Your online store is booming.
You’ve got Pay Per Click campaigns driving traffic to your store. Your store’s sweet design is easy to navigate and has a simple checkout. You’ve even got your Facebook fans shopping.
But even if your store is booming, it can always be better.
In fact, if you’re not doing these five things, you’re probably leaving a lot of money on the table (and your competitors are divvying it up!).
1. Auto Respond or Triggered Emails
There’s lots of different kinds of emails: newsletters, eflyers, contests, sales, promos, etc. – but here’s a few that most online stores overlook:
a. Abandoned Cart Emails:
67% of those who start the checkout process don’t finish. Use a triggered abandoned cart email that will give the shopper incentive to come back and complete their purchase. But make it fast, or they’ll buy from your competitor.
b. Reorder Emails:
Selling a consumable or something people need to order over and over? Remind them with an automated reorder email and and incentive to keep buying from you.
c. Product Recommendation Emails:
You know what your customers have bought, so send them recommendations for products they might be interested in. These emails can all be automated.
d. Product or Price Watch Emails:
Your inventory is always changing, make it easy for your customers to keep up with automated emails altering them of new products, price drops, price increase, or low inventory.
e. Top Reviewed or Liked Product Emails:
Shoppers like to know what’s popular, what’s in style, and what others are buying. Set-up automated emails showcasing your most popular, “liked”, or highly reviewed products.
For a more in-depth read on triggered emails, read the guest blog on e-commerce emails we wrote for our friends at Delivra.
2. Custom Landing Pages Designed for Search
When a customer lands on your website from search results, both paid and organic, where are you sending them? You should be taking visitors to landing pages that are most relevant to the the query they typed in. In paid search this is easy to control. If the user searched for “red tennis shoes”, make sure that you’re showing them red tennis shoes before anything else. Studies show that you have five seconds or less to signal relevancy to a searcher, make your landing pages count.
When it comes to organic (natural) search, do some keyword research, and find out which types of products you carry are being searched for most often. Make sure you build search friendly pages for these products or product categories in order to capture some of that traffic. If you’ve got the budget, a 3rd party tool like SearchSpring can really help you out by automating this process.
3. Highlighting (and Encouraging) Reviews
Customer reviews have many benefits to your ecommerce store. First and foremost, reviews increase your conversion rates. Plain & simple; statistics show that over 61% of online shoppers read and are influenced by reviews. If you’re not allowing and encouraging reviews on your site, you’re shaving points off your conversion rate – and fattening up the conversion rate of your competition.
Further to the conversion rate benefits, you’re also missing out on potential traffic. Reviews are great for SEO! It’s no secret that search engines love fresh content – and reviews are just that, fresh content that was written for you, for free! In many cases potential customers start their search for a product looking specifically for reviews, so it helps to have some review content on a product page to attract organic search visits from search terms that include the word review, from users in that phase of the purchasing cycle.
4. Up-selling and Cross-selling During Checkout
Did you ever notice all the gum, goodies, and gossip mags when you checkout at a grocery store?
They’re there to get you to add more stuff to your cart. Your online store should be no different.
The checkout process is when shoppers have their credit card out, and are ready to buy – and you should still be ready to sell.
Cross-selling is promoting a product that complements the one they intend on purchasing. If they’re buying a camera, offer them a camera case. If they’re buying a shirt, offer them a tie. Note that the cross-sell items should be at a much lower cost than the original item(s) (just like the gum at the grocery store).
Up-selling is promoting a product that the customer may wish to purchase instead of the one in their shopping cart. If they’re buying a computer, offer them a faster one with more memory. If they’re buying a a DVD, offer them the DVD that comes in a box set. Your goal is to present the shopper with a relevant, higher-priced item that they may not have considered until now.
5. Split and Multivariate Testing
The average online store conversion rate is 2-3%.
So if store A and store B have similar products, pricing, and promos, why does store B get twice the business?
One reason could be that they actively optimize their site with split and multivariate testing.
Split and multivariate testing allows you to pit changes on your site against each other to see which attracts more conversion. If there are any change that you’re thinking of making to your site, but are unsure as to whether or not it will have a positive effect on the performance, testing is essential. Op Ed advocates constant testing of an e-commerce site, as you never know which small tweak will lead to your next conversion rate boost! For a more in-depth read, along with some testing ideas, we’ve previously written a primer on the basics of testing.
The post 5 Surefire Ways to Leave Money on the Table with Your Online Store appeared first on Op Ed Marketing.