68% of small businesses don’t have a structured or documented conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy.
What does that mean?
It means there are many businesses that you can beat by implementing proper CRO strategies, providing better customer support, less friction in their shopping experience, and building an awesome brand.
With so many ways to attract visitors and convert them into customers in this article we will discuss three of them:
- Using engaging pop-ups and implementing best CRO practices
- Providing excellent customer services and reducing friction in the checkout process
- Providing consistent messaging across all channels and having straightforward website copy
Let’s discuss them.
1. Use engaging pop-ups and implement CRO best practice
Pop-ups can be an amazing way to draw your visitors’ attention to something you want them to see.
The trick is to have the right design, the right message, and deliver it in the perfect moment.
Sounds simple, but it’s not easy.
Usually, websites tend to surprise visitors with crafty offers, discounts, various coupons, but also to remind them of some unfinished tasks they need to complete or to pursue them to leave their email address.
They can also provide additional information in moments of need and assist in navigating and onboarding.
Highly engaging pop-ups are a great way to double your chances of converting a greater number of visitors.
Today, many different tools can help you create beautiful pop-ups, and one of these tools is Poptin.
Poptin enables you to create:
- Engaging pop-ups
- Embedded forms
- Automatic emails
When it comes to pop-ups, there is a useful drag and drop editor that facilitates the whole customization process to make your pop-ups fit your brand’s design and look professional.
The fun part is you don’t have to know how to write code at all. Anyone can do it.
You can use your pop-ups to your advantage by showing the right offers to the right people at the right time.
That’s why there are various triggers and templates to help you set a particular type of pop-up to appear at the moment when your customer decides to exit your website, after a certain period of time, a certain percentage scrolled, on-click, and similar.
Using exit-intent pop-ups, you can increase your conversion rates immensely and reduce bounce rates simultaneously.
People tend to buy more when they get the impression that it will pay off, so offering discounts and other incentives is always a good strategy to make more sales.
Conversion rate optimization is important as the number of visitors who take a certain desired action can drastically affect your business success.
These certain desired actions can be:
- Agreeing to subscription
- Signing up for email lists
- Signing up for a trial
- Submitting a contact form
- Purchasing a specific product/service
Some of the usual CRO activities you’ll undergo for your e-commerce website are:
- Making small changes to the CTA buttons
- Removing distracting elements
- A/B testing pretty much everything (as long as you have the time and resources)
Besides using pop-ups, use eCommerce PPC services provide your visitors with some quality content, attractive design, and an exceptional user experience. Then, watch your sales grow day by day.
But, there’s more.
2. Provide excellent customer service & reduce friction in the checkout process
Fast customer support is essential for pretty much any business.
Forrester reports have shown that 44% of consumers believe that live chat is the best feature that an e-commerce portal can have.
You want your prospects to feel like they can ask whatever they want, whenever they want. It should be your priority to provide a fast answer and a solution to any question or obstacle they may face.
People don’t like to wait, and if you put them in a position where they have to wait for a long time to get an answer, they will probably leave your website and go to your competitors.
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- A bad customer support team is worse than nothing having one at all. Pay attention to quality and dedicate yourself to creating the best team to deal with your customers. Sometimes, the support team is your only true touching point with your customer.
- Make it a priority to create meaningful connections with your customers. You want to make them feel special, heard, and addressed.
- Personalize their experience. Starting from purchases, understand that everyone buys a product for different personal and emotional reasons. Your customer support should acknowledge that.
- Be quick with your responses. People are often busy and don’t want to waste their time waiting for you to respond. They are usually already angry that they have to reach out in the first place.
- Ask for feedback. Show your customers that you value their opinions. Feedback is also great because it provides insights to help you improve your sales and overall brand.
It’s also not a bad idea to take a look at some of the best project management software to help you stay in sync with your team and crush your e-commerce sales & goals.
One of the best ways to ensure more e-commerce sales is to leverage social proof as a marketing tool. Make sure to display your customer’s reviews and testimonials on pages that matter, such as product and category pages, to increase your conversions significantly. There are lots of plugins nowadays that can automate this kind of work, but even if you do it manually, it provides a great return on investment. You can find some good examples on this website.
You can also add FAQ pages on your website with all the important information about billing and payment methods, refunds, shipping, and similar.
To enable real-time contact, you can add live chats to your e-commerce website.
Live chats are very useful as they provide interaction within a chatbox while still on the website and help you provide your prospects with important information.
Premio plugin: Chaty enables customers to contact you via their favorite social network channels such as Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Viber, Whatsapp, Skype, and more.
This live chat widget is also highly customizable, and you can design it to fit your branding.
While e-commerce bots help you respond quickly and answer repetitive questions, you’re always going to have customers who have unforeseen issues and need personal assistance.
That’s where live chat like Engati can come in.
Your e-commerce bots can handle all the repetitive, monotonous questions, the kind that makes your agents wonder, “Why do I have to answer this all the time?”. As for your agents, they can now take care of your customers in a far better manner. Most of the time there will be some very good software to do the repetitive work.
Besides offering a way for potential customers to ask a question about your product before making a purchase, other things to consider are all of the other factors that influence their experience on the website.
- Do they change their minds and give up before making a purchase?
- Do they return to your website after the initial visit?
- Do they go to your product pages after reading a blog post? Perhaps the navigation on your blog is terrible, so they don’t realize you offer products as well.
If you want to increase your conversions and reduce cart abandonment rates, you need to reduce friction in the checkout process. Reducing friction essentially means making it as simple as possible in the fewest steps/clicks to buy the product/service from your website.
Find out what stops your prospects from finishing the purchase, and fix it.
Here are a few things to analyze:
- Is your website load fast enough?
Customers don’t like to wait, and a short page load time is undoubtedly the first thing that they will notice when it comes to your website.
It shouldn’t take more than a couple of seconds for your website to be fully visible and interactable to your users.
Everything should run smoothly during the checkout process, from choosing to purchasing a product or a service.
Additionally, make sure your checkout page doesn’t have distractions that can pull them away from finishing the purchase. Some websites tend to remove website navigation from the checkout page to prevent users from leaving the checkout page to get back to the homepage.
To increase your website’s speed, start by compressing images to reduce file sizes. If you have gifs, be cautious as they can easily be 2-3 MB and completely slow down the loading speed.
- Create an easily navigable website structure
It is a very bad thing for your e-commerce website if it leads your prospects to dead-ends.
Being confusing and hard to navigate can also be a reason for them to turn away and decide that they want nothing to do with your online store.
You need to create steps that are easy to follow and intuitive and to create a website design that is clear, interesting but simple, and purposeful.
Use clear CTAs with active verbs to guide your customers and help them finalize the purchasing process or take a certain action.
- Optimize your online store for mobile devices
People want to be able to reach you and shop wherever they are, so optimizing your e-commerce website for mobile devices is one of the essential segments of your sales strategy.
Your mobile shopping experience MUST be as convenient/practical as possible.
Make the payment process easier by reducing unnecessary information, control the usage of pop-ups, keep the shopping carts visible, and put the most important elements in focus.
Take into account the smallness of their screens, and facilitate steps for them by putting CTA buttons in the right places.
The checkout process has to be both quick and easy to follow through.
The better the experience here, the higher the chances of upselling afterward.
- Offer different payment options to your customers.
Your website should offer various payment options to cover a larger audience and their payment methods. You don’t want to lose a sale because you don’t accept credit cards and only accept Paypal.
Automated localization is also a great way to accommodate your customers around the world. They should all be able to understand your website content language-wise and pay in their local currency.
And finally.
3. Provide consistent messaging across all channels and have straightforward page copy
Many brands believe they are consistent with their messaging and are easily understood by their target audience.
Yet, “Less than 10% of brands maintain a high level of brand consistency across all products and marketing channels.” according to the new SDL study.
Additionally, many people also believe that brand messaging means words (language and phrasing used) on your homepage or product messaging when really it’s much more than that.
Here are the rules for consistent messaging & straightforward copy that top brands use:
- Storytelling
You have definitely heard the saying consistency is the key to effective branding. Well, let’s define exactly what that means.
Brand consistency is the practice of always delivering messages aligned with the core brand values in the same tone, presenting the brand logo in a similar way, and repeating the same colors throughout your visual brand elements. Thus, in the case of employing 3D logo templates to create a logo for landing pages, continue to use those templates for all marketing touchpoints to maintain brand consistency. If you haven’t already, now is the ideal moment to consider investing in a logo maker to craft your unique brand symbol.
Additionally, every good brand has an interesting story. A story that customers connect to and later see themselves as part of.
But what if your brand lacks a good story?
A good question to start with is: What does your product mean to your customers?
Are you saving 5 minutes for someone or are you making their life a whole lot easier?
What are the interactions they have with your brand?
Your messaging must convey your story and how they, your customers, fit into that story.
Here’s an excellent example of how Innocent drinks conveyed their story on their website
- Be creative within boundaries
To provide your customers with consistency doesn’t actually mean that you have to be the same all the time and not change a thing.
You need to find the right balance between using your usual brand style and not becoming increasingly boring.
Your brand needs to innovate, but only to a point that you stop being recognizable and people start forgetting your story and what you represent – which is foundational.
Reebok has done an amazing job at presenting its brand on different platforms like Instagram and Pinterest without becoming unrecognizable and boring to its audience.
They adapt to a given platform, utilizing the platform’s unique content formats yet still remain loyal to their identity, which is essential.
Video marketing is arguably the most important content format right now, so it’s increasingly important to know how to use it to grow your e-commerce sales with video.
- Repurpose content
Repurposing content is a great way of emphasizing your message and your brand’s story. Many people believe it’s really just lazy but we think that’s not true.
While some brands have had lazy content repurposing, other brands have made it essential to their brand awareness campaigns and have made slight adjustments to keep the content fresh for their community while minimizing wasted potential.
Take GaryVee (Gary Vaynerchuck) for example. His entire content marketing strategy is based on creating one piece of long-form content and later splitting it into 10s of shorter versions that each stands as an individual piece of content.
If you’re interested in learning from his approach, here has made an interesting slide deck from which you can learn and copy tactics – relevant now in 2021 more than ever.
Of course, there are many ways to improve e-commerce sales. Perhaps all you need are more platforms to distribute your products on. You can learn more about the 9 Best Ecommerce Platforms For Startups & SMEs To Sell Products here.
The Bottom Line
To increase e-commerce sales, pay attention to different segments such as your customer service, consistency, and how user-friendly your e-commerce website is.
Customers have certain expectations when they are shopping online, and if your company doesn’t meet their expectations, they will usually go to a competitor.
To grab your customers’ attention, you can use interesting and engaging pop-ups. One of the best tools on the market for creating such pop-ups is Poptin. It allows you to entirely customize your pop-ups and set them to appear at the right time, right place with an enticing offer.
Improve your e-commerce sales by more than 20% with these useful tips & general rules and crush your goals.
