The 8 must have tools for eyewear e-retailers

To be successful in today’s online eyewear space, you need to constantly interact with your customers. Regardless if they are fashion seekers, eyewear lovers, replacers or basic choosers, all online eyewear shoppers need a regular gentle touch to keep you in mind.

Fortunately, there is an impressive range of technology to help you enhance the customer experience and to promote and grow your business.

Here we outline 8 software solutions you definitely want in your ecommerce toolbox. Not only are they proven to help digitally promote and grow a business, you’ll find the price tag pleasing. These digital tools can help you to:

• interactively keep in touch with customers and prospects
• attract new customers
• stand out from competitors
• improve the customer experience
• learn far more about your clients’ aspirations and needs.

1/ High-Quality Images of your frames

The Internet is a visual medium and high-quality images of your eyewear offerings are essential to successfully entice customers and sell your products. For budgets that don’t stretch to employing photographers and arranging studio shoots, Fittingbox offers a cost-effective and innovative alternative.

Photo Studio is a patented solution especially developed for shooting frames. It provides a full range of services for creating print and web-ready HD photos of your frames in record time, by making shooting and post-production design near-effortless.

This video provides a quick overview of the ease and comfort of the process, as well as the outstanding results that include 3D modelling based on exclusive textures and effects, and image enhancements.

2/ User experience (UX) to offer a smooth online experience

There are many tools that enable you to create a dynamic and beautiful interface that promotes your product and offers. Two simple to use ones for creating professional websites are Wix and Squarespace.

• • Wix’s drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to create a professional website – without having to know a line of code! That’s why it is used by 100 million users across 190 countries. With hundreds of templates (including ones specifically for eyewear and sunglasses) and great tools, Wix lets you build and sell through your site. Beginner-friendly and scalable, Wix provides an affordable, easy and hassle-free way of creating a website in minutes.
  • Squarespace is a similar solution favored by creatives with outstanding visuals. Regardless of the solution you choose, ensure your site is optimized for all devices. Also think about having responsive and seamless navigation to help potential conversions. Keep in mind than consumption is now a cross-device process. A buyer can start the purchase on a smartphone and finish it at home by computer, so your UX experience needs to reflect and capture this behavior.

3/ Virtual Try-On to reduce barriers to purchase

Try before you buy is a rule that customers love. This is possible online with virtual try-on solutions. These are also an innovative, tech-savvy way to raise interest in your brand.

Fittingbox Advanced for Website is a virtual try-on software for glasses dedicated to eyewear professionals. It turns the user's screen into a virtual mirror, in real-time, and brings fun during the shopping experience.

User can virtually try on multiple frames as if they’re in front of a regular mirror. They have the opportunity to explore near-unlimited options before making a choice.

Allow your customers to try glasses online and drastically drive more conversions

 

Discover our virtual try-on

4/ SEO to rank your eyewear e-commerce on search engines

Search engines are the way potential customers now look for products and services. So, you need to get in front of them by describing your product page properly, with keywords to place them in a high position on search engine. This strategy to appear on Google, Bing, Yahoo... is called SEO for Search Engine Optimization.

There is a variety of free tools to assist your SEO, starting with a bunch of helpful services from Google:

• Google Trends helps you comparing your business to competitors, or with finding the right search terms.
• Google Analytics provides in-depth data on how your website is performing on measures like page views, how users are reaching your site and information on your audience.
• Google Search Console helps your business get discovered on Google. Google will also do a test drive of your site's map and determine if there are errors that you can fix.
• PageSpeed Insights analyzes how fast your webpage is and provides suggestions to improve the speed. 

On top of these paid for services, Moz Pro provides resources to learn more about SEO, improve strategies and analyze trends within the industry, and includes targeted keyword suggestions. Ahrefs provides insights on competitors, which, you can use to make better-informed decisions about your SEO strategy.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a free crawler that will examine your site and determine if there are broken links or problems. It can analyze page titles and metadata so you can find out if any pages are missing or are duplicated across your site.

5/ Adword Campaigns to boost your eyewear e-commerce

You can rocket fuel your SEO strategy by using adword campaigns to increase the visibility of your site. Known as Search Engine Advertising (SEA), this involves pay-for-use targeted campaigns and complements your organic SEO strategy.

Adword campaigns help you to outrank competitors by having a prominent place on search engines such as Google. It is critical to define relevant keywords that fit your target. Some of the tools already mentioned assist with this. It is then important to create campaigns based on the demographics as well as define the best time to reach them.

The key to SEA is to test, test, test and then re-test to identify what works best so as to get the best adword performance. Tools exist on every social media channel and in addition to Google Ads, there  is Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn ads, depending on the channel you are targeting.

6/ Social Media Strategy

To communicate and promote your latest products, you must be present in the social media sphere. Whatever social media platform you choose to be on – Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or Twitter, sharing content with your audience is essential so your audience remains curious about you and encouraged to buy.

• • Hootsuite is a social media management platform that lets you manage your social media channels.
  • Buffer is a content publishing platform that lets you publish and schedule content to social networks.

Hootsuite provides more analytical features for free, but both offer robust tools for analyzing how your audience respond to your posts. will help you manage your post frequency and post scheduling.

 

 

7/ Emailing Campaign for your sales 

One way to increase your conversion rate is by using emailing campaign that drive your audience to your products and latest deals. News about new collections, flash sales, discount offers and special gifts can all be used to regularly and successfully reach out to your audience.

• • Mailchimp is all-in-one email marketing platform that has email ads, landing pages and CRM tools to grow your business. While Mailchimp is the go-to solution for many smaller businesses,
  • Sendinblue is a cheaper alternative that doesn’t charge for list growth, but only emails sent out.

Using either solution, you will be able to spread specific content to your contact list and track your audience’s preferences across many metrics to optimize your offer.

 

8/ Customer Relationship Management

Free and simple to use, HubSpot gives small companies the power of a customer relationship management (CRM) system to control and align your sales process with your customers’ expectations. HubSpot keeps all your contacts in one centralized, customizable database. And you can see everything about a lead in one place -- no more digging through inboxes to find information.

The advantage of HubSpot is that it frees you up from spreadsheets and offers many of the benefits of a CRM, but without the confusing complexity of systems designed for larger companies. For example, with HubSpot, you can see when a customer made their last purchase, how many purchases they have made and what is the value of the average shopping cart.

 

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To go further, learn a few tips to beat your competitors

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The competitive edge

Given the power and ability of such digital tools, it is surprising that many businesses fail to embrace the technology. Deloitte research has noted that “digitally advanced small businesses” earn more revenue per employee, are more likely to create jobs and are more likely to have exported over the previous year. Yet, they comment, that four of five US small businesses aren’t taking full advantage of digital tools available to them.

This gives you a chance to gain an instant advantage over the competition.