Have you ever thought about the significance of content to the success of your ecommerce store? Most online merchants put too much emphasis on products and services they offer and forget the important role that content plays in a successful ecommerce website.
Just making your website easy to use is not enough when it comes to effective online selling.
Let's take a look at some of the highly successful online stores and examine how they play the content cum marketing card to drive up sales and ensure repeat visits.
Amazon.
com This is a huge online store and at first glance it appears that they're aggressively selling (and of course that's the main goal of the site), but on close scrutiny you'll notice that what happens at Amazon.
com is more than just selling.
They offer the following: Excerpts of the books on sale at the site, this is an hourly updated list of top 100 books on the hotlist.
The best selling audio and video of the day Customer reviews of most purchased items.
Book contests Book clubs and much, much more Amazon.
com sales are content driven since the site relies heavily on generated content to attract customers and maintain return visits.
Amazon encourages its users, both customers and sellers to review products and give testimonials.
Many customers return to the site just to read the reviews and other resources offered.
Netflix: Reputable movie site When you look at Netflix, you can't easily tell that it's involved in ecommerce activities.
Being a movie rental company, Netflix tries to sell two essential things: They sell accounts, this means that the bigger their subscriber base, the better they become.
Movies, this are sold to registered members.
Netflix relies on movie trials and demos to generate traffic and drive sales.
They have created a massive movie database that clients can browse and also provide plenty of information upfront concerning the various plans they offer and information on how you can purchase the movies.
CDNow A reputable seller of CDs on the web.
CDNow offers their clients quality content to their clients.
They provide Reviews and Latest News about the CDs they sale, they also provide updated information on the artists whose CDs the have in stock.
They even have a section with hyperlinks connecting to other sites that contain information relevant to a band in question.
What's even more interesting is that CDNow offers a feature that enables users to customize the site to their taste.
Among some of the things that can be done include; the ability to create favorite artist list with alerts that update the user regarding the particular artist selected.
Though many ecommerce sites don't place much emphasis on content, most rely on it to encourage return visits and build loyalty with their customers.
It's worth mentioning that the initial 98% of visitors to your site will buy anything.
You have to win their trust before they can spend any money on your site.