The coronavirus is not just a pandemic that is causing thousands of infections and deaths worldwide. Worst of all, the isolation that must be maintained at home to prevent the disease’s spread has led to a complete halt in economic activity.
In this article, we are going to give you a few ideas so that you know how to face the coronavirus crisis in your online store. And we will also emphasize the best practices that other eCommerce and online businesses are carrying out to get better out of this exceptional situation.
Thanks to technology, today, you can work anywhere with internet access. This means that there are many things you can do to stay active and take advantage of the COVID-19 time.
Develop A Contingency Plan To Deal With Delivery Delays
Do not delay in informing your customers that the current situation may cause delays in shipments.
The best way to do this is by adding a prominent message on your website’s front page, in all categories, on each product sheet, and on the subpages prior to order confirmation.
In case there are ongoing orders generated before confinement, notify by email that that specific product may arrive later than expected.
Boost Your Email Marketing Strategy
Email is the great ally of online stores in these moments of confinement due to coronavirus.
The benefits of creating an email marketing strategy are numerous:
- You regular loyal customers.
- You can generate cross-sales.
- You improve customer retention.
- You close ties with your potential customers, and you get them to move up your sales funnel.
As you may now have more time than before, you can take advantage of these circumstances to create a brand new strategy or improve the one you already have.
Spend More Time On Social Media
Generally, eCommerce store owners have a never-ending to-do list, so they don’t tend to spend as much time on social media.
But forced isolation at home increases the free time available. So, after vacuuming, tidying up the cabinets, and making a cake, you will still have a lot of time to improve the social networks that you should use in your business.
As a priority objective for these times, use social communication channels to solve your potential clients’ doubts and interact with them.
You should also prevent your audience from getting bored with excessively promotional or commercial content. Instead, it is better to show that your eCommerce is involved with the people who are having a hard time because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
If you do it right, you will be cultivating a community that, when all this happens, may be interested in acquiring the items that you sell.
Focus On SEO
One of the issues that you should control, especially if you do not have the budget to hire an SEO consultant, is search engine positioning. Google must favor your website if you want potential buyers to find you.
If you cannot generate organic traffic to your store, you will have no choice but to inject visits through online advertising. Therefore, you should not forget about SEO at any time.
These are some of the things you can do at the SEO level with your website:
- Optimize each page for a specific keyword: You should analyze with some of the best SEO tools.
- Attract traffic to the blog: To attract more traffic, you can optimize product pages for specific keywords. And once you have done that, you can start targeting other keywords through blog posts that allow you to increase traffic and leads.
- Boost organic searches: With the Google Search Console tool, you can see which terms Google shows your pages in the SERPs. And once you are clear about the potential keywords that can generate more searches, optimize each page based on that search.
Improve Product Sheets
One of the big mistakes that many online stores make is the lack of attention to the product sheets. To avoid wasting time, they tend to cut and paste descriptions of the suppliers and upload the same photos as their competitors.
But now that the coronavirus has left you a lot of free time, you should review the texts of those descriptions to avoid penalties for duplicate content. Besides, you should also rewrite the cards to make them more persuasive and your products more attractive.
Another way to increase the desirability of the items you are selling is by using better quality photos. To do this, you need to use images that differentiate you from the competition.
Conclusion
Whether you have to suspend sales for the moment or if you are going to continue operating during this Covid-19 crisis, these are some of the things that we recommend. We intend that your eCommerce business remains operational and that you are prepared for when all this happens.
