The first quarter can be a sad time for eCommerce retailers. The holiday season is over, and consumers are in penny-pinching mode. What can you do to give your eCommerce sales a quick boost during the post-holiday slump? We have some tried and true tactics to boost eCommerce sales that have worked great for our clients. These are inexpensive, don't involve any programming knowledge, and each one can be implemented in less than an hour or two. Be sure to add these to your eCommerce marketing strategy.
You cannot visit a major eCommerce retailer these days without seeing a pop-up or slide-in offer of some kind.
These offers are easier to implement than you might think. We use a service called Optinmonster. You can place your Optinmonster opt-ins in any type of website, and it has plugins for website builders like Wordpress, Wix and Shopify.
Optinmonster works with all of the major email marketing providers (Mailchimp, HubSpot, ConstantContact, etc.).
Pricing for Optinmonster starts at $9.99/mo.
We used an Optinmonster pop-up for UdeserveAcookie.com. We have seen almost 6% conversion for the opt-in. Of the 6% who opted in, one-third make a purchase.
Users often make it all the way to the checkout page and then decide to back out on their purchase. Maybe they don't have their credit card handy. Maybe they are hesitant to pull the trigger just yet. Whatever the reason, at this point in the checkout process, you have their email address, and you can use it to your advantage.
Most of the major eCommerce platforms have an abandoned cart integration. Shopify and Bigcommerce offer this feature natively. For Wordpress/Woocommerce, we recommend a plugin called Recover Abandoned Cart ($49). For one of our clients, this plugin has recovered almost $11,000 in less than six months. How's that for ROI?!
Live chat and eCommerce go together like peanut butter and jelly. It's a great tool to reduce friction. A visitor might be confused about what comes with a certain product package. They might have questions about shipping. They might be confused about how to setup an account. The possibilities are endless, but without someone available to answer their questions instantly, they are likely to find what they are looking for on a competitor's site. Your live chat assistant can be your visitors' knight in shining armor, and it can help you determine where the leaks are in your site.
Who will manage your live chat?
If you're a one-person shop, that person should be you. Who better to answer your visitors' questions than you, the person who has poured your heart and soul into the products you're selling? You can hire services to manage your chats for you, but proceed with caution. You'll want to make sure you're getting your money's worth and that the service offers effective, English-fluent communicators. If you have a staff, live chat can be delegated to anyone with a good working knowledge of your website and product catalog (a customer service rep, a sales rep, or an administrative assistant, for example).
We recommend a tool called LiveChat for our clients. LiveChat offers direct integration with Wordpress and tons of other tools. You can even install an app on your phone and chat with visitors while you're on the go. Pricing for this tool starts at $19/user/month.
We hope these quick tips will give your eCommerce sales a boost as we near the end of the first quarter of 2017. Do you have any eCommerce tips you'd like to share? We'd love to hear about them in the comments!