The eCommerce space is jam packed with businesses scrambling to get to the top of Google and trying to gain as much market share as they possibly can. Every year that goes by it becomes more and more competitive, however, everything moves so fast in terms of technology and trends so there are always opportunities to make more money from your eCommerce channel.
In this blog, we want to provide you with some tips to help boost sales through your Magento store:
On-site pop-ups
eCommerce pop-ups are unsung heroes as far as we’re concerned. In their early days, they were more of a pain in the back side to customers as the message or offer was never compelling enough but most importantly they didn’t have the sophistication around what, when, where and who they display to as they do now. Companies like Nosto do this really well with their Magento extension.
You can use on-site pop-ups in some of the different ways below to increase conversion rate:
Welcome customers and collect valuable email addresses for re-marketing
Incentivise and grow your mailing list by offering customers who visit your site a discount for signing up to your newsletter.
Create a sense of urgency to drive seasonal sales
One of best and quickest ways to increase conversion rate on your site is to create an urgency in your customer to purchase within a period of time, for example, on the same day they visit your site. This can be done by displaying a countdown timer showing the remaining time left before the offer expires. The offer could be to get 20% off or free shipping if you purchase by 12am that day.
Flash sales
Flash sales are a great way to drive conversions on your site. Flash sale pop-ups might appear only when a visitor is about to leave your site. These may also be set to only display to visitors from a certain channel (email, organic, adwords etc.) or who have viewed certain products. This ensures a discount isn’t displayed to high-performing channel visitors.
Offer discounts or complimentary items to clients who have a certain cart value
One way to increase Average Order Value (AOV) is to use pop-ups to reward your customer for spending more by offering them a discount or a complimentary item if they spend a certain amount.
Target the most suitable customers for increased conversions
You might be running a promotion for a particular item, for example, a certain pair of trainers but only want a pop-up offer to display to visitors who are viewing the ‘trainers’ category.
Convert visitors before they leave
When might visitors who are abandoning your site return? Will they ever return? This can be done by detecting your user’s mouse movement. Try and entice them to stay by offering them a discount.
Loyalty programs
Loyalty programs are always a win-win from our perspective and a fantastic way to increase sales and maximise profits as you don’t have to spend as much trying to drive new traffic to your site. There are some great loyalty program Magento extensions out there such as this one from Mirasvit.
Here are some ways loyalty programs can increase sales:
Competitive advantage over your competitors
Having a loyalty program will always sway a customer towards you instead of a competitor because there is an extra incentive to purchase from you.
A customer who collects points will always spend more
This will always happen because when a customer has accumulated X number of points they will want to spend them and quite often they’ll add their loyalty points to their order to reduce the cost.
Loyalty programs are a must so start looking at the many Magento extensions on offer. Also make sure you do your research and look through the reviews.
Emails
We’ve come across so many business owners that don’t have a proper email strategy in place. They normally just send out weekly or monthly newsletters but do absolutely nothing with their transactional emails.
Transactional emails are emails triggered by a user’s interaction, example of transactional emails are:
- Order confirmation
- Account registration
- Subscribe to newsletter
- Back in stock
A lot of the time there is no real thought given to these emails. This is a grave mistake as these emails have a much higher open rate than any other type of email. These are emails that the customer needs to look at rather than chooses to look at. There is no reason why you can’t include any of the following in these emails:
- Products to sell
- Promotions
- Article
- Social media links
All the above are opportunities for you to increase your returning customer spend as well as customer engagement. It’s far cheaper than increasing your Adwords budget to gain new customers. The design should also be considered the same as you do for your newsletter instead of using the generic template offered by Magento.
Site Search
Site search is another function of your Magento store that we see overlooked by so many business owners. All sites have the function but so many stores just aren’t getting the maximum benefit from them.
Visitors that use site search are far more likely to purchase as they are shopping with intent and they’re much further down in the purchase funnel.
Too many e-store owners don’t spend enough time reviewing the quality of their site search results to see if they’re actually helpful to their customer’s. Magento out of the box site search functionality just doesn’t cut it, however, there are many site search modules out there you can install on your Magento store, for example, this Mirasvit one.
Here are some tips on how a site search extension like the one from Mirasvit mentioned above can help boost sales:
Search spelling corrections
Corrects any misspelling(s) or mistyping whilst searching for products.
Search Auto complete
As soon as visitor starts typing the relevant products appear below.
Includes Image and price
When typing, a drop down will appear showing not only the product name but a thumbnail image of the product as well as the price so the customer can view before even clicking search.
These are just a few ways you can enhance your site search experience for your customers.
Lastly, the site search is more than just helping your customers find the right products quickly, it’s also a helpful tool for understanding what your customer likes and can be very helpful in other ways. By analysing the site search data you can:
- Find out what products or brands your visitors are searching for which you might not sell so you can inform the buying department
- See what products need to always be kept at a certain stock level because they are searched for regularly in order to not miss out on sales
- Add great value to your merchandising strategy by seeing products that only convert via site search. This can indicate that a product might not have been merchandised correctly. It might be because it’s positioned at the bottom of a page or maybe it should be shown on a home page banner because people constantly search for it.
If you want to increase the conversion rate on your Magento store then get moving on the tips above if you haven’t done so already!
