Either you are just getting started with your Ecommerce store, or you have 50K visits per month to your store, you certainly need few growth tools which would certainly help you increase your revenue and growth of your e-commerce store. Having access to right tool would empower you to deliver better results for you and your store.
As an e-commerce business owner, you have a dozen of challenges to overcome, like building traffic to your site, increase conversions, experimenting with a different copy on your product pages. So, why don’t we use some great software and tools that are already available and takes very less time to setup?
Following are the list of essential tools that every e-commerce business owners need:
1. Google Analytics
You probably would have installed it but it’s mandatory to enable e-commerce on your google analytics setting.
It helps you to track conversions, product performance and most importantly look at your visitors shopping behaviour analysis. You can pull more data from those enhanced data collection like how many people have abandoned the cart and how many have not even taken a time to visit your product pages! These are very vital information to understand your visitor behaviour and act accordingly.
Eg. from one of our stores
You can see that we have very less conversion from visitors viewing our product to adding our product to cart which is just 5%, we need to improve on that. Understanding these behavioural patterns helps us to action out on the most important hurdles our visitors face.
It takes less than 2 mins to enable it and verify these behaviours on GA.
2. Live Chat
Why should your store need a Live chat?
a. Discover potential buyers pain points
You can discover a lot of questions that might be raised before purchase during your sales funnel, most of the questions arise at the time of cart / checkout stage if there is no one there to address those questions you might lose a sale. When I sat down to live chat for one of our clients, we got a dozen of questions like do you ship to Australia, US? Do you provide any warranty on the product? Is there a refund policy? How much it costs to get it in Ireland? Or sometimes they were looking for a specific product which is out of stock and wanted to backorder that but wanted to confirm whether it can arrive on their friends birthday? Or there might be a bug in our site when viewed in the different browser and they don’t know how to add to cart! A lot of these questions provide you with an opportunity to address these in product pages or cart pages so your visitors were informed earlier and proceed on to next stage without any hurdles. It helps to discover your customer’s pain points.
b. Increase sales
It provides an opportunity to upsell the product when a visitor initiated the conversation, you answered all his queries and then he is about to checkout, now is the time to upsell your products, It can be accessories for gadget store or any related product which you wanted to upsell. Live chat increases sales.
c. Faster resolution to customer problems
Once customer has placed an order they might have few questions on why it has not yet arrived? Or anything! Since Live chat is very convenient to our customers they wanted to check with you on this first before pick up their phone to ring you, It helps to resolve customer problem faster and to provide better support resulting in a happy customer.
Now that you know Live chat is very essential and you need to incorporate it on your store. One tool which I am using it for all my client’s store and resulted in a great increase in sales and customer happiness and that tool is Intercom. Please check them out, they are not free but if you get one order by proactively helping your visitor it makes up for that cost.
3. Heat Maps
Why you need a Heat Map? To better understand the behaviour of your visitors. Example of one of our stores heatmap
You can see that the areas that are highlighted with Yellow / Orange are the most interacted elements on our cart page, less highlighted marks are less interacted elements,, you can see from the above image that many of our segmented visitors just change quantity of the items and the next most interacted element is the coupon code section.
It gave us another hypothesis that when our visitors see coupon code they quit our site and look out in google for any publicly available coupon codes, probably one of the reasons contributing towards Cart Abandonment. Those who proceed to checkout are very less compared to the people who have clicked on the coupon. This behaviour helps us a lot to know how our visitor is interacting with our site and act accordingly. I would explain how we addressed this issue shortly.
One tool which I would suggest using to get heatmaps is VWO (Visual Website Optimizer), has tonnes of integrations for almost all e-commerce platforms, shouldn’t take more than 5 mins to get it up and running.
4. Abandoned cart emails (Optimonk / Cartstack)
Cart Abandonment is a big problem in our industry, Current industry average stands at 68.63% which is huge. But our abandonment stands at a much bigger number which is 85.74%. You can have a look at how we were affected by the cart abandonment here. Following are the process which helped us to recover lost sales.
a. Exit Intent Popups
We showed a 10% off coupon to our visitors who are about to exit our site without making a purchase, It worked wonderfully. Please look at our conversions here
We have shown the popup for 561 visitors, and we have got 113 conversion which is 20% conversion whereas the industry average is 8 to 10% (It’s not real people who have purchased but its just their email). From 113 people who have left their email in exchange
From 113 people who have left their email in exchange for the coupon, we have got 40 orders, 35% conversion is great and imagine without those tools we might have missed those 40 orders. I highly recommend setting up exit intent popup on your site via Optimonk, it works wonderfully for us 🙂
b. Cart abandonment emails
If a visitor had started a checkout process or added a product to the cart and abandon’s it, we can re-engage them with emails. Yes, if started the checkout we would have their email and if not we might have their email with exit intent popup.
According to a study conducted by SalesCycle (Remarketing Specialist), it states 8 to 10% of the emails that we send convert to actual sales. I have personally had only 6% as conversion rate from emails (I am still at very early stages of testing).
Example of an abandoned cart email,
One tool I would highly recommend using is CartStack, offers simple setup and integration for dozens of platforms, they are willing to go beyond and help you recover lost revenue. It should take less than 10 mins to get things up and running.
5. A/B Testing your copy
Does your website speak your customer language? Only testing different copy with your audience would tell you which works and which doesn’t. That’s the entire purpose of A/B Testing. So you can test which variant of your headline, Call to Action button text, Product USP’s or email campaigns with different variants and see which variant has better conversion than the other one that is ultimately what works for your audience.
A/B Testing also referred to split testing, which version of your website performs well.
Rule of thumb is to test the following one at a time:
- Headings on your most landing page (which obviously is the home page for many stores)
- Your ‘Call to Action’ button which is ‘Add to Cart’, ‘Proceed to Checkout’, ‘Place your order’, ‘View Product’ buttons which makes your visitors to take action
- Test your Dropdown menus
- Your Search text
- If your store has only single product image, test it with multiple product images
You can also perform multivariate tests where you can testing multiple variables for your hypothesis. You can change CTA text’s and also headings, this is a bit complex to create, to begin with, I would suggest going by single A/B test alone.
One tool I would highly recommend to perform A/B testing is VWO. They provide integration for all most all e-commerce platforms and shouldn’t take any more than 30 mins to set up and running when you have decided which section of your site you are about to test.
6. Request review & Follow up reminder
70% of online customers rely on reviews to make buying decisions. Oracle did a study on Customer Experience Impact Report they found following great insights:
a. 86% of consumers will pay more for a better customer experience
b. 89% of consumers will do business with a competitor following a poor customer experience
c. 79% of consumers who shared complaints about poor customer experience online had their complaints ignored
Another study from BazaarVoice found that the number of reviews and average rating on a product correlate closely with conversion to purchase. In the Beauty product category, when the number of reviews increases from 1 to 15, we see a 56% increase in orders
How do you know whether you are providing a better customer experience unless we request our customers to write a review about their purchase experience at our site? A majority of the online customers rely on reviews before making a purchase decision it’s always better to set up a process to request a review with our customer for definite period after their purchase.
Here’ the process that you should adopt to get it started
a. Send a review request email a week after you have shipped the product to make sure customer have received their product and have used your product for a couple of times
b. Send a review request reminder two weeks later if they have not responded to the review yet.
c. Incentivize your customer to provide review with 10% off coupon on their next order and tell them they can share this with their friends. This should be an exclusive coupon for that customer so he is encouraged to share or use it (yet another sale from review :))
d. Never ignore your negative reviews, they are sometimes really helpful in knowing which area of your store needs focus right now.
How to generate more sales using Reviews?
a. Find Niche bloggers who can review your products
Find an influencer who has got a decent fan following and invite them to review your product in exchange
Find an influencer who has got a decent fan following and invite them to review your product in exchange for your free product.
When they do it, two most important things happen, one your product reaches to their audience and two if your product and service are good you get an excellent review by an influencer which adds meritocracy to your product. I am pretty sure every niche has their own influencers and bloggers whom you can reach out to.
b. On-site reviews & Off-site reviews
Though On-site reviews have a lot of advantages like fresh user generated content and SEO Juice especially from the Local search engine. Off-site review sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google Places, TrustPilot help generate authenticity of your reviews. Using 3rd party services like Yotpo or BazaarVoice can really give your store a head start with Google Seller ratings, Rich snippets which lead to increase in traffic.
I would suggest going with a mix of Off-site & On-site reviews,. You need user-generated content on your site and also some percentage of 3rd party sites so your reviews can be of authenticity. I would say 70% of your reviews should be on your site and remaining 30% of your reviews should be on 3rd party.
Do you need to publish a negative review from the customer?
One of the most burning questions for any e-commerce business owner. Brands with Perfect review looks Inauthentic. If all your reviews are 100% positive it means either you have delivered exceptional services to your customers in time and every time (which is definitely hard), or you have screened the feedback and presented only the positive ones. 99.9% of the business falls under the second case where they screen the reviews.
Why negative reviews are good for your business? You have got nothing to hide that in turn creates a credibility with your visitors. In fact, people can understand that sometimes it can go wrong you might miss a delivery expectation, it occurs most of the time as ecommerce stores depend on various logistics providers, and they have their own challenges. Sometimes a customer is annoyed with the fact you were charging high for international orders which lead them to leave a negative review. So it’s ok to have few negative reviews on your store.
Reply to those negative reviews publicly and clarify what went wrong and how you would prevent this happening in future, these conversations are the gold mine for any visitor who is looking to read your reviews before making a purchase, they know you accept your mistakes and go on to fix it in future. Once you fixed up the issue follow up with them and say “Thank You” for bringing it to your notice which has helped your business to provide improved customer experience in your store. They would be delighted 🙂
There are a lot of tools to help you with setting up review request email & follow up emails. In fact, there are a couple of plugins or addons for your store which is already available to you at free. If you prefer to use 3rd party review services, I can recommend Yotpo.
7. Measuring the most important metrics
Setting up Google Analytics to monitor your ecommerce conversion rate and referrals is easy but there might be a lot of discrepancies. The transactions in GA won’t match up with your store, might be some orders haven’t returned back to your store after completing payment or they might have visited the ‘Order Confirmation’ page so many times. If you offer Paypal as one of the payment options, you might have an issue showing Paypal as the referral source for most of your orders losing some sensible data there, (Yes, of course, you can fix these issues but it’s harder to fix all those small issues in GA and very time-consuming).
As an e-commerce business owner, you have tonnes of things to do hence the need for the plug and play system where you plug it into your store and it should pull up all the important metrics for you. The most important metrics for your store is as following:
a. Conversion rate
Conversion rate is the most important metric for you to track. A Percentage of visitors take the desired action, action can be ‘Add to cart’, ‘Purchase’. The industry average for retail ecommerce conversion rates is 1% to 2%. If you increase your conversion rate you can increase your revenue and profits. Please read here on how to increase your conversion rate of your e-commerce store.
b. Which source of traffic has higher conversion rate
The other most important metric to know is whether Google search, Adwords, Facebook or Instagram has higher conversion rates, depending on that we need to double down our activities on that particular channel.
if Instagram is your lead conversion source then double down on your activities in Instagram, If Google Search is your lead conversion source try to increase your rankings for your keywords. To decide which activity you should pursue this metric is a must to have.
c. Segmentation based on customer behaviour
Let’s say James bought a product from your store two weeks ago and yesterday he viewed two other products and added one product to cart and abandoned it. If you have this data wouldn’t you incentivize James by providing an offer for the product he added to cart and convert a sale? You would be definitely. But the most important question is whether you have this kind of data at present at your store? If not you should quickly act on to get this most important data about what’s happening in your store. There are a lot of segmentation and retention strategies you can apply once you have the data. You can send targeted email campaigns to your customers who have not returned to your store after they made a purchase a year before, or you can send an email campaign to people viewed a particular product and not placed an order by making an offer on the product they have viewed. Have you re-engaged with your customers who had a pending orders? Like their payment failed due to some issues with their card? There are a lot of segmentations we can do with it once we have the data.
I highly recommend Metrilo to get it installed on your store to pull all the metrics and deep dive segmentations so you can retarget them with your email campaigns based on their behaviour. It shouldn’t take more than 30 mins to get it up and running.
8. Growth Spreadsheet
Have you got a growth plan for your store, I am sure you would, but don’t worry if you don’t have it yet, Let’s take this opportunity to revisit our growth plan if you had one or create one now.
Why do you need a growth plan for your store?
Everyone needs to grow their business, without a growth plan you cannot measure how your store is performing. Planning to increase 15% MoM (Month on Month) is a good target to aim. We need to set our weekly & Monthly targets on the number of orders, your weekly revenue, your marketing budgets, no. of customers, etc.
I have put up a spreadsheet to help you grow your store by only entering few data on the sheet along with your desired growth rate, it should tell you the daily, weekly & monthly targets for your store.
You can download the spreadsheet by Clicking here
Once you know your goals, you can put all your energy towards achieving it. I personally use this sheet for all my client’s store. Please use the spreadsheet and grow your store.
I would like to know what are the other metrics you effectively measure your growth which I have missed and if you can share it with our community it would be of great help.
Now that you know how these essential tools help your store increase your revenue and profit, it’s your turn to let me know what are the tools you are planning to implement in next few days, given that all of them takes less than few mins to setup.
I would suggest you define your growth plan and where your business is at present and what’s the most important hurdle your business has and share it with us in the comments, we would share our thoughts and solutions to your problems.
If you happen to use any of these tools, please let me know how it benefitted your store and what you think needs to be improved.
Cheers to your growth 🙂