Much like managing a traditional brick & mortar store, the mark of a successful ecommerce business relies on much of the market you can siphon from the competition and grow sales to new heights. While the traditional overhead costs associated with physical stores are non-existent in the ecommerce realm, there is a slew of other matters business owners encounter that affect their bottom line:
- Inventory turnover: how much stock do you need on hand to meet surging demand during peak seasons?
- Web infrastructure: how many plugins, bells & whistles, and marketing technology impact profitability?
- Performance: are all marketing channels successful? Or are there sources of traffic generating new customers that end up bleeding your profit margin?
- Social proof: does the vocal minority (negative reviews) put a damper on the user experience for other users?
The myriad of situations listed above have a profound effect on profitability and can create turmoil within your business if sales lag. Additionally, a meandering website that isn’t increasing sales month-over-month will find it challenging to fund new ventures and marketing campaigns, making it difficult to scale operations in the future.
However, with the right strategic approach, you can turn an ordinary ecommerce business into a veritable money-making machine. Merely boosting your ecommerce conversion rate can significantly increase the volume of sales your website rakes in every month. Unfortunately, small business owners that lack the experience in digital marketing or resources to contract leading agencies may not be able to resolve issues with their conversion rate. Fortunately, I’ve prepared a handy guide detailing ten aspects of your digital marketing mix you can optimize to not only boost your conversion rate but also ramp up sales and increase the customer lifetime value of your clients.
1. Optimize the User Experience
Inadequate user experience and poor navigation structure are typically the main reasons why ecommerce businesses suffer from low conversion rates. It’s essential to build your website in a way that facilitates transactions from the moment users access your site from any source of traffic. Regardless of which initial pages users access, whether it’s a resource hosted on your blog or a detailed product page, the user experience needs to be fluid, conducive to conversions, and fully functional. Bombarding your website traffic with an array of undecipherable content blocks, distorted imagery, and broken lines of code will almost result in a significant loss of potential revenue.
Fortunately, website builders are far more proficient than the old GeoCities setup from back in the day. It’s essential to be mindful of any potential impediments blocking the paths to conversion from your most valuable entry points. When it comes to your category and product pages, make sure adding products to the cart is a seamless experience, especially when it comes to selecting quantities and item variations. You’d be surprised at how many websites I’ve come across where the user experience on mobile devices makes online shopping an increasingly frustrating experience. In some cases, it’s as if the webmasters that built the website decided to play “Where’s Waldo?” with the add to cart buttons.
Lastly, when using platforms like Shopify, WordPress (WooCommerce), or Magento, there’s going to be an excessive amount of work to maintain your website and increase page speed. There are many themes available from a variety of developers, which makes the design process all that more difficult. If you’re designing a custom theme, consider the additional work required to code a website that’s smooth and loads quickly on all devices.
2. Enhance Your Product Imagery
Never judge a book by its cover. We’re supposed to live our lives by this subtle yet powerful axiom, correct?
Unfortunately, when it comes to online shopping, imagery almost always plays a vital role. From click-through rates on Google Shopping & Amazon listings to igniting interest amongst your website traffic, your design should be of the utmost importance when it comes to styling your product pages. You can enhance the user experience by creating a synergy with the items you’re selling and the templates you utilize.
As for the images themselves, here are some essential guidelines to follow:
- Clarity is crucial. Ensure your images are of high-quality and refrain from posting low-res item shots with distorted lighting, or blurry components. Additionally, please abstain from shooting low-quality videos that are more apt for The Blair Witch Project than an ecommerce website.
- Enhance up your product listings with a myriad of photos highlighting core features and benefits. Incorporate at least three-to-five product shots highlighting different angles replete with detailed information to educate your audience.
- Resist the urge to design images that are overly gimmicky and cartoony. Simplicity is best when it comes to the visual representation of your brand and product catalogue.
Author’s note: image size is just as important as image clarity. Don’t sacrifice page speed for resource-intensive graphics that slow down your website. While there’s a myriad of plugins that will compress images with no discernible differences compared to the original, you should operate with the mindset of uploading images that are not 5 MB each. Additionally, optimizing the filename and adding alt text will make your product shots even more SEO-friendly, so be conscious of not uploading creative assets titled “product-2-download (1).jpg”.
3. Boost Product Pages With In-Depth Descriptions & Social Proof
Your website will be entertaining web traffic from all types of inbound marketing, ranging from interested online shoppers to inquisitive search engine spiders. Investing time and resources into writing compelling copy and in-depth product specifications will tend to convert traffic more often than not. Barren product descriptions with vague specs are unlikely to galvanize your audience and most likely deter them from adding items to their shopping cart.
Visual representation of your product descriptions is crucial when it comes to serving information in a digestible manner. Most online retailers tend to work with layouts that do more to obfuscate readers than inform, relying on throwing content into one giant block rather than spreading it out across several tabs. Structure your product information to be broken down into the following sections if applicable:
- Main product description and information.
- Detailed product specifications and jazzy technical details.
- Frequently asked questions.
- User reviews and ratings.
On the last point, social proof can make or break campaigns for your business. Ecommerce conversion rates tend to increase when products have an average rating north of four stars complemented by dazzling customer reviews. Retailers in Amazon’s ecosystem live and die off the ratings they elicit from users, with effervescent customers publishing five-star reviews serving as virtual brand ambassadors. However, there is a caveat to opening your store to customer reviews. Once you allow users to post feedback in a public manner, you must be able to deal with negative feedback quickly and efficiently. When you receive acerbic input from customers, please take advantage of the opportunity to assuage their concerns by evaluating their messages and providing viable solutions. In some cases, you’ll convert unhappy digital shoppers into new brand loyalists. Worst case? You engage in hilariously entertaining battles of the written word with overly negative customers. Win/win situation, as far as I’m concerned.
4. Channel the Power of Product-Based Advertising
Other than venturing to the Everything Store on Amazon, most engaged online shoppers tend to begin their discovery process for new products on search engines. More likely than not, at least in North America, that search engine tends to be Google.
Rather than investing a significant portion of your advertising budget on display advertising and other alternative strategies, smaller businesses can focus on allocating budgets to product-based advertising via Shopping Campaigns on Google & Bing. Shopping campaigns differ from regular search advertising campaigns in that you do not actively bid on keywords, but instead bid based on the product level associated with items in your feed. By assigning product categories to individual items in your catalogue and crawling pertinent attributes (title, description, etc.), search engines will serve your ads according to keywords that best describe your products. However, blankly adding all your products to one ad group & campaign is a faulty strategy, so it’s highly recommended to segment product groups as much as possible to optimize negative keywords and item-level bids best. My typical list of campaigns with clients revolves around the following baskets:
- Best-selling products: dedicate budgets to products with an above-average conversion rate and drive the bulk of your website’s sales.
- Most profitable products: you can skew bids higher on these products, knowing that your conversion rate and ROAS will offset the increase in CPC.
- All other products: you can segment other products based on their categories and competition level in search engines. It’s also important to note that products with a higher price point than competing products in the same auction have no nearly chance for long-term success. Only premium brands with longevity and powerful brand equity can afford to spend money on advertising products at a higher price and remain profitable.
- Brand-related terms: make sure your other campaigns have brand names negative matched, allowing you to control the bids for your company’s name in product auctions. You will typically bid higher on these search terms due to the conversion rates being much higher for branded keywords than generic search terms. It’s essential to add your brand name and all variations to negative keyword lists in all primary product campaigns. Doing so will ensure your brand-specific campaign is the only one to trigger product ads based on your company’s name.
- Specific product names: taking the brand bidding strategy to an entirely new level, duplicate your campaigns, set this campaign at a low priority, and only negative match keywords that don’t convert well.
It’s also highly recommended to dedicate a portion of your advertising budget to regular search advertising campaigns using expanded text ads and responsive search ads. While the ROAS may not achieve the same heights your shopping campaigns will, there’s a tactical reason for investing in keyword-based targeting campaigns:
- Brand protection: if you sell products in a competitive niche, you may identify competitors bidding on your brand name and other relevant terms. Force them to pay more by injecting yourself into the auction.
- High-converting keywords: use your Shopping campaigns to weed out keywords that provide excellent conversion rates at low-to-mildly competitive CPCs. Remember, the goal is to ensure that your average cost-per-order does not exceed a point that makes acquiring new users unprofitable.
5. Funnel Your Traffic With Social Media Advertising
Social media advertising is an active channel within the digital marketing arsenal for ecommerce brands. Facebook, in particular, has the broadest reach out of all social advertising platforms due to Facebook’s extensive range and Instagram’s popularity. Additionally, the targeting options available on Zuckerberg’s Platform of Doom provide ample opportunities for businesses to zero in on profitable niches. Lastly, Facebook’s rich ad formats give brands the ability to convert their messaging into a drawn-out story, full of stunning visuals, videos, and custom landing pages.
Deploying a successful Facebook advertising strategy requires segmenting traffic into three types of buckets:
- Top-of-funnel users
- Middle-of-funnel users
- Bottom-of-funnel users
Hence the “TOFU-MOFU-BOFU” names. See, I wasn’t messing around.
Just like a funnel you use to fill up that flask with invigorating whiskey, think of funneling your traffic to your website and tailoring the messaging to them depending on where they lie in the purchasing decision process.
Top-of-funnel targeting will typically consist of two types of audiences: users based on interest targeting and lookalike audiences of past customers and web traffic. These users usually have no background information regarding your brand and are being exposed to your business for the first time. It’s at the awareness stage where you can use a wide variety of ad formats to engage users with the ultimate goal of retargeting them down the line. Campaign objectives in this stage tend to rely on expanding reach, generating brand awareness, and increasing video views for your content.
Middle-of-funnel campaigns target users that have familiarity with your brand but have not taken action beyond watching a video or engaging with a post. At this stage, you filter out all uninterested shoppers and focus your ads on capturing lead information from previously engaged users and web traffic. Tailoring your message effectively here can turn warm prospects into viable customers, or help you recapture lost traffic from other campaigns via remarketing. A popular tactic is to offer up a lead magnet utilizing the Lead Ads format. Users converting on a lead gen ad format will synchronize their profile to your email service provider of choice for future remarketing purposes.
Bottom-of-funnel traffic is where you’ll see your most significant ROI due to the limited amount of unqualified impressions you’ll be bidding on in global auctions. Users at this stage of the purchasing decision have indicated an active interest in your brand. Segmenting users based on website actions and recency is an effective tactic, as you can customize the offers and discounts available to different audiences. Campaigns at this stage are conversion-focused, and your ads should be synergistic with the campaign objective, throwing fluff to the side and focusing on writing compelling copy to get them to convert. Add-to-cart users and abandoned cart users also remaining a viable audience to target, as a last-minute incentive usually prevails in generating orders.
6. Drive Traffic to Landing Pages for Standalone Products
While your advertising campaigns will push traffic to specific products from an assortment of dynamic ads and product listing units, there are opportunities to test alternative strategies by devising landing pages for standalone products. Unfortunately, pre-built templates in website builders like WooCommerce or Shopify won’t present fully customizable options for independent pages and split-testing mechanisms. The lack of building page-to-page customizability on the fly is why dedicated landing page software like Unbounce or Instapage provides flexibility for adept marketers. For complex funnels that require multiple steps and an assortment of upsell offers before and after checkout, ClickFunnels tends to be the most comprehensive software in that regard.
Building customized landing pages for your products affords your business a vehicle to test new concepts, nail down effective messaging, and split-test a wide variety of elements. Once you accumulate enough data, you can adjust creatives on the fly based on paid media tests and implement wholesale changes to your website, enhancing the user experience according to a data-driven approach.
Lastly, the integration of your ecommerce store can prove to be fruitful. Zipify has stunning landing page templates that effortlessly integrate into the Shopify environment. In contrast, you can embed special coding in Unbounce landing pages to add products to the cart on your website automatically. Removing all the distractions embedded within your leading site will narrow your audience’s focus to a single product, which may increase conversion rates for specific campaigns across the board. Note that long-form landing pages tend to work best with traffic from native advertising campaigns, where content publishers embed ad units within loosely related articles. As native ad platforms adopt more valuable targeting options, in conjunction with availability to third party data exchanges and machine learning programmatic capabilities, you might end up dedicating a portion of your budget to campaigns of this nature.
7. Incorporate an Upsell Strategy
Whether it’s during the add-to-cart process or on a post-checkout basis, utilizing upsells is an incredibly profitable tactic. Shoppers tend to get distracted rather quickly, so reign in their focus with upsells opportunities that will inspire even the most frugal digital shopper. Upsell opportunities come in a myriad of formats:
- Add-to-cart quantity upsells: if someone adds a singular product to their cart, they can receive a prompt to add more items to obtain a volume discount. Additionally, you can cross-sell other merchandise that may be related and offer multiple products as part of a bundle. Bundling items is an effective strategy because of the allure of a discounted rate compared to purchasing each product individually. While this may seem like a psychological hack, it’s a very effective strategy if the products are closely related.
- Initiate checkout upsells: adding pre-purchase order bumps can get miserly shoppers excited about potential savings. Upsells can either be in the form of new products significantly discounted from the market price or additional items to complete a bundle.
- Post-purchase upsells: pushing special offers to users after they purchase from your store is an innovative strategy that doesn’t scare users away during the checkout process. In some cases, an aggressive array of offers may overwhelm your audience before they complete a transaction, which is why post-purchase upsells are unequivocally effective. Capturing payment and then offering special post-purchase incentives that only require a simple click can provide immense value for your digital store.
The eventual goal of upsells is to increase the average order value in your online store, increasing the return on ad spend for all paid media campaigns and making each visit to your website all the more valuable.
8. Harness the Magic of Lead Generation
Think of all the entry points to your website and how easily users may get distracted when perusing your online store. While you can add users who left your site to retargeting baskets in advertising campaigns, why not capture pertinent information before losing their attention?
Exit-intent popups provide a wealth of opportunities to increase your email remarketing database by offering users a last-minute attempt to sign over their soul to your brand. All jokes aside, strategically executed exit-intent strategies will provide users with an incentive, such as a 10% discount on their first purchase, to sign up the site’s newsletter. Aggressive discounts and promotions tend to convert at a higher rate than standard messaging such as “join our newsletter please” due to the price-sensitive nature of most shoppers.
Incorporating other lead generation vehicles throughout your website will entice shoppers to subscribe to your newsletter or provide their contact information in exchange for juicy discounts. Using third-party software like OptinMonster makes it extremely easy to customize popups for specific URLs. For example, you can push a very aggressive offer to users trying to leave the website while in the checkout process, and utilize a more conservative approach on individual product URLs. It’s highly recommended to segment your popups based on product categories, especially if a significant amount of your traffic will be visiting your website for the first time via individual item and category pages. Just don’t go overboard with programming exit-intent popups on every URL; otherwise, you’ll alienate your traffic and conversion rates will falter.
Lastly, stock management may be a frustrating aspect to manage, mainly if bestselling items are regularly out of stock. Turn an issue into an advantage by employing out-of-stock plugins that permit users to subscribe to updates that will notify them when inventory replenishes. You can inject incentives into emails to encourage users to complete their purchases once products are back in stock online. Using real-time alerts with a conversion-focused approach will increase the customer lifetime value of your client database.
9. Reel in Traffic With Content Marketing & Strategic SEO
When it comes to higher-priced items, the more savvy digital shoppers will perform their due diligence and conduct an exhaustive amount of research by comparing a variety of specs before making a final decision. Lower-priced items won’t face similar scrutiny, but there is a way to utilize content marketing and SEO to effectively capture users in any stage of the purchasing decision process. As with social advertising, segmenting your content production efforts into three baskets, TOFU-MOFU-BOFU, will make your brand a reputable source for authoritative and engaging content and generate a valuable amount of organic traffic in the long term.
Don’t believe me? Just ask Marcus Sheridan, the enigmatic digital marketer, that generated $2.5 Million in sales from one blog post on “how much it costs to install a fibreglass pool.” Unfortunately, replicating that type of success doesn’t happen overnight. Simply creating content for the sake of having more web pages on your website won’t do anything but exhaust crawl budgets and annoy search engine bots and users alike. However, putting the time and resources into creating compelling content that answers pertinent questions your readers have will convert your website into a trusted, valuable resource that will earn links for years to come.
While time-sensitive material may generate excellent short-term results, particularly if you’re driving traffic to your blog via social advertising and email remarketing, your primary focus should be developing evergreen content. Unlike regular news updates, evergreen content revolves around topics relevant to your audience for years to come. In some cases, updating your content or adding new sections may be prudent to reinvigorate your articles with current information, while at the same time not having to rewrite blogs from scratch.
For those of you skimming the article and losing interest in my protracted explanation of “create interesting content,” here’s the gist of this entire section: write good stuff and you will end up reeling in customers. Just like fishing. Hardy-har-har. But I digress.
Determining the topics your brand writes about can be achieved by conducting adequate keyword research and using tools like SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool or AnswerThePublic, which provide an unlimited array of questions based on the most relevant keywords.
Amazing content ideas:
- Ultimate guides & compendiums. These resources should typically be 2,500 words minimum and source a wide range of reputable websites. Comprehensive articles of this nature also tend to receive natural backlinks from various sites within similar niches, increasing the authority of your content in search engines’ eyes.
- “How-to,” “how much,” and “how will” articles. These question-based resources provide a near-infinite amount of opportunities for content creation, with each question you find on a specific topic, possibly deserving of a dedicated article. Once you have created a compendium of invaluable insights, you can convert your content into lead magnets, eBooks, and downloadable guides, offering website traffic an extra incentive or tangible product in exchange for contact information.
- Video reviews and testimonials. Like unboxing videos on social media platforms, content rooted in social proof resonates very will with shoppers requiring tangible testimonials proving the effectiveness of products.
- Comparison articles, such as “my product vs. Competitor XYZ”. You can even siphon traffic away from competitors by comparing two competing products and throw yours in there for good measure as a final CTA.
10. Increase Your Customer Lifetime Value With Smart Email Remarketing
All of the tactics listed above will incontrovertibly provide you with a bountiful database of newsletter subscribers anxiously awaiting your next digital broadcast. Hyperbole aside, amassing a wealth of active opt-in subscribers provides your business with a tangible first-party data asset that you can remarket to continuously. Increasing the conversion rate of your paid media and organic campaigns may be the primary objective. Still, tactical email remarketing will also accomplish the aim of increasing the customer lifetime value of existing clients.
Strategic email remarketing platforms come in all shapes and sizes these days. Plugging in any ordinary email service provider (ESP) to your store can catapult you from sending plain newsletters to delivering an exciting array of direct-to-consumer email marketing delights. Platforms like Drip and Klaviyo provide structured automation workflows that permit you to split test creatives and subject lines to determine the optimal conversion paths. Additionally, segmenting your lists into different baskets provides an effective means of tailoring messaging and promotions to users based on where they are in the purchasing decision process.
The best example I can recall in this regard is a split-test I organized for an ecommerce brand in the luxury clothing industry years ago. We tested two initial purchase incentives: (1) $50 discount on the first purchase and a (2) $25 discount on the first purchase, with an increase to $50 on day 10 in the automation workflow. Interestingly enough, path number two converted far better between days one-through-nine. The perception of an incentive doubled on day 10, catapulting our conversion rate to new heights. My initial hypothesis was that the first path would have converted the best all along, but in the end, we let data dictate the strategy and employed the 25% initial discount with a bump later on in the workflow.
Lastly, configuring an abandoned cart email strategy is of the utmost importance in this arena. Shoppers departing your website with products residing in their cart need to face a blitz of remarketing on all fronts. However, don’t stick with the vanilla tried and true approach of just showcasing the products left in their cart. Use this opportunity to test upsell offers, discounts, and special promotions to convert users. Remember, it takes more effort to acquire new customers than to encourage existing brand loyalists to repurchase.
TL;DR Version – Ecommerce Growth Takes Work
If there’s any salient point to extract from this long-winded essay, it’s that segmenting your traffic and campaigns as much as possible provides the best path to success. Unfortunately, marketing professionals prefer the “easiest is best” approach, lumping all audiences together and deploying unified campaigns. Your advertising budgets and marketing strategy should segment audiences as much as possible, allowing you to customize messaging depending on where users are in the purchasing decision process.
Additionally, having a functioning website is the bare minimum for delivering an optimal shopping experience. It’s vital to put yourself in your ideal customer’s shoes, understanding where the pain points lie on your website and understand how to fix them to increase conversion rates. Rejuvenating your website with fresh creatives is always a welcome treat, but make sure to reduce the barriers to conversion and ensure that the shopping experience is fluid across all devices.
Most importantly, have fun with your marketing. Some of the most successful ecommerce brands have incorporated a witty twist to their marketing messages to cut through the clutter and noise on social media platforms and create profound breakthroughs in their business. Utilizing a unique approach to communicating with your audience can increase conversions if executed strategically.
I hope that this guide proves to be useful for anyone in the ecommerce realm, whether you’re just venturing into the digital world for the first time or have been in the business for several years.