How can you Increase your eCommerce Conversions?

Creating a sustainable increase in your eCommerce conversion is a challenge most eCommerce businesses face.

Attracting new customers while encouraging your existing ones to spend more is a delicate balance. Not least because if you get your communication and retention strategy wrong, you could turn off your customer base.

To stand any chance of increasing the eCommerce conversions you need to be able to accurately analyse your website performance and identify opportunities to improve.

Crucially you need a robust retention strategy that drives engagement with your existing customers. Your ability to retain customers will have the biggest impact on your conversions and your profits.

Repeat customers are cheaper to attract and spend on average 69% more than new customers. Therefore, increasing your retention rate by as little as 5% could net your business a significant uplift in revenue and profit.

Identify Challenges to Conversion

Before you can increase your eCommerce conversions, you need to carry out some analysis on your website. 

You need to be confident that your site is working as hard as possible otherwise anything you do will fall flat.

Use your website analytics to identify any problem areas. Look for pages or parts of your site that have a high exit rate. Pay particular attention to the signup and checkout pages. These could indicate barriers to conversion.

Giving customers the option to pay without signing up and providing a slick checkout experience will immediately boost conversions.

Compare year-on-year data to identify any uncharacteristic downward trends. Also, check for any 404 errors. No website is without its glitches and pages can break so checking all your product pages are working is good practice.

As part of this exercise, it’s also worth analysing how your other channels are performing. Email marketing, paid search and push notifications should all be examined.

If you’re seeing declines in open and click-through rates there could be a problem with your messaging, product offers or all of the above.

Again, compare your data to last year. Take into account any seasonal or market trends that could skew the numbers as well as any promotions you had running.

If the numbers are still in the negative then you may have a bigger problem with retention than you first thought.

Identify Opportunities for Conversion

Just as you need to identify the potential problems with your website, you need to look at the opportunities.

The objective is to increase your eCommerce conversions. That means looking at any and all ways you can do this.

To boost your conversion rates you need to build robust acquisition and retention strategies. The former focuses on website optimisation, content marketing, social marketing and paid search.

The latter is a different beast entirely. Mainly because, unlike acquisition, you already know who you’re talking to. More than that, you have considerable first-party data to draw upon.

Your retention strategy needs to contain multiple campaigns, each addressing a different type of customer or promotion.

Utilising the data already within your internal systems, you can create campaigns for lapsed customers as effectively as you can for loyal customers.

Additionally, you need to identify the best channel to use to engage with your customers.

This depends significantly on both the objective and the level of urgency. If you’re going into a flash sale you could email your audience. Or you could send them an SMS message or app notification.

You don’t want to miss out on valuable sales because your customers don’t check their emails as often as you’d like them to.

Take the time to break out each of your objectives and which channel would serve you best. 

Data and eCommerce Conversions

Before you can execute any of your new campaigns you need to dig into your data. Unless you have a customer data platform your data will be in silos, making it almost impossible to consolidate.

Any work in this respect will be painfully manual and result in you making decisions and building campaigns with old data.

It’s also next to impossible to consolidate transactional data against all of your customers and action it in any meaningful way.

To generate the kind of interest you need to increase your eCommerce conversions, you need to consolidate your data.

The advantage of doing so is it will pull all your data into a Single Customer View. That means you can gain insight into everything that matters to your customers.

Not only the products customers buy but the products they’ve viewed. Their average order value and order frequency will tell you their level of loyalty and buy-in.

Even their demographical data can give you insight into dependents which can prove useful come the holiday season.

Using a customer data platform or a hybrid customer data and engagement platform will help you leverage that data.

It will give you the capacity to segment your data so you can make sure the right message goes to the right part of your customer base.

Generic, fire and forget marketing doesn’t work. Or at least not in the volumes you need it to. Using a customer data platform with integrated marketing tools allows you to build personalised campaigns.

You can segment your customer base so your customers receive product recommendations relevant to them. Whether it’s new season fashion or a winter sale.

Equally, you can target lapsed customers with aggressive offers to entice them back to your website. Consolidating your data makes these campaigns possible.

The Right Channel for the Job

While the majority of eCommerce businesses rely almost exclusively on email marketing, it isn’t always the right tool for the job. As highlighted above.

Taking advantage of the technology available to you will help you to add considerable value to interactions with your customers.

The focus needs to be on delivering value through relevance. The more data you have to hand the more relevant you can make both your website and your communication channels.

Push Notifications

By using web push or app push notifications, you can reach out to your customers with timely offers. Knowing the offers or discounted products that your customers will respond to can significantly boost the chances of conversion.

It can also be useful if a customer is about to leave the site or close the app without purchasing. A timely nudge or an offer or free shipping can be enough to change the customer’s behaviour.

Push notifications are also effective to notify customers when sales start or a product is back in stock.

SMS

SMS or text messages can have a multitude of applications. Everything from order dispatches to sale alerts.

Your journey planner allows for multi-stage campaigns so you can nudge your customers based on behavioural triggers. Delivering communications in this way helps to build trust as your customers will feel you know them.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a staple of most marketing departments. And most campaigns are generic newsletters to the entire email database regardless of relevance.

Customers expect a lot more from you.

Consolidating your data allows you to send highly personalised emails. The core message doesn’t change but by using transactional data and segmentation, each customer receives an email tailored to their preferences.

You should have a clear idea of how well your emails perform currently. Personalising them in this way more or less guarantees an uplift in conversions.

Chatbots

Opinions are divided on how well chatbots work. This is because not enough businesses plug their chatbots into anything. They are stuck using specific responses based on identifying keywords in customer queries.

This makes for a frustrating customer experience. If you had a chatbot that was plugged into a customer data platform, things would change radically. 

All your customer would need to do is log in or give the chatbot an order number. From there it can access the Single Customer View and formulate responses accordingly. 

It turns chatbots from something you feel you should have, into something you can’t live without.

Boosting eCommerce Conversions

Of course, all of this takes time. Consolidating your data is the relatively easy part. The time goes on analysing your data and building the campaigns.

However, once you’ve got your first campaigns under your belt you can start to make a meaningful impact on your customers. This in turn will have a huge impact on your eCommerce conversions.

The good customer data and engagement platforms have split testing and AI baked in so you can refine your campaigns for maximum conversions.

The best bit is, that the more you use the tool the more effective your campaigns become and the more engaged your audience will be.

As a result, it opens up exciting new opportunities like developing a loyalty programme for your customers. This in turn can have a suite of campaigns to maintain engagement and nurture trust.

To learn more about how a customer data platform can help grow your eCommerce conversions, get in touch today to request a demo.