E-commerce Seminar: 50 ways to increase your online sales

roger@screenpages.com

50 ways to increase your online sales

300+ e-commerce websites since 1997

Substantial e-commerce website experience (ca. 100 yrs)

Magento specialists since 2009 (ca. 100 implementations)

Screen Pages key facts

Best practice e-commerce

Bespoke/customised websites – down to the

last pixel

Professionally designed & specified &

constructed

Heavily content-managed by you

Functionally rich/complex + integrated with

ERP/back office

Fast, reliable & scaleable

It’s going to be changed almost as soon as it’s

live

Our philosophy to website building

Agenda

Getting new customers

Engaging customers

Persuading them to buy

Making it simple to purchase

Getting them to come back

No silver bullets…

….it’s good old-fashioned hardwork

First…measure

Analytics – build a custom dashboard

Surveys

Usability studies

50 ££s of dynamite

Order confirmation page

Three questions

One text box

Surveymonkey £26 p.m.

The answer to the “survey debate”

Getting new customers

Email

SEO

PPC

Referrals

Affiliates

Marketplaces

Catalogues/lists

Offline (eg PR)

Hidden gem: retargeting

Getting new customers

Source Traffic Conversion £ per visit

Brand related searches 14.5% 6.3% £4.45

Generic search 14.1% 1.5% £0.55

Paid search 19.9% 3.4% £2.74

Email marketing 20.6% 4.9% £2.73

Referrals 10.5% 2.4% -

Average 3.9% £2.64

Funny thing, conversion rate

SEO basics

Page titles

Meta data

Keywords in copy (& other places)

Sitemap

You should be able to “content-manage” the onsite assets

It’s all about (interesting) content

You can’t trick Google

Mobile is now a big issue for many

Other ways to get in Google

1.

2.

3.

4.

Content marketing dumbed down

Category page copy (hardest pages *** more later)

On domain blog (Wordpress, please)

Content pages optimised for target keywords

How to…

Buying guides

FAQs

Ideas/inspiration etc

Articles, style guides [& video]

Buying guides

How to & tips

Social Media

Facebook Like & Tweet (or Share This)

Distribute your content

Make videos, host on Youtube & embed

Get a channel

But:

Ca. 1% of traffic & 0.1% conversion

Exception: “causes”

• Case study

Holy Grail at the end of the ‘long tail’?

3,729 search terms = 55% of sales

5x increase in generic traffic in 6 months

Increase from 5% to 10% of total traffic

• Looking good!?

SEO – holy grail?

6% of total sales (vs. 10% of traffic) = lower conversions & ROI

No. 5 “swiss watches” = 400 visits per month & no sales

First page for “watches” (negative ROI)

PR

Catalogues

Inserts

Offline marketing

How to get good PR

Sign of the times

27%

21%Mobile opportunity?

2.9%

0.9%

4.5%

Mobile conversions

Mobile usage

Speed matters

Each second costs you a 7% decrease in conversions

85,000+ visitors on both 13th & 14th November

20,000 orders processed

Appeal raised £32m

Two front-end, load balanced servers

One database server

Magento Enterprise

Synchronised with eBay store

Integrated with warehouse

Scale, load & peaks

Engaging customers

New/latest/sale

Promotions (regular & varied)

Content (lots of it) & photography (lifestyle)

Make your landing pages compelling (category & product pages)

Navigation

Categorisation is critical

Dropdowns (esp. multi-layered)

Filters (price, colour etc – but caveat)

Put your products in the “right” order

Navigation

Customer engagement fail

% landings bounce%

Home page 39% 17%

Category page 22% 31%

Product page 19% 56%

i.e. not on the home page. Opportunity.

Where do visitors land?

37%

Special case: category pages

25-50% of all entrances

BUT: 40-50% of all page views

Three roles:

Landing pages

Routing pages

Conversion pages (with add to basket)

Yet, sadly overlooked…

Remember:

68% of people don’t arrive on the home page.

About 4 in 10 of these bounce

Category page

Product pages

Bullets and copy

Photography/video

Call(s) to action / how to transact / service

Reviews/testimonials

Why are you selling it?

Instructions

Delivery & returns

What if it’s not quite the right product?

What goes with this?

Write great copy

Buy this

Anatomy of a product page

Link: http://www.smartinsights.com/conversion-optimisation/product-page-optimisation/retail-product-page/

Persuading them to buy

What makes a good proposition?

First: meet your competitors

Desirable products

Well presented

Attractively priced

Securely paid for

Nicely delivered

Communicated on every page

What makes a good proposition?

Persuading visitors to buy

Service & “hygiene factors”

Delivery

Returns

Packaging

Call-centre

Customer service

Source:: E-consultancy

Work on delivery options

Standard delivery (free?)

Next day premium

Nominated delivery

….and communicate them

Reviews & ratings (social endorsement)

Onsite or offsite

Make it simple to purchase

Basket

Security

Big buttons (especially for mobile)

Show your beautiful packaging

Make it simple to purchase

Integrated payments (+ alternate methods)

No distractions (different header?)

Registration or not?

Language & tone

Example: “pay securely now” vs. “submit”

Quiz time: which checkout performs best?

Abandonned basket chaser

13.3% of these emails are clicked

35% of these clicks lead to a

purchase

AOV is 19% higher

Getting them back

Conversion data

Surveys/Analytics

Trigger emails

Email marketing (once a week now, twice for VIPs)

Loyalty schemes

Catalogues

Recent survey26% had 20%+ of traffic from emails.

20% had email traffic converting at 8%+

Build your email database

Those that do it well, benefit extremely well

It can performs at 4-7 times regular traffic

Emails are increasingly opened on mobiles

Guidance:

1. Design your transactional emails

2. Manage & update their content

3. Tag them for Google Analytics

Read this article:

http://www.screenpages.com/email-marketing-20-ways-to-expand-your-email-database

Email marketing (best converting traffic)

Loyalty schemes

Plan your attack

But first….

1. Agree & quantify business goal

2. Breakdown into key activities

3. Identify metrics for each activity set

4. Define activities to achieve the metrics

5. Measure results

“A goal without a plan is just a wish”

Planning taps you can turn

New

customers

Existing

customers

Visits/traffic sources % increase % increase

Orders/conversions % increase % increase

Average order values % increase % increase

Ling’s Cars £35m

“…On a website, you are competing with

You Tube, porn sites and Facebook. You are

not trying to out-bore your local council

website. So, open the energy taps, eat

sugar and get on with something exciting.

Split testing/focus groups etc, is just a fast

road to the lowest common denominator,

just as you see in politics; boring.”

Things change

Keep it simple

“The best website is one that the

customer doesn’t notice”

Source: Screen Pages’ 5th E-commerce Forum, 2013

Bonus tip: pick the right platform & agency

roger@screenpages.com

@screenpages

01932 359 160

Thank you