As a skin care brand, it can be challenging these days to sell skin care products online. There are a vast amount of websites that offers beauty products through their ecommerce sites and online stores. A host of specials, discounts, and promotions are offered monthly to give consumers incentives to shop and become loyal fans.
To make things even more challenging for brands, many traditional retailers are now investing into online ecommerce operations, promoting and selling skin care products. One of the more famous and recognized retailer is Sephora who launched a very sophisticated online store and ecommerce website for their customers. Brands must now compete with some of their distribution channels as well for online market share.
Regardless of how competitive the online market becomes for skin care companies, brands must continuously look to improve customer experience online and offer what the consumer is looking for and is becoming accustomed too. How does a beauty brand stay competitive and sell products successfully online through ecommerce websites?
Selling Products Successfully through Skin Care Ecommerce Websites
Once a website receives traffic, people visiting the website through marketing, advertising, and PR campaign efforts, the goal of a brand is to convert the visitor into a loyal fan and shopper. This process is often called conversion and the improvement of visitor vs. shopper ratio is often called conversion.
New brands, just starting out should design and develop their skin care websites and ecommerce stores correctly. For existing brand operations and websites, a redesign may be necessary to incorporate improvements. Here are the most common areas improved for increasing conversion rates.
Home Page
The home page is the most important and most visited page of a skin care website. Therefore, it is the most critical page as well. This does not mean store pages or other site areas are not important, but the home page is for most websites and industries the most important real estate of a website. For skin care brands, it is important to incorporate all call to actions, conversion tools, and marketing required data on the home page.
Call to actions could be promotions, best sellers, most popular items, discounts, specials, new additions, and so on. While conversion tools can be newsletter signup, giveaways, packaged deals, and other methods. For marketing and advertising, a home page must be developed and designed correctly. SEO campaigns need text content on home pages and other techniques for successful campaigns. All of this needs to be incorporated into the home page of a skin care brand’s website.
Online Store Pages
For brands to sell products, the individual online store pages of the products must be developed and designed correctly to produce sales. The store page must have clear, sharp, and nice size and at times multiple pictures of the beauty product. A short description, directions of use, ingredients, and a longer description for each product listed. At times, brands include certifications as it applies such as organic, green, free of this and that symbols. These work well with consumers and are widely accepted. Brands must ensure, they list only what honestly they can claim.
Each store pages should have also a very user-friendly way to shop, browse through other products, cross selling functionality, and list any guarantees, memberships such as BBB, and other trust building elements. Payment types accepted should be well displayed and visible. Also, all shopping navigation and functions should be clearly displayed and accessible to the shopper, at all times. These are some points to consider, when improving store pages.
Online Store Overview Page
Most ecommerce websites have online store overview pages. This is the store page that is most commonly accessed when a website visitor “clicks” on the navigation labeled “Shop” or “Store”. A website visitor arrives at an overview page that lists most commonly all products or the categories etc. It varies depending on the design and development of the websites. Skin care companies; most commonly list all their products on overview pages of ecommerce websites.
The “Overview Page” of a skin care ecommerce store, should list all skin care products, packages, and any other item for sale. Here, to improve user experience and chances for sales, the page must clearly and easily allow for navigation of products by individual products, type such as face, anti aging, and other categories. Guarantees, accreditations, and other certifications should be clearly displayed. Packaged deals, sales, and promotions must be also well visible here as much as most popular sales items.
Blog Pages
Every skin care brand should have a company blog and use it professionally to increase sales and chances of success. Skin care blogs generate independently website traffic and potential customers and fans. In many cases, a blog can generate more traffic than the home page of the skin care website. Each article if done correctly is individually indexed by search engines and attracts readers, fans, and customers.
Blog articles are often ranked higher in search than store pages or brand home pages. A blog article is often more trusting to the audience. Potential shoppers often are converted from avid reader to customer through skin care website blogs. These blogs should have conversion tools and call to action elements designed and developed into the blog. Each article should have links correctly going back to product pages and designated landing pages for increased success and product sales.
There are other areas that can be addressed and improved upon to increase success and product sales for skin care brands. The above-mentioned areas are a great start to optimize, manage more efficiently, and measure results. To really improve and increase product sales through ecommerce websites, reports, statistics, and analytics must be used, read accurately, and understood.
Once all reporting systems are in place and improvements accomplished, these reports and statistics will allow brands to watch the improvement of results of their efforts. Often slight changes, can have strong impacts on website visitor behavior and shopping experiences. Brands should carefully study reporting systems and their statistics to increase their success.
For brands that wish to improve their websites and ecommerce results, consulting services are always available. Consultants can quickly review and analyze a website for their clients. Skin care brands can work with experts to analyze their operations, traffic, and ecommerce pages. Brands have the option to also improve their sales through conversion optimization services. These with design and development improvement can drastically increase sales for skin care brands.
