What do the initial efforts in setting up a new marketplace from scratch look in a nutshell? Focus on your task, start gathering an audience through an email newsletter and social media by generating relevant promotional content and scale your project further, for which you’ll, of course, require more and more money.
At this point, most people think that they need unique features to sell and that these unique features should be essentially the things the creators find useful/comfortable/interesting in the first place. The part about unique features – yes, absolutely. Using your individual user preferences as a foundation for them, though, is a mistake.
We provide the following brief tips on delivering your target audience exactly what they want and demand for, without getting their eyes all blurry with ‘advanced capabilities’ and ‘powerful exclusive features’.
Hitting the spot with TA demands building a web marketplace
1 No one likes the excessiveness
You should get rid of all the ‘fillers’ that are created mainly just for looks and infusing the ‘corporate feel’ in users. Stuff like whole separate pages dedicated to a few blocks of copy (‘about us’ usually), template emails that don’t really demonstrate any effectiveness in attracting any more new customers, cumbersome forms that take considerable shares of time to fill out. Forget about all of that, no one needs that nowadays.
Think a landing page instead of a whole resource that holds the same amount of information; analyze your email newsletter thoroughly and focus on the letters that bring at least some result; employ live chats available on any page instead of separate contact forms situated in an additional tab. All in all, before thinking on how to add something to impress users, remove all the fluff that might put them off.
Another helpful tip here would to use the user activity tracking tools or services to identify where exactly on your resource users spend most time when they visit it. Gather and analyze the conversion data, you should’ve heard of Google Analytics or might be already employing it, but we’d recommend to really get into attribution of events (what user does before the purchase) via UTM configurations on each inbound link of yours.
To provide you with more practical advice, the CleverTap’s platform will help you with event attribution. It only requires an SDK to run on a mobile device and script to run in the web. The solution will provide you with good shares of useful analytical data as well as event-based capabilities for your TA.
For SaaS-type of marketplaces with sales processes that take longer than in the case of regular eCommerce or larger-scale solution as a whole, we’d recommend using AgileCRM software, which is reasonably priced, allows tracking users engaging with website or email content in the real-time mode, and help accelerate conversion with thoroughly manageable messaging sequences.
2 Promise what you really deliver
Once a product or service you offer gets some email newsletter traction, you should start to focus on retention. Low repeat purchase rates mean that the copy your website features doesn’t really fully describe what you are offering, so you may settle your promises down a little and stay as constructive and informative as possible in all related text.
3 Stay patient in acquiring convertible customers
Start to engage with people that leave their email for your newsletter, but stay patient and don’t bombard them with sales offers and stuff right away. Remember, it is still a potential customer and it depends on you in many senses whether they become a regular, satisfied, loyal customer or decide not to become one at all. Establish a nurturing sequence for interested users that will warm them up during a couple of weeks or so. The software provided by AgileCRM, which we’ve already mentioned, offers great opportunities for this matter.
4 Employ a feedback loop
A feedback loop is a tool that will help you indicate why some active customers decided to buy a product through your marketplace and analyze what makes others deciding against buying something from you.
Summary
The tips provided are general and mostly descriptive, but keeping them in mind when starting up your new eCommerce marketplace business will help you avoid the commonplace mistakes and adjust a real conversion machine that should be expertly greased with further scaling effort. The latter implies growing your user-base by exploring and the described and other methods of leading business in-depth and providing a satisfactory service. We hope this brief article help make your starting up efforts painless and all the more efficient.
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