Summary: Ecommerce Evolved - Chapter 4: Conversion Tricks, Sales Boosts, Etc. (4)
Summary: Ecommerce Evolved - Chapter 4: Conversion Tricks, Sales Boosts, Etc.
This post is the 5th of a series of posts I'm writing to summarize the book Ecommerce Evolved by Tanner Larsson, available on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Ecommerce-Evo...9352160&sr=8-1
Here are links to the other posts:
Introduction
Chapter 1: Funnel-Based Ecommerce
Chapter 2: Recurring Income Core
Chapter 3: Think Before You Sell
Chapter 4: Conversion Tricks, Sales Boosts, and Profit Maximizers (this post)
(Disclaimer: These are my personal notes so I've paraphrased quite heavily in some places. If you like what you read, please buy the book to get the complete information in its original glory.)
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Chapter 4: Conversion Tricks, Sales Boosts, and Profit Maximizers
The author says he would be at least 30-40% less profitable without using all the tricks described in this chapter.
Conversion Tricks
Retargeting - Involves tiny snippets of ad-activating code that tracks the actions of your website visitors. When someone visits your product's page without buying, the code follows the person as they visit other web pages and shows them ads for the product or ads for other related offers. People are 70% more likely to convert after being retargeted. Retargeted banner ads have a 0.7% CTR on average. Retargeting garners a 1046% increase in branded search and 726% increase in site visits after 4 weeks of continuous retargeting use. The author's retargeting campaigns regularly generate over 1000% ROI. Recommended retargeting services: Perfect Audience, AdRoll, SiteScout, Facebook. Running on multiple services will give maximum coverage and reach.
Youtube is also highly recommended. It's under-utilized, cheap and highly effective for retargeting. You can build retargeting lists on youtube through adwords so that when someone watches a youtube vid, your video ad would show first.
Product Reviews - Product reviews in your store with the right format and rich snippets will improve trust in your business and boost search engine rankings (Google loves product reviews with rich-snippet format). When customers buy, automatically send an email asking for a review, and incentivize them - even send them a little gift. Model reviews after Amazon's reviews - same look-and-feel - to see an increase in sales.
Landing Pages - Should contain product benefits and a buy button. Should be devoid of distractions to encourage the sale. Can result in an instant 5-10%+ boost on front-end conversion rate (vs. 1-2% conversion rate on standard product pages). Send paid traffic only to these pages. Components of a landing page: Headline (to grab prospect's interest), pictures (featuring the product), video (optional but highly recommended; 30 seconds or less is best, 3 minutes at most), features and corresponding benefits (5-10 from most to least important), product reviews, purchase incentives (e.g. discount, free shipping, bundle discount), retargeting pixels (product they saw but didn't purchase; or complementary products to one they've already purchased), exit-intent email grab (a pop-up that appears when customer tries to leave, offering a lead magnet for their email).
Unique Mobile Checkouts - Particularly important to design a checkout process that is optimized for mobile: Remove images or styling elements that don't scale down correctly, code for popups, code for real-time calculations that increase loading time, etc. Allow the customer to enter data on multiple pages instead of cramming everything into one page i.e. a multi-step checkout process. Only ask customers to create an account AFTER they've checked out to reduce cart abandonment. Add paypal as a checkout option as people are wary of entering CC info on mobile.
Sales Boosts
Loss Leaders -> Products that are sold below product/fulfillment cost, e.g. product costs $10 and you sell it for $5. Used to acquire new customers. Must have funnel to recoup the loss right away to at least break even. Good example is free product + just pay shipping.
Trip Wires -> Low-cost offers used to acquire new customers. Should be the font end product of a connected sales funnel that features related upsells. Tripwires allow you to break even or make slight profit, unlike loss leaders.
Flash Sales -> 24-hour events you offer customers and other people on your list a steep discount on a product, a big sale, or a bundle of products for a discounted price. Each sale should result in profit. Can include count-down timer. Can be done during slow periods to boost sales.
Phone Calls -> Provide a phone support number. Author has seen a 30% increase in daily orders. Some people have problems with the checkout process, or prefer to give out CC info over the phone instead of online. Also, when an order is declined, someone should call the customer right away to salvage the order.
Profit Maximizers
Free Shipping -> Don't use this as a desperate grab for more sales, but use it as an incentive to increase the average order value, i.e. "free shipping for orders over x dollars". 58% of customers buy more to qualify for free shipping. Should only offer free shipping on orders that are LARGER than your average order size (e.g. 20% larger). At 20% larger, author sees a 30-50% increase in sales. Also show reminder like "If you spend x more dollars, you qualify for free shipping", right where shipping charges are listed.
Ride-Alongs -> Put inserts/flyers in packages before shipping them. This is an inexpensive way to 1)make extra sales (can have different inserts showing related products of particular products; discount coupons, liquidation offers, "thank you for being a loyal customer" notes, reminder for customer to post a review, even product samples; great way to move unpopular products), 2)test out new offers, even 3)make extra cash from 3rd-party advertisers (other companies pay you to send out inserts for them if you have a big customer base; can make affiliate commissions from resulting sales).
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And that's it for Part I! Hope you found that useful.
Again, I had plans to summarize the entire book, but by the time I was finishing summarizing Part I, I realized I had reached the 10% fair-use threshold.
I would strongly recommend that you get the book from Amazon - it's truly worth its weight in titanium!
Amy
To add to that depending on the market you are promoting your e-commerce site, even in those cases when the store offers cash on delivery as a payment method, adding an ordering phone number to the sales page will boost the conversion rate further more. Just consider the amount of people that have never made a purchase transaction online and are skeptical about it.
Originally Posted by platinum
The geo my partner and I have been doing testing in, 10-20% of orders were placed by phone...this is 10-20% of orders that probably wouldn't have happened if a phone number hadn't been available. Next step would be to make the phone number easier to find, featured in a more prominent spot in the storefront, to see if sales would increase as a result. Lots of testing and learning for this ecom newbie yet!
Amy
Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app
And it's not just countries.
We have seen specific age groups as well, say 50 / 60 plus that are sometimes placing their very first order online. They'd call first and then order online once they know it's not a scam.
And there's the group of people that were scammed previously and are now hesitant to order online. If you look at the number of fake shops, it's no surprise people - no matter which geo market they are in - are hesitant to spend money online.
This is especially valid for us, as our AOV is around 150
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