A blog is an essential tool for any ecommerce website, even if you're only posting one article a week. There are a litany of ways blogs help drive sales and revenue for your ecommerce business, all of which depend on your goals and that strategy you choose in order to achieve them. Clarity's ecommerce Solution allows you to manage your entire website, including blog posts, from one easy-to-use interface.
The image below illustrates how Zagg's traffic and revenue increased after implementing a blogging strategy. Their direct ROI was 111% and 50% of new traffic came from their blog posts!
6 Reasons Your ecommerce Website Needs a blog
Fresh Content Makes a Fresh Website: Fresh content helps tailor a visitor's perception of the website as a whole. For example, if you write a blog post about a new product your store carries, this leads the user to assume that your store promotes new and exciting products often, even if they didn't read the post! Another benefit is that you, as the website owner, seem engaged in your site and are therefore perceived as both available and responsible if your customers have problems, generating a nascent trust before they've even made a purchase.
Lastly, fresh content simply turns your
b2b ecommerce website from stale to exciting. Fresh content captures attention, a key component to keeping visitors on your site longer so you can convert them to customers.
Add SEO Value to Your Site: Users aren't the only entities that appreciate fresh content; search robots actively look for and award points to websites with constant content generation. Additionally, blog posts are a great way to optimize for your targeted search terms or even help get specific products found through search engines.
Bring Potential Customers to Your Website: Higher search engine rankings means more traffic will be able to find and visit your site when browsing through results to their search queries. Additionally, you can promote your ecommerce blog content via social media, simultaneously engaging with current or former customers while engaging new ones. Furthermore, if you develop a relationship with other relevant blogs (say if you sell shoes and you build an understanding with a footwear blog), they may link to or even allow you to guest post your content, sending you referral traffic and adding SEO power to your articles.
Building Your Brand as an Expert or Thought Leader: If you regularly post engaging, well written articles and constantly nurture your brand's relationship with relevant partner websites in your industry, you will start to become THE resource for your area of expertise. The value of being top of mind when someone thinks of products or services you provide is best illustrated by this simple example: When I say 'Fast Food,' you probably immediately thought 'McDonalds.'
Showcase Your Company to Build Trust in Your Brand: ecommerce blogs are also a great way to showcase your company's achievements to customers as a way to generate trust and establish your ecommerce business as an industry leader. For example, if you're able to blog about how your enterprise ecommerce business has proudly processed 1,000,000 orders for 10,000 companies, prospective customers will form a degree of trust in your company because so many of their peers are using your store to fulfill their ecommerce product needs.
Save on Customer Service Costs by Preemptively Answering Customer Questions: We've all been through the process of calling customer service numbers, only to have a machine ask us a plethora of redundant questions before we're ever able to speak to a representative. This annoys customers. Wouldn't it be great if they're question could be answered with a quick search within your site? Even better, wouldn't if be fantastic if, when searching for an answer online, they stumble upon your site, which in turn gives them the answers they seek and leaves them with a positive view of your online store?
Answering common customer questions in a blog post that's easy to find can make frustrated customers happy, attract disgruntled competitor clients, and cut down on your customer service representatives wasting time answering questions more easily answered by a simple blog post. Furthermore, blog posts can include pictures, videos and links that robustly answer questions and show how to solve problems, something a phone conversation simply cannot do.
Clarity ecommerce: Making blogging Easy
One of the most difficult parts of having an ecommerce website that contains a blogging apparatus is finding a CMS that can handle both blogging and your technically complicated ecommerce needs. Wordpress is a great blogging platform, but it is a known fact that it's ecommerce capabilities are weak or sub-par at best, especially for enterprise companies.
For this reason, we commonly see ecommerce websites separate their blog and ecommerce into different domains, and our our response is always the same: NOOOOOO!
Okay, maybe we're not that dramatic. But seriously, separating your website and blog is the same as throwing away almost all of the benefits listed above and adding another step to your conversion funnel, hurting your overall sales! For this reason, Clarity has created a framework that allows for the easy addition of blog posts and articles into an ecommerce website. Additionally, Clarity ecommerce solution's intuitive, user friendly interface gives anyone who knows how to type the ability to create beautiful, informative, though-provoking or engaging blog posts in a matter of minutes.
The best part with the Clarity ecommerce platform is that with it, you get the expertise of industry professionals that will help you develop a blogging strategy that will help improve your business goals. Call Clarity today for a free consultation!