So, your site’s getting a steady flow of traffic, maybe it’s even rising. Your visitors are signing up for emails, and your mailing list is growing. But why aren’t your sales increasing accordingly? And if you’re getting more visitors and leads, why aren’t they converting? Time to find out.
Businesses that have trouble converting their e-commerce leads often overlook the following:
This article provides five solutions to begin increasing your conversions immediately:
Lead Nurturing
1) Content Strategy
2) Email Marketing
3) Retargeting/Remarketing
Providing Seamless Experiences
4) Consistent Brand Experience
5) Integrated Platform for Content & Product Management
Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is the process of developing relationships with your customers at each stage of the sales funnel – i.e., awareness, consideration, preference, purchase, loyalty, and advocacy.
This can be done through a variety of methods. But, unfortunately, many businesses take the “collect and forget” approach with their leads. In this section, we’ll be looking at content strategy, email marketing and remarketing.
1) Content Strategy
A content strategy is integral to every business and plays a key role in customer acquisition and retention. A strong strategy contains different messages for customers at each stage of the sales funnel.
What makes a piece of content valuable is determined by your customers. Listen to their questions and understand their pain points—provide solutions, establish authority, and build trust.
Content can take the form of blog posts, infographics, thought-leadership articles, industry news, podcasts, social media updates, and more. It’s useful to note that pages with visual content get 94% more views than those with text only. You might also want to check out this cool infographic about infographics.
High performing content is consistent, useful, engaging, and perhaps even interactive. For instance, provide a rich customer experience by starting a poll in your Instagram stories or a quiz in your blog to engage with your customers.
By building relationships with customers through your content, they will be more likely to trust you, purchase from you, and advocate for your brand. A successful content strategy could essentially form a lead-generating feedback loop!
2) Email Marketing
What are you doing with your mailing list? Do you have an effective email marketing strategy in place?
Email is one of the highest converting digital marketing methods, ahead of social media, SEO and PPC. Email marketing has an ROI of 4400%. If you’re not using your email list effectively, it’s no wonder your conversion rate isn’t reaching its potential.
By reaching out to customers in their inbox, you’re staying in constant contact, initiating engagement, and keeping your brand at the forefront of their mind.
A drip campaign is a set of automated emails triggered based on specific conditions or customer behavior—for instance, when someone signs up for your newsletter or makes a purchase. This is an excellent way to nurture leads and guide them throughout the customer journey—from consideration right through to purchase and retention.
Here are some ways to use drip campaigns to increase your conversion rates:
Set automated emails to trigger when customers leave products in their carts without checking out.
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In the first email, you might remind them that the product is still available for purchase. A second email the following week might offer them a discount code valid for a limited-time, encouraging them to complete their purchase.
Send personalized recommendations based on your customers’ purchase or browsing history.
Need more convincing about the effectiveness of such emails?
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45% of cart abandonment emails are opened
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50% of these emails are clicked on
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50% of customers who engaged with the email content complete their purchase
3) Retargeting/Remarketing
Thanks to GDPR-compliant cookies (not the chocolate chip kind), businesses can constantly engage with customers even after they leave their site. Retargeting is especially useful for consumers in the consideration stage and plays a key role in increasing conversions.
Through targeted Google display ads and social media advertising, businesses can put their brand and products in front of customers. When was the last time you saw a Facebook ad promoting something from a site you visited last week? Or what about that ad on a random website showing those specific headphones you were thinking of buying? That wasn’t a coincidence—you’re being retargeted.
Personalized brand experiences can be created by using data analytics to get insights into customer behavior. Consumers are expecting more personalized experiences in e-commerce, and Forrester predicts that insights-driven businesses will make more than $1.2 trillion in 2020.
Here are some examples of how you might engage warm leads by setting up custom audiences for different ads:
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B2B e-commerce: Offer a 30-day free trial or limited-time discount to customers with high content engagement rates but have not made a purchase.
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B2C e-commerce: Offer a coupon code to customers who have visited your site more than five times in the past month but have not made a purchase.
Providing Seamless Experiences
If you give your customers a smooth omnichannel experience, you’ll get more conversions. It’s quite straightforward really—the easier you make it for your customers to buy, the more likely they’ll make the purchase.
Likewise, for internal management, the more complicated your systems are, the more expensive and difficult they are to run. Successful e-commerce companies provide a cohesive user-friendly experience for their staff to ensure smooth business operations.
It is, therefore, fundamental to have a seamless experience both externally and internally.
4) Consistent Brand Experience (external)
Branding is the way your business demonstrates its identity, professionalism, and trustworthiness. A strong brand experience can increase customer acquisition and retention rates. To increase conversions, ensure that your branding is consistent across all channels and platforms.
You might notice that most thriving online businesses have distinct brand guidelines. This includes the brand statement, logo and instructions for usage, color palette, font types, and image styles. Using a CMS for brand management is especially useful for companies with multiple content contributors, as it eliminates the risk of straying from the style guide.
You already know that it’s not enough to just rely on your website for conversions. An omnichannel approach enables businesses to engage with customers across multiple touchpoints, thus increasing the likelihood of conversions. A CMS helps to maintain a consistent appearance across desktop, mobile, social, and email. Given that 72% of e-commerce will take place on a mobile device by 2021, it would be wise to choose a CMS that prioritizes mobile optimization.
If you have international customers, it is crucial that your CMS and e-commerce platforms can implement multiple languages and currencies. Kentico offers extended e-commerce capabilities, enabling its clients to split orders into multiple shipments and payments for different countries and brands, without needing a different storefront.
5) Integrated Platform for Content and Product Management (internal)
Considering the strong correlation between content marketing and product sales, it is only logical that both of them are managed together. It is surprising how many e-commerce stores have separate content and product management systems, either because their CMS doesn’t work with e-commerce or because the team can’t be bothered to merge them… and they wonder why managing their store is so difficult!
Using an integrated platform combining CMS and e-commerce functions, you’ll be able to get a unified view of your marketing activities and customer data. With the ability to access performance analytics and conduct SEO and CRO within a single system, you’ll have greater control and flexibility to make changes. And easier optimization leads to more conversions.
So, let’s say you’re creating a landing page with content from both CMS and e-commerce platforms. Your team would need to learn how to use two different platforms. Not only are you paying double, but there’s also the cost of further development and training for both platforms to work together.
Picking the right e-commerce platform is one of the most important decisions for an e-commerce owner. If you’re interested in an all-in-one CMS, e-commerce, and online marketing platform, with out-of-the-box features, allowing flexibility and customization for marketers and developers, check out Kentico’s solution. Kentico provides 24/7 support and takes away the hassle of dealing with separate systems, guiding you towards e-commerce success.
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