While we focus on the on-site experience and don’t run optimization programs specifically for email marketing, we’ve collected plenty of learnings on the topic after 15+ years optimizing the digital experience for ecommerce and product marketing teams.

We recently answered the question “how do I improve sales from email?” for a client, and I thought our audience might like to know the answer. Here’s a summary to get you started.

1. Analyze last year’s holiday email marketing campaign

Before diving into the nitty-gritty of this year’s holiday email campaign, analyze the previous year’s Black Friday & Cyber Monday campaigns. This can help inform the upcoming holiday season sales.

Looking at YOY sessions and ecommerce data highlights trends and identifies what days have the highest potential for conversions. In this client’s case, we saw the day before Cyber Monday had the highest revenue and conversion rate, indicating an opportunity to remind users of the sales end date and create a sense of urgency.

Understanding your peak conversion days can help you focus your marketing efforts on the most fruitful periods.

2. Review landing page performance and optimize emails accordingly

Analytics also provides insight into what landing pages perform best. For this client, we saw users who landed on the homepage or a category page rather than directly on a product page converted the most often. This indicates that users needed more information about the company and other products it offers before being ready to decide on and purchase a product.

We can’t assume that just because someone is on your email subscribers list, they’re a devoted brand loyalist. Instead of linking to individual products in your email, try linking them to the main category page to encourage exploration. Shoppers can utilize the information you already have on your site to make product decisions rather than relying on the content you can fit in the email.

Holiday shoppers want to learn more about the brand and compare products. They don’t necessarily want to make a decision about a product in the email and navigate directly to the product page.

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3. Use data-backed tips to write holiday email marketing copy

Effective copywriting is the backbone of a successful ecommerce holiday email campaign. To maximize your campaign’s impact, we’ve gathered some simple but data-backed copywriting tips that have improved sales from email for clients:

Quantify the deal

Remind users of the value they are getting with language like “the best deal you’ll get all year.” Providing tangible metrics, specific calls to action, and emphasizing the savings can capture the recipient’s attention and interest.

Here’s an example from Fitbit, who shares that “the biggest deals of the year are here.”

Create a sense of urgency

Presenting a timeline for the special offers can create a sense of urgency and drive action. Phrases like “ends tomorrow at midnight!” can be more effective than vague statements like “save all weekend long.” Users are more likely to act when they perceive a limited time to take advantage of a deal.

Check out this header from Grammarly’s Black Friday sale emphasizing “one day only.”

Highlight your unique value proposition

Don’t just focus on the deal; emphasize the synergy between the incredible offer and your outstanding products. Make it clear in your email that users aren’t only getting a great deal but also a high-quality product that aligns with your brand’s value proposition.

The sub-header in this Canon email says “Gift now. Create year-round.” The message emphasizes not only the brand value of sharing moments together during holiday time (gift now) but that their product is a creative gift that keeps giving (create year-round).

4. Segment your subscribers and personalize your campaign

Segment your email list based on user data like purchase history, browsing behavior, and engagement levels. Send custom messages that will resonate with each audience.

For example, some clients create segments for loyal customers who have previously made multiple purchases, potential customers who have shown interest but haven’t converted yet, and inactive subscribers who need reengagement.

Tailor your email content to cater to the specific needs and preferences of each group.

5. Validate your email content (and your offer)

Experiment with different elements such as email subject lines, images, CTA buttons, and email content. By comparing the performance of different versions, you can fine-tune your emails to maximize engagement and conversions.

To get ahead of the competition, don’t wait to A/B test during your holiday email marketing campaign. Instead, get early and quick validation from rapid testing. Here are two rapid testing methods you could try:

Preference tests

Preference testing takes multiple designs or pieces of copy and presents them to the tester by asking, “which one of these do you prefer?” or “which one of these do you think is more effective?”

You can display multiple options of your email, offer, copy, or images to get quick feedback from qualified users on what to implement.

5-second tests

5-second tests show users an image for five seconds, take it down, and then ask them what they remember seeing.

Use this test to validate your email layout and to make sure that you are communicating the main message quickly and effectively to your target audience. The test helps you understand what a reader’s first impressions will be and what stands out visually.

Set your holiday email marketing up for success

Optimizing your ecommerce holiday email campaign requires a combination of data analysis, effective copywriting, and strategic execution.

By leveraging insights from past holiday email campaigns, segmenting your email list, crafting engaging content, and creating a sense of urgency, you can increase your chances of a successful holiday season.

The key is to focus on improving the user experience by understanding your customers’ needs. Then, you’ll be able to provide obvious value that meets them where they are.

The post 5 Ways to Improve Sales from Your Holiday Email Marketing Campaign appeared first on The Good.

Why is it so important to test your offers?

1. Optimizing for Profit: Finding the Right Offer Strategy

When it comes to crafting the ideal offer, it’s not just about giving customers a deal; it’s about maximizing profit while considering a range of crucial factors. To ensure that your offers are not just driving conversions but also positively impacting your bottom line, you need to find the right balance.

Factors to Consider:

• Conversion Rate: Your offer should be designed to boost conversion rates effectively. It’s not just about attracting more customers, but about ensuring that a higher percentage of those visitors actually make a purchase. The key is to create offers that encourage action without eroding profitability.
• Average Order Value (AOV): A successful offer should not only increase the number of sales but also the value of each sale. By carefully structuring your offers, you can entice customers to spend more, elevating your AOV.
• Cost of Promotion: Every discount or promotion comes with a cost, whether it’s in the form of percentage discounts, free products, or reduced shipping fees. Assessing the cost of your promotions against their impact on profit is essential. Are you sacrificing too much of your margin for the sake of attracting customers? The aim is to provide enticing offers while maintaining a healthy bottom line.
• Customer Acquisition Costs: A critical aspect of offer testing is understanding how promotions affect your customer acquisition costs. Ideally, your offers should not only attract customers but should also do so cost-effectively. A successful offer should decrease your customer acquisition costs, ensuring you’re getting more for less.

2. Finding the Best Method for Implementing Your Offers: Store-Wide vs. Targeted Offers

The choice between store-wide and targeted offers using codes can significantly impact the effectiveness and manageability of your promotions. Understanding the nuances of each approach is crucial for optimizing your offer strategy.

Store-Wide Offers:

• Advantages: Store-wide discounts can create a sense of urgency and are relatively straightforward to implement. They are particularly effective for clearance sales, holiday promotions, and broad customer engagement.
• Challenges: If you’re using site-wide discounts, you might be overspending without a clear indication of whether your promotion is genuinely boosting your profit. Testing and measuring the impact of store-wide discounts can be challenging, and an overreliance on these discounts may lead to a high level of discount fatigue among customers.

Targeted Offers Using Codes:

• Advantages: Targeted offers, delivered through discount codes, offer greater control over who receives the promotion. This approach is effective for segmenting your audience, rewarding loyal customers, and running personalized marketing campaigns.
• Challenges: Managing code-based offers can be cumbersome, and it may hinder the effectiveness of your promotion. It requires customers to locate, remember, and manually enter the code during the checkout process, potentially leading to friction and code leakage, where discounts are used by unintended recipients.

When considering the use of store-wide or targeted offers using codes, you must carefully weigh the benefits and drawbacks in the context of your specific business and goals. Striking the right balance between broad promotions and tailored discounts is essential to optimize your offer strategy, boost profitability, and deliver a seamless shopping experience to your customers.

Additionally, there’s a third option to consider—leveraging targeted offers through onsite personalization tools like Intelligems, which can provide an even more tailored and convenient shopping experience for your customers.

3. Tailoring Offers to Customer Preferences

The ‘right’ offer isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Your customers’ preferences are diverse and unique, and understanding these preferences is the key to crafting a winning offer strategy. What works for one brand might not work for another, making it crucial to test your offers and tailor them to match the specific expectations of your audience.

Factors to Consider:

• Customer Segmentation: Different customer segments may respond differently to various offers. Tailoring your promotions to cater to distinct groups can significantly boost their effectiveness. Whether it’s offering exclusive discounts to loyal customers or enticing new shoppers with introductory deals, understanding your audience is key.
• Personalization: Personalized offers resonate with customers. When you tailor your promotions to individual preferences or past behavior, you create a more engaging and memorable shopping experience. The ability to provide customized deals based on past purchases, browsing history, or abandoned carts can enhance conversion rates and customer loyalty.
• Cost Alignment: While personalization is essential, you must also ensure that the cost of your offers aligns with your bottom line. A finely tuned offer that caters to customer preferences should strike a balance between delivering value to the customer and profitability for your business.
• Value-Added Offers: The most effective offers often involve a mutual exchange. Customers appreciate offers that enhance their shopping experience, whether it’s boosting their average order value (AOV) in exchange for a discount or offering a compelling gift with purchase (GWP). The focus is on creating a sense of reciprocity, where customers feel they are receiving added value in return for their loyalty.

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Finding the Ideal Offer: A Real-Life Example

Let’s delve into a real-life example. Momofuku Goods, renowned for its top-tier pantry essentials, had a mission: to secure the most effective Average Order Value (AOV)-boosting offer before the upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping frenzy.

In the past, Momofuku had experimented with a variety of holiday offers to enhance their AOV. However, assessing the success of these promotions over different time periods yielded unreliable results. Were some offers genuinely outperforming others, or were external factors like recent reviews or advertising campaigns influencing the outcomes?

Momofuku Goods realized that the only way to definitively pinpoint what resonated best with their customers was through rigorous testing. Seeking reliable insights, they embarked on an A/B testing expedition to explore various AOV-boosting offers, including gift-with-purchase and threshold-based promotions.

However, this testing process was far from simplistic, and it wasn’t merely about slapping a banner on the website. They needed the ability to target these offers to specific customer segments without impacting the non-test groups. They also had to communicate the offer on their site with dynamic messaging tailored to each test group and ensure the correct offer was applied seamlessly in the shopping cart.

Momofuku Goods ultimately chose Intelligems’ campaign testing tool, a choice that fulfilled all their testing needs and ensured a smooth customer experience. Their method involved creating campaigns with the desired offers, integrating these campaign links into their Klaviyo flows, designing the on-site experience for each test group, updating their checkout script to apply the correct offers, and subsequently launching their test.

They tested 4 offers against a control group (no offer):

• Spend $75 and get a free gift (chopsticks)
• Spend $100 and save $20
• Spend $100 and get a free gift (chili crisp)
• Spend $100 and get a free gift (truffle crisp)

In order to find the winning promotion, they had to consider several key metrics to find the winning offer. Using the Intelligems Analytics dashboard, they tracked the impact on conversion rates, AOV, the cost of the promotion, and revenue per site visitor. These critical metrics provided the insights required to identify the offer that ultimately generated the highest profit per visitor.

The results were nothing short of astonishing. The winning offer, when compared to having no offer at all, not only boosted the conversion rate but also significantly increased the AOV. This remarkable success resulted in a profit per visitor increase of over 200%.

Conclusion: Harnessing the Power of Offer Testing with Intelligems

In today’s fiercely competitive market, making informed decisions about your offers is no longer an option; it’s a necessity. There’s no better way to understand which type of offer resonates with your customers while helping you to improve your bottom line. Using a sophisticated, end-to-end offer testing tool like Intelligems Campaigns allows you to simplify the offer testing process, enabling you to refine your offer strategy and turbocharge your conversion rates. By leveraging data-driven insights, you can ensure your promotions align seamlessly with your business objectives.

As the BFCM season fast approaches, there’s no better time to start testing your offers with Intelligems and embark on a journey towards greater profitability and customer satisfaction. Let the power of data-driven insights lead the way to your business’s success.

The post Effective Offer A/B Testing: How to Boost AOV & Conversions Leading Into BFCM appeared first on The Good.

Looking at the trend, there could be a lot of money on the table for this upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

If you want to win big this year, it’s time to start optimizing your site (and this doesn’t mean thinking of what discounts to offer!). We’re updating our guide to help you do it.

Keep reading to see the three-step optimization process to complete before the holiday traffic strikes.

• Step 1: Conduct a Website Audit
• Step 2: Optimize Your User Experience
• Step 3: Re-evaluate Your Sales Strategy

Step 1: Conduct a Website Audit

Conducting a thorough review of your website prior to the shopping season will set your business up for success.

You have just a few short weeks to identify holes in your conversion funnel before the holiday traffic surge arrives.

Technical Review

Start with a technical audit of your website. Before you can dive into improving your website’s customer journey, you need to ensure that it’s technically functioning at its best.

Site Speed

Having a fast ecommerce site is the difference between conversion and abandonment.

According to HubSpot, your conversion rates can drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time. Unfortunately, for a lot of ecommerce managers, optimizing a website’s load speed is often overlooked and languishes at the bottom of the priority list.

Many brands, content with the quickness of their homepage, forget that their product pages, category pages, and shopping carts’ load speeds matter just as much. Having a homepage that loads in 2 seconds is great, but if your shopping cart takes 10 seconds to load (or worse, times out), you will lose a sale.

Server Load Capacity

There is a predictable surge in traffic during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. While everyone considers this a blessing, it can also be a curse. Even popular ecommerce sites can buckle under the unusual amount of visitors going to their sites.

Part of conducting your website audit should be to check whether your server can handle the doubled or tripled amount of requests coming in.

User-Experience Review

Analyzing the user experience of your website is an essential step to consider before moving on to testing. Evaluating your website analytics helps you identify the specific pages on your site that may be causing problems for your customers.

The three key components to conducting a successful user-experience review are…

1. Eye-tracking heatmaps
2. Session recordings and user testing
3. Talking to customers and customer service representatives

Eye-tracking heatmaps

First, let’s focus on heatmaps—a tool we use on a daily basis at The Good. Eye-tracking heatmaps provide a visual representation of typical user behavior by aggregating data showing where users click, move, and scroll on a webpage.

Heatmaps may not provide the breadth and variety of data you’ll receive from a website analytics tool, but they work very well for quickly diagnosing problems that could potentially be costing you sales.

Hotjar is an excellent tool if you’re serious about optimizing your website experience. It provides heatmap reports based on the clicks and movements of customers on your site.

Session Recordings

Next, let’s talk about session recordings. Session recordings (also referred to as session replays) are one of the essential tools you’ll need to conduct a comprehensive website audit.

As the name implies, these recordings capture the mouse movements, clicks, and scrolls that a visitor executes while browsing your website. Session recordings provide an unbiased look at how real customers behave on your site and play a key role in helping you uncover potential usability challenges.

At The Good, session recordings are an essential part of our UX research process. Having the opportunity to observe how real customers navigate a website is invaluable knowledge that will make your optimization efforts all the more impactful.

User testing

User testing is another method of research that works in tandem with session recordings. This research technique involves asking “user testers” in your target audience to complete specific tasks on your site.

While the tester is completing the assigned tasks, their screen is recorded, and they’re usually asked to narrate their thoughts on the browsing experience.

The knowledge you’ll take away from even just a handful of user-testing sessions will be invaluable to the optimization process later on.

Recommended tools for session recordings and user testing:

• UserInput.io – With a range of user-testing options, you can get quick and in-depth user feedback on your site. Real people will record their live impressions of your site, so you can make sure their experience is exactly as you want it to be.
• UserTesting – This is another tool for conducting remote, unmonitored user testing. After you input the specific demographic information of your target audience, this service will hand-pick a group of user testers who meet your criteria to participate in tests.

Talking to customers and customer service representatives

The last (and arguably most important) task you should take into consideration when conducting a website audit is speaking directly with your customers. You’d be surprised by how many ecommerce managers we talk to who have never invested in focus groups or in-depth customer surveys.

There’s no better way to understand how your customers perceive your website than talking with them directly. Investing in just one focus group session will provide more than enough insight to fuel your next round of A/B tests.

In addition to focus groups and in-depth interviews, you might consider opening a direct line of communication between your UX designer(s) and your customer support team.

It’s not uncommon for there to be a disconnect between these two teams, especially for larger ecommerce companies or if customer service is outsourced to a third party. Creating a feedback loop between these teams may unearth latent problems that can then be addressed quickly by your ecommerce manager or UX designer.

Step 2: Optimize Your User Experience

After identifying the specific challenges and conversion blockers that are hindering sales on your site, the next step is optimizing your user experience.

The three key areas of we recommend focusing your attention on are your:

1. Homepage
2. Product Pages
3. Checkout Page

Homepage

A critical mistake we see ecommerce managers make is insisting that their homepage is the most important place on their site. They’ll invest the majority of their time (or their developer’s time) trying to make it the most beautifully designed page of the site with complete disregard for the rest of the customer experience.

Here’s the problem with this approach: Putting most of your resources into designing an aesthetically appealing homepage is like investing all of your automotive budget into a new paint job, then not having funds left over to buy gas or repair the engine. It’ll look good, but it won’t get you far.

That said, the homepage does play an important role in your customer’s journey. Your homepage should accomplish something in a major way that every subsequent page on your site should echo: let visitors know exactly where they are, what they can do there, and how to take the next step forward.

Unfortunately, many brands misuse the homepage as a dumping ground for all things marketing, neglecting the wayfinding purpose of the page.

Here’s what we recommend you do to get your homepage optimized before the BFCM traffic starts pouring in:

1. Revisit your value proposition

Visitors direct their attention to your value proposition when deciding if they need what you’re selling. If they don’t fully understand the value that you can provide for them, they’ll leave your site.

Consider looking at your unique selling proposition (USP) to aid in developing a value propostion. If you can clearly describe what makes your company unique, you’ll be better equipped to explain to your customers why they should choose you over the competition.

This template is a good place to start:

• Target audience: Be as specific as possible so you attract the interest of the prospects who matter. If you’re targeting digital marketers, be specific about that.
• Target objective: The objective is revealed when you’re determining your customers’ immediate needs. If your target audience’s goal is to improve their search engine optimization strategy, speak to that need.
• Unique selling proposition: Explain what value you can provide through your products/services. This is the unique solution that you’re selling to your audience.

One way to make sure your homepage is delivering on all of the above is to have an acquaintance perform a 5-second test (usually, friends and family are too close to give real, raw feedback).

Go to a local coffee shop and offer to buy someone a coffee for a few minutes of their time. Show them your website and ask them to tell you about the first things they notice.

2. Optimize your navigation menu

Website navigation can make or break your visitors’ experience. Attempting to navigate a website that doesn’t have a logical, well-defined structure is like being dropped in the middle of a complex maze with no map and no frame of reference.

It’s overwhelming, frustrating, and all-around unpleasant — not exactly the user experience you’re hoping for.

• Optimize your mobile website’s navigation. Having a navigation menu appropriate for a mobile device is essential to any ecommerce website. Consumers expect the mobile experience of a website to be as good, if not better, than the desktop experience. Provide your visitors with a responsive, optimized navigation bar, and you’re guaranteed to see an improvement in your mobile conversion rate.
• Make site search frictionless. Visitors who use search typically have the intent to buy or act. Plus, they’re much more likely to find what they’re looking for. People who run a site search convert buyers approximately two times more often than people who don’t.

3. Remove any unnecessary distractions

First, if you’re currently using a nonrotating carousel on your homepage, we strongly recommend removing it.

Research has shown that a staggeringly low 1% of site visitors click nonrotating image carousels (carousels that don’t change automatically). Additionally, 84% of those clicks are on the first slide, meaning all the remaining slides combined receive a dismal 16% of the clicks.

The numbers aren’t much better for carousels that rotate automatically. Auto-rotating carousels receive a bit more attention, but again, the first slide dominates, receiving 40% of all clicks. The second and third positions receive 18% and 11% fewer clicks.

While it may seem like a good idea to use a carousel, the numbers simply don’t back it up. The click-through rate (CTR) on carousels is abysmally low, with the lion’s share of clicks being gobbled up by the first slide.

Another distraction you’ll often find on an ecommerce homepage is the “Sign-up for our email list!” pop-up. In general, we recommend that you stay away from pop-ups that detract from the browsing experience.

Product Page

If you plan on investing in paid traffic this holiday season, it’s important you’re making sure your product pages are properly optimized to get the most out of that traffic.

To optimize your product pages for a better conversion rate, we recommend you focus on:

1. Product naming conventions

When it comes to product naming conventions for your products and product categories, the more descriptive, the better. The reason for this is that each word is a potential keyword for organic search.

Google favors product pages that have descriptive titles because they allow users to find exactly what they’re looking for. Long names also implicitly indicate more value and stand a better chance of attracting the visitor’s attention.

2. Product descriptions

Great copy begins with an understanding of the audience – their needs, their desires, their problems, and the words they use to describe them.

The copy should be presented in a scannable, jargon-free format, with benefits highlighted to spell out exactly what the product will do for the potential customer. Use white space to help keep your product page layout clean and easily readable.

The product description should provide critical product information, short-circuit objections, and provide answers to the visitor’s most pressing questions.

3. Product photography/video

This is where your writers and designers join forces. High-quality images or illustrations lend credence to the copywriter’s product description.

Show people wearing and using your products to give the prospect a glimpse of ownership.

Your headlines and product images should work together to establish the product’s value and illustrate why the prospect would be wise to select it.

The practice of including video elements in the digital assets strategy has risen so dramatically that many ecommerce sites now consider videos essential. Do people worry your product is difficult to use? Video can disprove that concern by demonstrating that the owner only needs to follow a few simple directions.

Do customers want to know more about the difference between certain features? Video can describe those differences quickly and accurately.

4. Back-in-stock notifications

If you’re prone to running out of stock on certain items during the holiday shopping season, you need to have a solid back-in-stock notification option to recapture those sales when your stock is replenished.

There are a few things you can do to ensure you don’t miss out on sales when a product goes out of stock:

• Use back-in-stock emails. Work on your back-in-stock emails themselves. There are a few details to note here. Include the brand, the product, and its best price in the email subject line. In the body of the email, we recommend including an image and mentioning the brand, product name, and price again. You can also include a reminder of why they are receiving the email, clearly explain that it’s back-in-stock, and include a very clear call-to-action that brings them to the exact product in the store.
• Use SMS and push alerts. SMS text is quickly becoming one of the most effective ways to reach customers. Providing customers with the option to input their mobile number instead of an email address may be an even more impactful way to notify customers that an item is back in stock.

Checkout

According to Statista, over 69% of visitors who load items into an ecommerce shopping cart end up not finishing the transaction. For one reason or another, they abandon the cart.

The money online retailers invested in advertising, social media, content development – every sales and marketing expense you can name – has contributed to getting someone right to the brink of the purchase. But that person decides to walk away.

Improving your shopping cart conversion rate is the spot where your ecommerce optimization dollars will pay off best. It’s the ideal place to begin.

Here are several items to consider when optimizing your checkout process:

1. Evaluate your post-purchase follow-up

Reevaluate your post-purchase follow-up procedure to ensure customers are receiving the best possible service even after they complete a purchase.

Despite the statistics, most marketers give little time or thought to their post-purchase email sequences. They send a receipt and little else. This is missing out on a significant opportunity to convert new customers into recurring customers.

6 Post-Purchase Emails That Convert and Retain

Here are the post-purchase emails we recommend you include in your post-purchase follow-up sequence:

• The order confirmation. The first email should always be the confirmation of purchase. When people click Buy, they want to know that everything worked, . Assure them they didn’t just send money into the ether of the internet, never to hear from you again. Confirm that their order was received and that someone on the other end is doing something about it.
• The shipping confirmation. The shipping confirmation email allows you to update the customer on the status of their order, continue to build trust with them and nurture your relationship with them.
• The shipment update. Approximately one week after their shipment should have arrived, you want to check in to make sure everything arrived in good condition. This is also an excellent opportunity to entice the customer with complimentary products or sign them up for a recurring purchase plan.
• The review request. After the customer has had time to use the product, make sure to politely ask them to submit a review and let you know what they thought of the product.
• The post-purchase offer or replenishment reminder. Now that your customer has purchased a product and hopefully left a positive review, it’s the best opportunity to encourage them to re-order the product or something similar. If the item they brought was food, health supplements, or necessities, you could also send an email reminder for them to replenish their stock to get them to re-order.
• The loyalty program. Your final email should contain information about a loyalty or rewards program that your customers can join to entice them to buy again and transform from one-time buyers into loyal customers.

2. Hide the discount code field

With the rising popularity of discount-finder apps like Rakuten and Honey, consumers have grown to expect a discount on every purchase made while online shopping. Unless your business is relying on discounts to draw in new customers, showing this form field to users is only going to encourage them to leave your site in search of a discount or promo code. After they leave your site, it’s very unlikely they’ll return empty-handed to complete the purchase at full price.

We always recommend hiding the discount code field (even completely removing it) so visitors aren’t tempted to go searching for coupon codes somewhere on the internet.

3. Offer free shipping

For retailers, it’s important to consider both the short-term and long-term benefits of offering free shipping. In the short term, offering free shipping will likely lead to an increase in orders and a higher average order value (AOV), especially if you set a minimum order threshold that your customers need to reach before they “unlock” free shipping.

Sixty percent of ecommerce businesses report that “free shipping with conditions” is their most successful marketing tool. If adding one more item to the shopping cart results in getting free two-day shipping, most consumers will do it.

In the long term, offering free shipping will benefit your business by increasing customer lifetime value and helping you build a group of loyal repeat purchasers. Additionally, it can be a great way to maintain your competitive edge in the marketplace, especially if you’re operating in an industry that sells commonly available products or even commodity products that compete heavily on price.

4. Implement a one-page checkout process

The checkout page is easily one of the most crucial yet often overlooked elements of an ecommerce website. If your checkout process is too lengthy or complicated, you’re seriously hindering sales for your business. We always recommend implementing a one-page checkout.

A single-page checkout simplifies the checkout procedure and eliminates any additional steps in the customer journey that could potentially contribute to cart abandonment. The one-page checkout template comes standard with most major ecommerce platforms (Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento), so there’s really no reason not to have it on your site.

Integrate social proof throughout the customer journey

Implementing social proof on your site can be one of the most effective methods for increasing your overall conversion rate. Sixty-one percent of customers read online reviews before choosing to buy a product or service.

If everyone is buzzing about a newly-released movie, and I’m hearing nothing but recommendations to go see it, I’m quite likely to go. On the other hand, if the reviews are sour and my friends tell me the movie was a waste of time and money, I’ll skip it.

Human beings are social creatures. We want to fit in. Our tendency is to do what others are doing, even if we pride ourselves on individuality.

Social proof is evidence that something is popular – that others have endorsed it. By creatively and soundly displaying social proof, ecommerce website managers can stack the deck in their favor and generate more sales. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Product reviews from purchasers – Product reviews are regarded as one of the most effective forms of social proof to use on ecommerce sites. Nearly 95% of shoppers read online reviews before making a purchase, and the purchase probability for a product with five reviews is 270% greater than the purchase probability of a product without them. If your website doesn’t include product reviews somewhere on the product page, you’re losing a substantial amount of business.
• Customer testimonials – Requesting testimonials from prior customers can be a great way to build credibility and trust with your audience. These differ from product reviews in the way they are presented. Testimonials are concise recommendations that are placed in a call-out format. If product reviews are the backbone of social proof, testimonials are the face. Including video testimonials with your written testimonials is a particularly powerful tactic.
• Earned media and press – If recognizable media brands have endorsed your company, you should definitely be leveraging this earned media on your homepage.

Step 3: Reevaluate Your Black Friday & Cyber Monday Sales Strategy

After conducting a thorough review of your website and optimizing your user experience to meet your customer’s needs, it’s time to review your selling strategy for the BFCM season. How are you going to drive the highest return on investment from your promotions?

What promotions will you offer?

If your current strategy is to rely on discounting to bring in new customers, it might be time to start thinking outside the box. Here are three ways you can optimize the impact of your planned BFCM campaigns to compete with big brands like Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, and Apple.

1. Offer free shipping

Local retailers often counter the “I can get it cheaper online” objection with “Not after you add on the cost of shipping.” And while the reality is that free shipping plans often fail to provide significant cost savings to consumers (the expense must be covered somehow), conversion rates typically take a healthy leap forward when free shipping is featured. Just use Amazon Prime as an example.

Free Shipping Options

Here are several recommendations for how to offer free shipping without destroying your margins:

1. Free shipping threshold. A popular way to offer free shipping is having a certain cart threshold visitors need to reach before they unlock free shipping. Customers who are close to reaching the order amount for free shipping will very likely tack on additional products to reach the required threshold. That, in turn, can push your average order value up considerably and help make up for the absorbed shipping cost.
2. Free shipping to members. This is a great way to improve customer retention while also growing your mailing list. You can charge for membership or not, but helping people feel like they’re a part of your business and giving them a good reason for shopping with you are good ideas.
3. Free shipping to limited locations. Given the often exorbitant cost of shipping abroad, many ecommerce stores will offer free shipping only to those in their own country. Another possibility here is to offer free shipping from the distribution center to a local retail outlet. Be sure to spell out which locations qualify for free shipping.
4. Flat rate shipping. This isn’t a free shipping offer, but it does alleviate much of the shopper’s anxiety. Those who know what the shipping cost will be before loading up the cart are more likely to follow through and place the order than those who don’t know how much shipping costs will be until they’re ready to pay. This tactic is especially effective when higher-priced items are ordered. A $5 flat rate shipping on a $150 order is far more attractive than $5 shipping on a $12 order.

2. Leverage FOMO

Remember to create a sense of urgency around your campaigns. The fear of missing out (FOMO) can draw sales from people who might otherwise abandon a shopping cart and not return to complete the sale.

Here are a few ideas to help get you started:

• Displaying “limited quantities available” on popular products
• Offer exclusive offers or priority buying privileges to loyalty program members
• Display sold-out items to encourage users to sign-up for a back-in-stock notification
• Implement a free shipping countdown timer

3. Don’t lean on discounting

Shoppers love sales. Any reason you can come up with to hold one – be it Black Friday, Memorial Day, or your ecommerce birthday – is sure to boost revenue. There’s just one problem with the idea. “On Sale” means a discounted price, and a discounted price means less profit.

Yes, a properly orchestrated sales strategy can make up for the slimmer margin by pumping up the volume. The problem is you end up sacrificing profits for the reputation of your brand.

Discounting leads customers to think that you’re a discount brand. Instead of being known for quality products or outstanding service, customers associate your company with the lowest price.

You become the ecommerce version of Dollar General, attracting those searching for bargains. When a customer receives a discount on their first purchase, you can be pretty confident that they’re going to try to get the same discount with every subsequent purchase.

Do you really want to join other discount brands in a race to the bottom? Instead, focus on Black Friday Deals that add value for your customers.

Segment & Grow Your Customer Base

Segmentation delivers results. Ecommerce managers who take the time to identify customer segments and tailor messages specific to each segment consistently see ROI boosts that justify those efforts. People like to feel like you’re speaking directly to them, not just blasting out generic sales pitches to the masses. The more you know about your prospects, the better you’ll be at influencing their buying decisions.

There are two levels that should be considered in market segmentation: product fit and customer fit. Some would see this as the difference between business-to-business or business-to-consumer sales.

Remember, though, that buying decisions are made by people. Whether you’re selling to a corporation or a homemaker, you still need to be concerned about individual preferences.

At The Good, we tend to look at segmentation as either bottom-up or top-down.

Top-down segmentation begins with the product or service and seeks to fit the offer to the most lucrative segments of the available markets.

Bottom-up segmentation focuses on the buyer’s preferences and style, then works to get the best messaging to the right customers. An offshoot of bottom-up segmentation is the preparation of customer personas.

Neither approach is best. Insight from both is needed to develop the most effective marketing plan. The aim of market segmentation is to know what matters, where it matters, and when it matters. The end result of market segmentation is the division of your viable market into clusters of buyers with similar needs and desires.

Market segmentation research is the basis of determining your most effective marketing mix.

It’s Never Too Late to Start Optimizing

Be prepared to adjust your strategy to meet changing needs and demands. If a certain offer or campaign isn’t working for you, make the necessary adjustments to ensure that the rest of the season goes smoothly.

It’s OK to change up your ecommerce strategy as long as you’re making changes based on data, not assumptions.

If you’re still not sure what to start improving on your website or don’t have time to manage optimization on your own, you might consider bringing in an optimization expert to lend a hand.

For over a decade, The Good has successfully improved the digital experience for brands large and small, including Nike, Adobe, Xerox, The Economist, and many others.

If you’re interested in learning more about our approach to conversion optimization and how we can help improve your website experience, check out the Digital Experience Optimization Program.

We believe in producing results that are based on data from our insight platforms as well as expert analysis by members of The Good’s UX Strategy team.

The post The Ecommerce Optimization Guide for Black Friday & Cyber Monday appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

According to a research by Adobe, 2021 brought the first ever $200+ billion online holiday season in the US. Assuming this year follows similar trends, optimizing your website before Black Friday and Cyber Monday can help your ecommerce brand win big. 

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about how to optimize your website to drive more revenue for your brand this Black Friday and Cyber Monday. They cover the importance of website audits, how to improve user experience and why you should re-evaluate your sales strategy. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why website audits are necessary
2. How to leverage user experience to improve site performance
3. Re-evaluating your sales strategy

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, hit us up on Twitter. We’re @jonmacdonald and @ryangarrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Ryan:
So, Jon, we are in the fun time of year for all of us working in e-comm. We are right before the chaos. It’s coming out the end of October, right before we start to really get excited and intense in the marketing world, leading into holiday. This year was a little unique and we had some Amazon Prime Day in October that changed some things likely, but we’re expecting this to be a pretty big holiday season. I mean, last year, we had I think just over $200 billion online in sales in November, December, which was up a decent amount from ’20, and then from ’19, way up since that was pre-pandemic in ’19. So, assuming things are still going to increase, it’s time to start really thinking if you haven’t been doing things already or already have a plan in place.
Jon, you’re famous for saying, “It’s never too late to start.” I would say it’s getting pretty close to that point in time if you’re listening to this and you haven’t made holiday plans. So, assuming that you already have some plans, there are still some things you can be doing to optimize your site and improve your conversion rates, which what I want to get into today is let people know that still, there are some things you can do to make your site convert better and improve what you’re going to receive this holiday season.
At least, hopefully, if you follow what Jon tells you. Jon, you’ve got some articles all about conversation rate optimization obviously, and there’s still a few things to do. So, at a high level, at the end of October, before the holiday hits, what can you still do to make your site convert better? You’ve got some points that you’re going to take us through, I think.

Jon:
Yeah. Well, look, there’s three main areas that people should be thinking about that can still be done, a week before, I wouldn’t suggest a day before, but you have time. As you said-

Ryan:
You better be eating turkey the-

Jon:
… “It’s never too late.”

Ryan:
… day before. Everybody should already be done on your website by the time you hit Thanksgiving.

Jon:
There you go. So, we’ll break it down into three steps today, essentially looking at how to or some things you should be thinking about to do a quick audit of your site. You got to assess where you are before you can move forward. Then we’ll talk a little bit about how to optimize that based on what you found and really focus on the user experience. And then the third step is just to reevaluate your sales strategy. I wanted to put this in here, because the number one mistake I see brands make is to go all in on discounting and sales over holidays. It really degrades the brand pretty quickly.
So, there are some things that we should be thinking about there that really can help make sure you have a profitable, not just a high revenue, but revenue at a profit. I think that’s what’s important here. You see a lot of people posting screenshots of, “Oh, look at my holiday sales and Shopify panel,” right? Great, but what are your COGS? What’s your ROAS? What are you doing to actually be able to make sure you have a profit off of that? Because I could discount all of your products to a penny and you’d have sell a lot of products, have a lot of orders, but you might not make any actual profit.

Ryan:
Easiest way to improve your conversion rate, right, Jon?

Jon:
Yes, there you go.

Ryan:
It’s my simplified version. Oh, I can improve your conversion rate. You don’t need Jon.

Jon:
Yeah, just give everything away for free.

Ryan:
Yeah, degrade your market. That’s great.

Jon:
It’s easy.

Ryan:
Okay, so we’re starting with a website audit though.

Jon:
Yeah. So, couple areas to look at, right? First of all, technical stuff. I think starting with a technical audit is a great place to start, because this is like you can’t make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without the bread. You got to start with the boring stuff. This is somewhat boring. I would suggest that you really begin diving into this as soon as you possibly can, because if your site isn’t technically functioning at its best, then it’s not going to convert at all, right? So, you got to really start here. So, this means looking at things like site speed. So many brands I talk to, they’re content with the quickness of their home page and they really focus on that, but they forget about the product detail pages, the category pages, even their shopping cart, which all of those matter just as much.
Every millisecond, you lose up to about 1% of revenue, millisecond. So, think about how much site speed could really impact you over holiday. Now, having a fast site is the difference between somebody converting and abandoning, but it’s not the end all be all, right? So, I know folks try to get every single millisecond out of their site and a lot of times that ends up being to a detriment. So, get as much as you can but don’t overdo it, right? Don’t start just eliminating everything off of your site to get site speed up.
I see that happen all the time. The best way to do this is jump into Google PageSpeed. So, it’s a great tool, PageSpeed Insights. It’s free. They tell you where you should start. They give you some scores and some ratings and they break it all down for you. There are companies that will help you to improve your page speed. If you work with them, the first thing they’re going to do is go to PageSpeed Insights. So, might as well do it yourself for free.

Ryan:
Right back to site speed real quick though, because I know there’s a lot of merchants on Shopify and they’re just going to assume that Shopify, they’re hosting it all. It’s fine. I can’t make it faster anyway. What are the biggest culprits that you see that are slowing sites down that they could probably easily be like, “Oh, I could easily eliminate that or improve that somehow”?

Jon:
Well, it’s a misnomer that you can’t optimize on Shopify. You 100% can. Shopify actually shot themselves in the foot a couple years ago now, where they brought out a page speed thing on their panel and they started telling everybody that their sites were slow. I was like, “Well, most brands feel like it’s Shopify’s job to make my site fast because they’re hosting and providing the platforms. So, how does this align?” It just actually confused a lot of store owners. Really, if you’re on Shopify, any platform, these really work well.
First thing is make sure that your images are scaled appropriately. I see all the time the biggest culprit brands pull massive 300 DPI, high resolution images, product photos that are given from their photographer at highest res possible, which they look beautiful but they take forever to load. When you’re having them on a small screen or on mobile, you don’t need all of that resolution. So, make sure you’re saving for web, optimizing your images, and that will save you a lot of load speed. The second thing I see, especially on platforms like BigCommerce and Shopify, is that people install too many apps.
So, they go and they install an app, they forget they installed it because it was a free app, they’re no longer using it, but that app is actually slowing your site down. Why that happens is because you install an app and what that app is doing is actually going out to other non-Shopify servers and sending and retrieving data. That’s just because it’s going to slow you down if you have too many of those. So, do an audit of your apps. What do you have installed?

Ryan:
Even if you’re not even using them.

Jon:
If you’re not using them, immediately remove it, right? You don’t need it. If you are using it, assess what value you’re getting out of it. Is it really worth having it installed? Most likely, what we find is a number of stores get away with just a small number of apps. But the vast majority, I think the average I saw one time that’s installed is 10. It’s double digits. I was just like, “You got to be kidding me. What are you doing with all these apps?” The problem we found is most people have at least half of those apps that they’re not actually using and engaged with. So, that’s the quickest way to speed up your site.

Ryan:
That is hugely helpful, because there’s a lot of companies just in the last two or three weeks that have come to me to talk about site speed. It’s not something that’s second nature to a lot of people, especially in e-comms. I don’t know, just go look all these things. But good insights there from Jon on your site speed, because it will also have an impact on Google’s organic rankings.
So, yeah, it’ll help version rate, which gets you more money. But if your site is super slow, for example, we’ve had a lot of merchants for whatever reason in the past couple months on Volusion that have made a migration and the site speed increase moving off of Volusion to another SaaS platform has been amazing. They’ve seen pretty quick dramatic increases in organic rankings on Google just for having a speedier site.

Jon:
It is one of the bigger factors that Google looks at for sure. That’s a big reason people try to eek every millisecond out of their site. It’s usually the selling point that a page speed company is going to try to sell you on. So, the second thing that I would really focus on in terms of an audit here is funnel analysis. What do I mean? Well, really start thinking about what’s the journey that people take through your site, because this is going to help identify where in the journey the customers are experiencing problems. The goal here is just to prioritize as part of the process. So, understand where people are going on your site, what paths are taking through your site, how they’re succeeding or failing at what they want to do.
We’ll talk about as we go down into the next step here, why and how to do that, because I think it’s one thing to focus on site speed alone. It’s another to understand where people are having problems and then what you’ll find is there’s going to be more technical issues there than what you think exist. So, maybe a dropdown on your product selector on your PDP doesn’t work on Safari. You’re going to find these types of issues. You’re going to see trends developing in this funnel analysis of people who hit this page and then bounce. You start looking for similarities in the analytics data. You see that most of them are on Safari, right? Okay, so now let’s fix that in Safari.

Ryan:
I think that’s an important point for a lot of people. Like me personally, I never test things on Safari. I use Chrome on the iPhone. I’m on Chrome on the computer all day. I don’t even think about Safari.

Jon:
Let alone Firefox, now DuckDuckGo or Blaze or all these other-

Ryan:
This thing called Edge on my computer because I have a PC that I forget is even there, but my parents use it and they’re like, “Oh, that’s great.”

Jon:
This is the thing I think a lot of people don’t consider is my wife’s job, they’re so locked down on security that they only allow them to use Edge, which seems less secure to me, but what do I know, right? But the reality is that they have it locked down. You can’t run Chrome and you can’t install Chrome. So, it’s really interesting that you think about the percentage of people that you’re losing that are locked into a specific browser, whether they want be or not. So, you really do need to run a test across all different browsers.

Ryan:
In my wine and beer business, I have one large distributor I buy from that their online order portal does not work on Chrome.

Jon:
Nice.

Ryan:
I actually have to use Edge because I can’t get it to… How did you not get it to work on the largest browser on the planet?

Jon:
I think their goal is just to make you drink more, right?

Ryan:
That’s probably like, “Hey, if we make this really frustrating, you’re going to have to buy a lot of personal wine, not just for your customers.”

Jon:
I love that. Well, having bought your wine before, I will say you made it seamless. I think I just texted you as opposed to-

Ryan:
Yeah, I just got a text today. It was like, “Hey, I need to get this wine.” I’m like, “Okay, I’ll go find it.”

Jon:
That’s awesome. The second thing you should really be doing when you’re auditing is looking at the user experience. So, evaluating analytics tells you half the story. It gives you specific pages, specific problem areas, but we really want to understand things from the consumer’s perspective. So, this is where things like eye tracking, heat maps, session recordings, user testing, or even just talking to consumers can really make a difference.

Ryan:
Buying cups of coffee.

Jon:
Buying cups of coffee is a great example of one that I know you’ve heard me say lots, but eye tracking really provides that visual representation of that user behavior. Same thing with session recordings, right? Session recordings is going to let you understand where people are clicking. It captures and records the mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, everything that a visitor is doing on your site. It does it in an anonymous fashion. The right tools, if you’re using the more legit tools out there, they won’t let you see any personally identifiable information in the recordings. So, they actually have ways of blocking out anything that’s inputted into a field, anything that would be personally identifiable.
But the great thing about session recordings, especially when combined with heat maps, is that they provide a real unbiased look at how real customers behave on your site. I think that that’s something that most brands don’t understand. I say often that it’s really hard to read the label from inside the jar. I say it so much, that should be the title my next book. But the reality here is it’s really hard for those brands to understand what it’s like for consumers. So, all of this is around helping them do that.

Ryan:
What’s the how behind a small brand can execute a session recording between now and Thanksgiving?

Jon:
Well, all of the tools that are out there for session recording don’t require a minimum amount of traffic. So, you could have 10 visitors come to your site and do a session recording on all 10 of those and gain information. So, think of this as the remote way, the remote unmoderated, which means it’s remote and you are not guiding them. So, you’re not telling them what to do, you’re not giving them insights. You’re just saying, “I don’t know who you are. Just use my site,” is basically what you’re going for here. So, you get some really accurate data in terms of usability because you’re not guiding that person around potential issues.

Ryan:
So you’re like, “I would go to one of these session recording companies online,” and say, “Hey, I want to get 10 people to do this on my site.”

Jon:
You don’t even have to do that. It’s a SaaS tool you can sign up for. There’s a bunch of them out there. Just Google session recordings. There’s, I want to say, hundreds of these tool sites out there.

Ryan:
And then I would just go out to my friends and family and say, “Hey, go to my site. I want you to do this and then use this session recording,” or is there a way to get users as well?

Jon:
It’s JavaScript that’s embedded on your site that will automatically record anyone who comes to the site.

Ryan:
Oh, God. So, you don’t have to go find people. You’re just going to start recording what’s happening on your site to see where people get stuck. Okay. That makes a lot of sense.

Jon:
Hotjar does this as well combined with heat maps, right? So there’s some good stuff you can do through Hotjar on this. That’s actually probably where I would start just because it has a great way of combining heat maps and session recordings.

Ryan:
It doesn’t slow down your site.

Jon:
It does not. It loads everything what’s called asynchronously. So, it has no bearing on your site speed. Now I wouldn’t leave it on your site if you’re not using it, going back to what we were saying before, but the reality is it has very, very minimal impact.

Ryan:
Okay, good.

Jon:
It’s perfectly legal because you’re not collecting any personally identifiable information. The more enterprise of this, this is where it would cost a little more. So, you might want to be a bigger brand, but user testing. This is where you’re actually sending people to the site that you may not know them, but you’re actually finding people who match your ideal customer profile and having those specific user testers go to your site and you’re recording not through session recording, right? Session recording is not necessarily a video. It’s showing you all the interactions that somebody did. User testing, you’re actually recording a video of somebody using your site. So, you’re recording their browser, generally the browser window and sometimes even a video of them.
So, you can get facial expressions, et cetera. But usually, you’re getting the browser and audio at the very least. What you’re asking people to do is talk out loud about the experience they’re having as they go through it. So, it works pretty well. And then lo-fi of this is buying people coffee. Just go talk to your customers, right? Say, “Hey, I have a question about why you bought from us. Can we hop on the phone for a couple minutes? I’ll send you a Starbucks gift card.” Pretty easy.
Or you could go stand in line at Starbucks and say, “I’ll buy your coffee. While they’re making it, will you just review my site with me for a minute and ask them to complete some tasks?” So, all of that is great, but I also think there’s a hidden one in there and that’s customer service. If you have a customer service team or some type of customer service representative, then you need to be talking to them about what challenges people are having, what questions they’re asking. Those are great hints at how you should improve your site.

Ryan:
I think even if you had a chat feature on your site and there’s certain pages that are constantly getting hit with chat, dig into, “Why does this product tend to have more chat hits on it? I have to help people do this, that I might not have to if I fix some things in the site.”

Jon:
That’s a great point. Chat is a great way to learn what questions people are having and it’s automatically logged. You don’t have to worry about a customer service representative potentially summarizing it in a way that changes the meaning a little bit, et cetera. So, some good options.

Ryan:
What else do we have, something around users or anything else that we need to be looking at?

Jon:
Well, yeah, so this is the second big point, which is optimizing that user experience. So, once you’ve collected all of the data from the technical side and that user experience, you now know what people are doing. You really need to just start digging in and start optimizing it. So, again, I always want people to operate based on data. Don’t just take a wild guess and make a change. You’re probably not going to be right unfortunately. So, really, what you need to do here is be thinking about those conversion blockers that we just talked about, all the data that comes up, and then start optimizing it. Now I would focus on three key areas, because at this point, time is limited. You got to be realistic about what you can get done.
We’re not looking for a full site optimization. We’re looking for what’s the most meaningful things that I can do to prepare for the highest revenue point of the year. So, three key areas I would look at are homepage, product detail pages, and then check out. Now we can dive into each of those and I have some notes here on those, but just know again, depending on the platform you’re on, you may or may not be able to touch the checkout. So, that’s okay.
If you’re on Shopify, meaning the nonplus version of Shopify, you can’t alter the checkout page. So, not worth putting a lot of effort towards that. You’re probably going to be dead-ended quite a bit. If you’re on Shopify Plus, you have a little more leeway, but you still are limited in what you can do to some degree. I know that’s opening up a lot with Shopify 2.0, but it still is a major complaint that I hear from people. So, don’t waste your time there.

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay per click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Ryan:
If you do have the ability to look at your checkout, what are the types of things? I mean, I know there’s an obvious one. If you’re forcing people to create an account to check out, why are you doing that? Go back and listen to the rest of this podcast before you get to this point then. But are there certain things that would surprise people? Do you see hey, generally, there’s some sticky points that you can dive into on a checkout process?

Jon:
There are, and I think there are ones that most people aren’t thinking about. Most people are thinking about how to eliminate some fields, things of that sort. I’m thinking bigger picture here. So, first thing is eliminate the discount field. So, you’re looking at eliminating fields. Most people think, “Oh, I’ll eliminate address line two or something of that sort. I don’t need phone number.” That’s great. I agree you don’t need that stuff, but hide that discount code field.

Ryan:
Because then I go out and search for one.

Jon:
Exactly. The whole point here is to make sure visitors aren’t tempted to go searching for those coupon codes somewhere else on the internet that is not your site. So, they’re going to end up doing it. I do it every time. Oh, do you have a discount code? Yeah, I’m going to find that, right? And then maybe I spend five minutes, I get distracted, I don’t come back and finish the cart. Or what happens is I go and I try five or six of them and they’re all expired codes or don’t work or were personalized codes that somebody posted and already used and it was a one-time use thing. I just get frustrated and I’m like, “I know I’m not getting the best deal because somebody else has got 20% off and I’m getting nothing.”
Now, I’m questioning everything. Am I getting the best value? Do I really need this? Is it worth it to me if I’m not getting 20% off? Even though I added it to the cart knowing how much it was, my frame of mine has changed. I mean we could do a whole episode on discount codes, but the reality is that’s a big one I would start with that most people don’t consider. There are ways to do that on Shopify. Now, the way we handle it at The Good for book sales and one-off purchases that we have for some services like our conversion growth assessment, et cetera, is we actually have a link in the cart that says have a discount code with a question mark and then people can click that and then the field expands, right? Why is that better?
Well, it’s not a blank field staring me in the face. So, we’ve done a lot of testing on this. The challenge is that a blank field, people are like, “I have to put something in this field. It’s meant for me to have something in it.” So the idea behind this is psychological more than anything, but just try not to have a blank field.

Ryan:
That is fascinating, because I wouldn’t even thought. I would be like, “Well, I have 10 people that still have a coupon code so I can’t eliminate the field. So, Jon, you’re crazy.” But now if I’m just going to have a link that allows that still to happen, great idea.

Jon:
Makes a big difference. Makes a big difference. One thing I would do is evaluate your post-purchase follow up as well. So, yes, this is after the checkout, but I think it’s all part of that checkout flow. You really need to make sure that they’re receiving the best possible service after they complete a purchase and that it starts with the checkout page. So, making sure that people get an order confirmation after they complete the checkout, make sure that you’re sending that via email to them. Then you’re also sending them a shipping update, shipping confirmation, and then you can follow it up with a review request as well.
So, if you’re going to have your highest volume of orders during this time, don’t forget to keep people updated and excited, especially because we know there’s going to be shipping delays. Every year, there are. ShipBob does a great job of tracking this and has a great report that they update. I think it’s every couple days with what the delivery times are from multi-carriers knowing that a lot of them are going to be delayed. In addition to that, you want to keep people updated, but if you keep them happy, then you can ask for a review and you’ll get way more reviews during this time than you would throughout the rest of the year because you have more orders. I just think it’s a great time to increase that social proof. All of that should be good.

Ryan:
For smaller business, make sure you’re collecting reviews right now, because you need to hit thresholds. So, get that enabled now.

Jon:
And then you can take that social proof and sprinkle it throughout the customer journey. So, put it on a product detail page, put it on your homepage, things of that sort, right?

Ryan:
Got it. Okay. Amazing insights on checkout for sure, things I didn’t think about. I know that a lot of the traffic is going to be hitting product pages this year, just like normal. So, product pages often get overlooked because they don’t rank high organically, generally speaking. So, when people are optimizing their sites for SEO, yeah, whatever, product pages, except the fact that a vast majority of your new customers are landing on those. Should they be thinking through on these product detail pages in the next three or four weeks? Can they make a difference?

Jon:
Well, I think you answered your own question there. Maybe you convinced yourself, but the reality is yes, 100%. The thing about this, Ryan, is that, as you say, most people forget about PDPs. It’s usually one of the first places we start when we’re optimizing for brands at The Good. So, we look at things like product naming conventions. You want to make sure that they’re descriptive, but this is where organic search can really come in. There’s so many product names that are technical terms or things that people aren’t going to search. They’re branded terms, right? Things that people aren’t searching for.
If you really want that term, put it in the description so that it still gets picked up by Google, but don’t make your product name something that is impossible for people to find or that they’re not going to be looking for. So, that’s something to think of. The description, of course, you want it to be descriptive, but also use it to address objections. You have a great opportunity here to answer the most pressing questions that people have. This is where user testing, things of that sort can come into play. What are people asking and saying, “Oh, I really like this product but I wonder what this is”?, et cetera, right? I wonder is a key that we listen for in user testing. So, make sure that you’re answering all of those questions as well.
Also, the product photography and video, key. We talked about the size of the images, but really the higher quality, the better. Not in terms of the quality of the resolution of the image, but I’m talking about quality of photography in general. So, don’t just use your iPhone, lay something on your floor, and take a picture and just leave it at that. Put some effort into it. Go into a studio. I’ve seen some really good ones that people create their own photo boxes, light boxes, where they just take a white sheet and put it inside a box and then put the item in there and get the lighting right. It can work wonders, but there’s so many of these out there where you can just ship your product to these companies and they’ll take great photos and 360 photos even. There’s no excuse for not having great photography for your products at this point.

Ryan:
Layer in some lifestyle images. Google’s recognizing those in shopping things. Funny story on this, I had a client that sells aftermarket suspension kits. I looked in their feed in Google ads and their shopping was showing the image of user generated content, which is good, but that was the main image was a Chevy Silverado that was a blue purple color that had been lowered using their kit, but that was the main image. It looked like based on their product title, you were selling a Chevy Silverado truck for $700. I was like, “Ooh, yeah, that’s not good.” Good images are important. You should have something that’s in there, but you got to have main images.

Jon:
Yeah, exactly. That’s a great point of just making sure that you’re taking high quality photos too. A lot of user generated content is not high quality. It’s great to have it. That’s actually part of the charm of user generated content is that it’s not high quality, but people expect your brand to have better photography. And then I really want to touch on the homepage just really quickly, one or two things, but overall, I would just remove unnecessary distractions from the homepage. I think that it’s really going to be an issue if you have things like an auto rotating carousel, popup, death by popups.
Now’s not the time to be collecting emails right off the bat. Now’s the time to be converting the people coming to your site. Let’s not distract people. Let’s get them to the finish line and make that revenue. So, after you’ve done that or as a value add later, you can try to get the email address, but a popup as soon as people get to your homepage, not a good place to do it. Rotating carousels because you want to show five, six different products, you’re just confusing people.

Ryan:
It pisses me off because I want to click on one and it’s slid off and I’m like, “How do I get it back?”

Jon:
Yeah, you and everyone else. So, I encourage people to be thinking about the challenges of that user experience and focus really on your value proposition. If I come to your site and I can’t understand what you do for me within the first 5 to 10 seconds, I’m going to leave. Not what you sell. What’s the benefit to me? Why do I care? A lot of brands will say, “Well, they should know that before they get to my site.”
Well, that’s BS. You need to reinforce it when people get there. Your advertising should get people to the site and then your site needs to convert them. With that in mind, there needs to be a connection between the two. So, if you just say, “People got to my site and they’re going to understand what we do because of the ad we ran,” well, you better reiterate that message on the homepage or whatever landing page you’re using.

Ryan:
Yeah, don’t assume anything, especially if you have a poorly run Google Ads account that’s sending a lot of traffic for longer tail searches to your homepage. You have people looking for a specific thing that’s not going to be readily evident on your homepage. You better be helping them understand why they got to your page. For sure.

Jon:
That’s so true.

Ryan:
I see that a lot.

Jon:
That leads us to sales strategy, the last point I wanted to make here. So, think about what promotions you’re going to offer. I say promotions and I don’t say discounts. I say that on purpose, call it promotions. If your current strategy is all around discounting to bring in customers, it’s time to start thinking otherwise, because you’re going to acquire a bunch of new customers during this timeframe and you don’t want to acquire just discount customers. You want to acquire customers who are going to value your products.
Now, I’m not suggesting that you don’t have some type of promotion, because look, it’s prevalent. Everyone’s doing it during this time period. You need to compete to some degree, people want a good deal, but just taking a dollar or a percentage off is a challenge. So, what I suggest you do instead is you offer something, you add something. So, you could add free shipping, pretty self-explanatory, but it’s a value that people see, right? They’re used to it from Amazon, et cetera. So, you got to compete against that anyways. So, why not make it seem like a value add?

Ryan:
I will say too that text ads on Google that you’re paying for free shipping is still the best call out for getting ad clicks. If you can say free shipping in your ad text, your clickthrough rate will be higher. It’s been like six years that we’ve been testing this and it’s still the best call out and a cool subpoint. I hate shipping calculations in the feeds and having to understand where they’re going and what the timeline’s going to be and what the cost is going to be.
So, if you’re making shipping a profit center where you’re like, “I’m trying to just cover my cost,” the headache involved in that and potentially getting it wrong is terrible. If you just offer it free, it’s so much easier to handle it. If everybody else in your industry is charging for shipping, you’re going to get a much bigger benefit on Google Shopping because your product will overall be cheaper and you’ll get additional impressions. So, there’s a lot of headache avoided. Yes, you give up some margin but your life gets easier.

Jon:
Speaking of pricing, that brings up a good point. We’ve done a lot of testing at The Good around price for shipping versus price of product. We have found that even if you raise the price of the product but have free shipping, people are willing to pay more for that product. So, you could recoup some of that shipping cost for sure by just raising your price a little bit. Again, your overall price will still be lower and that’s what people are going to look at too. I think this takes me to thinking about FOMO. So, exploiting FOMO during this time.
What do I mean by that? Well, a lot of people are going to miss out if you have limited quantities available on popular products. Now that’s very popular in the sense that it’s happening a lot because of supply chain issues that still aren’t 100% ironed out. So, we have a lot of clients at The Good that have some of their best products, they’re just still in low quantities. Now, I’m not suggesting you lie about it. Don’t create a fake urgency here. People see through that stuff.

Ryan:
FOMO’s always telling me that Bob in New York just bought a purple T-shirt, that does not increase FOMO. It pissed me off because I know you’re lying to me.

Jon:
Yeah, yeah. We talked about that a lot because it’s so annoying and those things are not helpful. So, again, focus on where you can provide value here. So, is it a loyalty program that you can offer exclusive things to, maybe free gift with purchase that if people aren’t part of that loyalty program, they’re not getting? So, then they have FOMO and they give you their email address. That’s all that’s required to sign up. That’s a great way to avoid doing popups, right? Another thing is making sure that you don’t just take sold out items off of your site. I find that happen all the time where something sells out and they just take it off their site because they don’t want to disappoint people. You’re losing an opportunity.
Have a back in stock notification option and there’s plenty of plugins for this on Shopify, where you collect an email. And then as soon as you add more stock, it will email everybody to tell them it’s there. We have one client that can’t keep things in stock, so they do this and it’s a way to build their email list up.
In addition to that, every time we send one of these back in stock emails, they add new stock, the product sells out within 24 hours, because you’re telling everybody, “Come get it. It’s back in stock.” Everyone’s like, “Oh, I better order it now because it’s going to go out of stock again.” So they immediately go and buy it. So, all of that is really, really helpful for your revenue during this time, especially when people need to order a gift by a certain date, that FOMO ramps up pretty quickly.

Ryan:
Great. Okay. There’s a lot of meat in this podcast. If you got to this point, you might have to go back and listen again to get everything Jon talked through, but it’s phenomenal insights to help your holiday season.

Jon:
We’ll summarize this up on thegood.com. Just search Black Friday and you’ll get an article. We’ll have it up there with a whole bunch of these points. I think, Ryan, going back to where we started today, the final point I have is it’s never too late to start optimizing. So, be prepared to adjust. Even if you’re putting out promotions that aren’t hitting the mark, that’s okay. Make the adjustments just to keep iterating. That’s really the key here is just keep iterating. It’s okay to change your strategy and make changes based on data, not assumptions, but data. I really encourage people to keep an eye on that and not be afraid to make small changes throughout the season.

Ryan:
Even if you’re starting on Thanksgiving when you should be eating Turkey and watching football, the optimizations you’re starting are going to benefit you maybe not even during this holiday season as much as it will in like four, five, six months. So, when should you start optimizing your site? Now is when you should, whenever you’re listening to this. Start now.

Jon:
Awesome.

Ryan:
Jon, thank you. I as usual learned a lot and I’m sure people listening in did as well.

Jon:
Great. Well, I look forward to everyone having a successful holiday season, and hopefully, you sell some fertilizer, wine, and the 10 other products that you’re involved in right now.

Ryan:
Just everybody, send me a Venmo. It’ll take care of it all.

Jon:
Love it. Thank you, Ryan.

Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 067): Optimizing Your Website for Black Friday and Cyber Monday appeared first on The Good.

After all, cycles are a normal part of business. The high season is followed by the low season. Things heat up for a while, then cool back down. One day, it’s tough to find time to eat lunch—then, all of a sudden, you’re scrambling to find something to do.

The worst part is there doesn’t seem like much can be done about it. Erratic traffic and erratic sales are to be expected. Such is life for an ecommerce team.

But that’s not true.

There’s plenty that can be done to help smooth out the rollercoaster ride. You can keep employees busy and the transactions coming in year-round.

Stick with me a few minutes, and I’ll provide examples of tactics you can use to accomplish that feat.

There’s no reason for any ecommerce website to depend on last-quarter sales to carry the whole year’s expenses. Follow these suggestions to keep customers coming back all year long.

5 Game-Changing Tips for Boosting Ecommerce Sales in Your Off Season Strategy

Breaks in the action aren’t always a bad thing. Basketball coaches use halftime to make strategic assessments, change up the game, and boost team morale. NASCAR teams use December and January to rebuild and redesign, so their cars will run even stronger the next time the flag drops.

You, too, can use the off-season as a time for growth instead of a time to pull back. Sometimes, all it takes is a shift in mindset to turn slow-time doldrums into “Let’s get ready for the next round” excitement. All you need is a different perspective – one that sees value in the quiet hours.

Here are five examples to get the ideas flowing:

1. Focus on what you can’t do during the busy times

If you have a code freeze during the busy season, for example, your off-season is the perfect time to make changes. Less traffic means less load on your resources – both machine-based and human.

In the rush to keep the wheels turning, it’s easy to forget you can purposely save some of the work for later. The old maxim about “Never put off until tomorrow…” isn’t always correct.

Have you been putting off a site redesign? Do you need to generate new images or other creative assets? Are there employees to hire or train? Do you need to launch an in-house initiative to make sure the team is working together effectively?

Slow time is the best time to get those and many other tasks accomplished — not the time to take a break. Smart ecommerce VP’s know their most lethal competitors are doing push-ups while others sleep. If you’re going to compete with those astute ones, you’ll need to do push-ups too.

2. Tailor your website to your target audience

Use A/B Testing to optimize your website for your targeted audience segments. That will help to increase conversions and bring in more sales revenue all during the year.

Here’s something else: once you’ve optimized your site, you’ll get more return on ad spend (ROAS). That will allow you to get more aggressive with advertising and attract even more visitors to your site.

Ads alone won’t provide the desired results. You can get ten times more traffic, but fail to get an appreciable number of more sales. The often overlooked ingredient is digital experience optimization.

Higher numbers mean nothing if those visitors aren’t converting from prospects into buyers. More about that in the next tip.

When you say ROI, do you mean return on investment or risk of inaction? -@pgillin
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3. Find the roadblocks

Remove friction. Use the slower periods to analyze data from when things were hopping. Where did you underperform? Where are your biggest bottlenecks? Once you’ve identified your stuck points, you can plan improvements based on your highest impact areas.

All of that assumes, of course, that you’ve identified the metrics you’ll need and the formulas you’ll use. If you find there are holes in your strategic view, you’ll need to patch them. Maybe you’ll need new tools, maybe you’ll need to train staff members, maybe you’ll have to hire to cover lapses.

Your off-season strategy will include time to take a close look at the buyer’s path to sales and kick the rocks out the way. It may be there is no other activity that can pay off like this one. We preach it over and over and over again: traffic that doesn’t convert is like a car with no wheels; you can steer it all you want, but it’s not going to take you anywhere.

Every aspect of marketing is entirely useless unless it produces conversions - @jeremysaid.
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4. Bring your new customers back during an off season strategy

Keep your first-time customers coming back by designing and implementing an effective onboarding campaign via email.

You can bring them back with offers of complementary products, for instance, or by offering special rewards for purchasing again soon. You’re limited only by your imagination.

The main thing is to let those new customers know you appreciate their business, you’re open to feedback on their shopping experience with you, and you want to keep them as ongoing customers.

Your onboarding campaign begins the grooming process for those who will eventually become your evangelists. Statistics consistently show it’s considerably easier and less costly to sell more to an existing customer than to acquire a new customer.

5. Develop a loyalty program to reward repeat customers

Those customers you acknowledge and treasure are the ones you keep. Make sure your loyal customers receive special treatment, and you’ll cement the relationship – they’ll be “in the family.”

It’s in this group that you’ll find evangelists who will freely provide invaluable word-of-mouth testimonials for you (unsolicited). They’ll talk about you on social media, they’ll brag about you to their friends, and they’ll love the fact that you not only recognize them, but that you do special things to reward them for their consistent support of your business.

It’s difficult to find a company – online or off – that’s really good at this. One huge, but often overlooked key, is that you want a high percentage of your messaging aimed at serving these loyal customers instead of selling them.

You’ve already sold them, and you should know them quite well. Now focus on giving them unexpected value. Don’t make it all about sales and discounts. Throw in informative content on topics you know they care about.

If your customer loves to camp, for instance, send updates on the latest advances in sleeping bag construction. It’s okay to mention your products, but don’t make the message a barely-hidden sales pitch.

Be real, and provide real value.

What You Do In Your Off Season Strategy Will Pay Off Big When Black Friday Rolls Around

When you begin thinking like a coach at halftime, instead of falling for the trap and acting like the season is over, your enthusiasm will spread to the rest of the team.

Go over the five suggestions above with your team. Get everyone brainstorming about the opportunity they have to get the engine powered up. Not only will your increased conversion rate provide more revenue during the rest of the year, but it’ll pay off in spades when the high-season rolls back around. You’ll get more conversions at that point too — maybe a whole lot more.

At The Good, we get to see what happens when companies take these suggestions to heart. We’ve seen battle-worn ecommerce VP’s get their smile back and begin loving the work again.

May that also happen for you!

The post 5 Powerful Ways to Boost Profits with An Off-Season Strategy appeared first on The Good.