva is an amazing tool that helps you create attractive templates to promote your product.
Your marketing team can collaborate and create amazing templates to promote your products.
With Canva you can:
● Edit photographs, create filters and correct any elements on photos, leaving them looking stunning.
● Search icons, photos and illustrations to use on templates.
● Resize content for different marketing channels like email campaigns, social media, and printed banner require different size images
#3 Google PageSpeed Insights
How is your eCommerce store performing? Are pages loading faster? Most visitors to your site will close pages that take too long to load.
You need to analyze your store and see how it performs on both computer and mobile device platforms. People are likely to exit pages with long loading periods.
A Google PageSpeed Insight tool is crucial in determining your page loading speed. It then gives users insights on the issue and suggestions on how to solve the problem. The tool delivers a speed score that rates pages as slow, normal or fast.
The tool analyzes major factors to determine the optimization score. The first factor is the time it takes to load half of the top page once a client lands on the website. Secondly, the tool analyzes the loading speed of the entire page.
Most visitors will close the page and opt for other options on their searches when pages take too long to search.
This tool is a great way to gauge your store performance and know if you’re on track. It also gives you several optimization tips to get you started. You also learn of the best practices to help increase website performance.
#4CRM – Customer Relationship Management
CRM is a customer relationship management tool that brings all your relations and interactions with customers to a central point. It is a decent tool that enhances the ways store owners collaborate and communicate with their customers.
You’re likely to increase your sales when communication with a potential customer is faster and easier.
Most customers abandon sales when communication with store representatives is poor.
This is a reliable tool that brings information sharing to a single place. All customer interactions are managed in a single place making it easier for your customer care to answer any customer questions. Here are some benefits of using CRM:
● Schedules commitments with customers for timely responses
● Improves the customer’s perspective of their needs
● Makes customer interaction easier by bringing every communication to one place
● Automatically adds files from Google Drive
● Imports information of your email campaigns in Adwords for a better understanding of keywords that lead to sales
#5 SEO tools
Potential customers must find you if they are going to buy from you. There are varieties of SEO tools to use and better position your site. Let’s focus on two of the most popular SEO tools, SEMrush and MOZ.
SEMrush
This is a one-in-all SEO marketing tool that works by making a comparison of your competitors and helping you position your site better. It is a leading SEO tool that offers advertising, content marketing, keyword competition, and much more. The tool does the following:
● SEO: It takes you through a set of actions we call search engine optimization (SEO) to help your website rank higher. The tool helps create a link-building strategy, choose the right keywords to use, and track the site’s overall optimization.
● Content marketing: It helps store owners content that attracts most visitors to their website. You easily get to know the content that is not performing and what needs to be improved. You can also track your backlinks and know what is working.
● Advertising: The tool lets you know what your competitors are doing and how you can improve. Based on your ads, you can see how competitors are performing through clear graphic pieces.
Social networks: It helps you program your ads on social media and monitor their progress. The tool also helps compare your performance with that of competitors.
● SEMrush is an exceptional tool available in multiple languages.
MOZ
This is community-focused software that simplifies ways of doing SEO. MOZ offers metrics on keywords and the best ways to optimize your store on search engines.
It can also notify you of errors on the site and opportunities to create a link-building strategy. You get to learn what harms your site and various mentions of your brand online.
The MOZ tool can identify mentions of your brand online even when there are no backlinks to your site. It enables site owners to know the right keywords to use and rank their pages higher on Google. It can also open the site explorer and see which SPAM sites link to your eCommerce store. This is a great feature that reduces broken links and creates authority on link building.
#6 Tools
Next, you need tools to measure the performance of your store. This is the only sure way to know whether everything is working fine.
You will not know what works and what does not work if you don’t measure. There are two common analytics tools to consider. These are Google Analytics and Mixpanel.
Both tools are great and selecting a suitable one comes down to what you need to measure. Google Analytics is ideal for small eCommerce stores. Mixpanel is ideal for large stores that need to track buyers closely and execute various actions like automatic emails.
Google Analytics is considered Google’s main tool for measuring the behavior of a website. It monitors sites’ conversion, sales, and how visitors use the site. You can see how visitors arrive at your site and the actions they take.
This is an important tool to help optimize your digital strategy. You get to know areas to put more focus on, where to improve and what to leave out. For a small business, the tool provides real-time reports. Here is what you can expect from the Google Analytics tools:
● Advertising analytics
● Social network analytics
● Content analytics
● Conversion funnel analytics
● Real-time tracking and reporting
Mixpanel on the other hand provides analysis of the whole customer journey from acquisition, engagement, and retention.
This will give you a clear idea of areas to focus on. The tool performs a deep analysis and a smart action.
Features of the deep analysis
● You get to know the visitors coming to your site
● What users do when on the site?
● How do users go around shopping?
● Are users returning to the store?
Features of the Smart Action
● Machine-learning where you know important details from data on your site
● A/B tests for user experience
● Message sending by users
● Measurement approach on page views
● Real-time reports in seconds
● User tracking
#7 Google Search Console
This is the updated version of the free Google Webmaster tools. It is a free service you must try. The Google Search Console helps users monitor how Google finds their eCommerce stores. How does Google view your website? You can only understand that by wearing Google glasses and seeing through their lenses.
The Google Search Console does not affect the result in search engines. It also does not work if you’re not registered. The tool might not appear beneficial but a clear understanding of how Google views your eCommerce store is important.
In most cases, the Google Search Console sends notifications whenever they detect a problem with your store. They also provide clear instructions on how to solve the problem.
Google Search Console actions are divided into two classes. The first class lets you take action enabling Google to find your content while the second shows you how Google and people are searching for you. The take action class lets Google does the following
● Accesses your content crawling it to search engines
● Helps you discover how Google and the world are searching for you
● Sends content pages to Google to track on search bots
● Removes content you don’t want in search engines
● Clean errors on online stores
● Verifies product prices
● Compares content that directs more visitors to your website
● Creates and monitors appealing content
● Discovers external sites linking to your site
#8 Live Chat
Live Chat is an essential eCommerce tool that can greatly boost your online sales. Having direct contact with a customer right away means a lot to close down a sale.
Customers want assurances before they can make a purchase. Having a live chat that answers customer queries right away can boost sales.
Of course, offering person-to-person service can be pricey which is why a lot of businesses offer some kind of conversational AI as well.
There are various Live Chat tools to consider. You need a live chat that can communicate with live and new visitors proactively. Some of the best chat tools allow for calling where customer experience is enhanced.
Some of these chats provide an option to continue conversations on social media pages like Facebook where you can further engage visitors once they leave the site. This is a great feature that creates a relationship with customers for future sales.
#9 Shopping cart tools
Buyers need to trust you to buy from you. Having excellent shopping tools that ensure a faster, clear, and secure payment process can help earn that trust. There are various shopping cart tools to consider. You can consider an open-cart system like Vendio which takes payment according to purchases through the website.
Having proper shopping cart tools can help reduce cart abandonment. Most customers abandon carts because of a complicated payment process. Have your IT team check your payment processing to ensure they are functioning correctly. Consider platforms that offer pre-configured payment gateways.
#10 Pop-ups
Popups are also great tools that can engage visitors and help make a sale. Most of these tools feature free versions so there is no excuse. The best thing about popups is they are easy to use and don’t require any coding skills. You can easily set them up in minutes and capture more leads right away. Having more leads is one of the best ways to increase your sales.
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