The pandemic has pushed more companies to set up online stores in order to grow and advance. Even without this health crisis in the equation, more brands are aiming to set up their e-commerce presence simply because the industry is thriving. However, despite the potential that the e-commerce world inherently has, your business still needs to build a unique identity in an oversaturated market, meaning that you’re up against many digital businesses that resemble yours.
That requires plenty of market and customer research and ongoing marketing output to ensure that customers recognize your unique value proposition, and preferably, that they come back to your store. In the midst of it all, you also need to work on conversion rate optimization regularly, to maximize your sales potential beyond your initial ad campaigns and the like. To do that, you should rely on an ongoing influx of data. Here, we’ll suggest a few ways you can use data in your strategies to boost conversions on your site and bring more people to trust your brand.
Adapt your checkout journey
The way in which customers feel when they reach your checkout process is perhaps one of the most honest reflections of their experience with your business. Are they frustrated with the number of clicks they need to go through? Are they unpleasantly surprised with the astronomical shipping charges? What about the mandatory account creation to go through the purchase at all?
Keep monitoring your checkout process and the customer journey to recognize what you can do in this respect that will improve their experience. Your analytics tools can greatly help you understand the motivation of your customers to abandon their carts.
Customize product suggestions
One particular part of the checkout process is how you present certain information when customers add something to their carts. For example, based on the content of the cart and the previous purchase information available from each customer, you can use a conversion-boosting Shopify App that will tailor custom in-cart offers.
Based on the product your customer is buying, you can make personalized offers and incentivize them to add more items to the cart, thus increasing your conversions. This also helps boost the average order value for each customer and helps you understand customer behavior for future reference, too. Personalization in this way also inspires customers to come back to your store since they appreciate when brands recognize their preferences and provide valuable guidance during the shopping experience.
Trigger marketing to boost returns
Sometimes, brands rely on return business solely because the first one or two purchases with that particular customer went well. However, you need to put some effort into deserving those return customers, even though you firmly believe they’ll recognize the value of your product.
This is where trigger marketing can help since it’s used to target customers who have already bought something from you, but then stopped coming back. Based on their previous purchases, reviews, testimonials, as well as behavior on your site, you can send them customized alerts with the sales they’d be interested in, and thus prompt them to come back to your site.
Implement social proof on your site
Real-time conversion optimization can depend on what kind of data you’re able to present to your customers, not just the kind of data you use for the purpose of marketing. For instance, inspiring the fear of missing out (or FOMO) with the help of social proof will likely inspire people to make purchase decisions more easily.
If you integrate a CRO tool to generate pop-up notifications when someone makes a purchase, people on your site will see that others like them trust your business. This kind of data presentation in real-time will nudge them to go through with the purchase and come back to your store for more. As you can see, automation can grow your sales by presenting the most relevant information when it matters most in the eyes of your customer.
Personalize your site’s experiences
Behavioral targeting is certainly not a new take on increasing sales, but you need to be aware of its impact if you’re going to use it in optimizing your conversion rates. Unlike personalized email campaigns that can nowadays even be automated to a great extent, personalizing your landing pages and the content on your site, as well as customer alerts and notifications to meet the need of an individual takes more finesse, and thus, more data.
For example, hypertargeting and geotargeting allow you to send well-timed alerts to customers notifying them about the kind of sales that they’d be most interested in. Then again, based on their past behavior on your site, you can tailor-make the kind of offers that will greet them the next time they visit your store. Finally, using segmentation, you can target people based on truly personal details available on their social media, subscriptions to your newsletter, and the like.
Thanks to a myriad of digital tools that you can integrate on your site, you can gain access to a large pool of data from your customers, but also recognize emerging market trends, and the ones that are fading in relevance. This will help you base all your design, advertising, and sales efforts on relevant information directly from your customers. Over time, such an approach can put you above your competitors, since you’ll be actively listening to what they want and need, and thus adapt your presence accordingly.
Top 5 Methods To Improve Conversion Rates For eCommerce Stores