Last updated on 07/13/2022
I launched my online store, but I don’t sell enough. What’s wrong?
Keep in mind that to improve your conversion rate which will bring you more sales, if you have a paid traffic acquisition strategy at the same time, you need to improve the traffic that comes to your website and your landing page experience where the traffic lands at the same time. Optimizing the ads and targeting to get better traffic is just as important as optimizing the website.
Introduction to Conversion Rate Optimization
Erza Firestone introduced the concept of Conversion Assets for Sales Funnel
“A Conversion Asset is a piece of “media” (text, image, video, etc.) that supports a prospect in making a buying decision”
Erza Firestone
Here are the must-have conversion assets you need to have and test on your product offer pages:
- Fast loading mobile page
- Call To Action Button supportive header or mobile header
- Sticky CTA on desktop
- Multiple high-quality product images
- Image zoom
- Product sales video or GIF for demo
- Add to cart above the fold + multiple CTAs on the Page
- One page order Bump
- Well-done product description with great copywriting
- USP’s image format or logo
- Promptly displayed guarantee
- Reviews (user submitted content and Q&A)
- Social proof images
- Product FAQ
- Cross-sells
- Exit intent
- Live chat fly around
And you can test further:
- CTA buttons: size, form, color, text
- The size of your descriptive text: short, long
- Your shopping cart page: drawer, the entire page, cross-sell, payment logo, guarantee
- Your images: lifestyle, lookbook, studio, background white or with items, outdoor
- Your checkout: one page, standard, display guarantee and legal information, display payment icon (or not)
You will find examples on this product page https://www.boombycindyjoseph.com/products/boomsilk-product
All these elements must be tested one after the other and then analyze the difference in the conversion rate after 2 to 3 days for each test.
It is very important to change only one element at a time.
In conversion rate optimization (CRO), there are 2 types of optimizations, small optimizations and big changes.
- Small optimizations are typically a change of color, or minor copywriting changes, reversing 2 images or 2 HTML blocks.
- Major changes such as changing the marketing offer on the site, shipping price (you test free shipping from a certain amount of purchase) , a promo code, increasing the price of products, adding a whole section to the page.
These radical changes are not permanent, they are intended to test a hypothesis.
Example of hypothesis:
Is my price too high for the perceived value? If I lower OR raise my price, is there a change in conversions? Sometimes raising the price brings more value to the product and the conversion is better.
The value you give to your product may be different from the value customers attribute to it.
Example of testing: Increase the price from 29.99 to 49.99 for 3 days by sending traffic to the product page. Ideally, you send traffic to 2 similar pages and only the price changes by A/B testing.
The settings of the test are important.
Remember to create custom UTMs in your traffic/conversion campaigns to be able to analyze later on your Google Analytics dashboard.
Send traffic that is in the same place in the sales funnel. Cold traffic or hot traffic, not both.
Then you need to look at the analytics and compare which price had the most conversion.
Never be satisfied with your conversion rate, it can always be improved.
Find your product market fit with A/B testing
I assume that you have done a marketing study before launching your business, so you are sure that there is a demand and that you offer a product that brings value to your future customers.
If this is not the case, I invite you to read our article which presents why the best e-commerce brands are successful and to get inspired by them. Article Here: https://valecommedia.com/successful-e-commerce-brands/
If nevertheless after conversion optimization tests you still don’t have any results, you will have to ask yourself about your Product/Market Fit and maybe review the way you present your products to your visitors at the beginning of the sales funnel and the audiences you target if you advertise on social media.
It will be necessary to test several marketing angles, but having a consistent brand image, change your targeting, optimize or renew your content.
Of course, you should not change everything at the same time, like the testing on your product page.
First, change your images, then the angle of your videos, then your targeting, then the acquisition strategy, then the products if you have another collection to advertise.
The goal here is to find a success formula that works for your brand so that you can scale to the moon.
Acquisition Strategy Targeting and Ads
An e-commerce website is not everything. If you target vegan people to sell them hot dogs with meat, it has very little chance of success.
This is an extreme, but it illustrates my point.
You need to have an acquisition strategy that is relevant to your products, your brand, and your marketing. Maybe you are targeting too broadly and no one identifies themselves with your brand.
Maybe you’re not highlighting the real issue of the audience to sell your product.
That’s why video is growing a lot in terms of online acquisition. Because it allows you to demonstrate the consumers’ problem and how the product will improve their daily lives and solve their problems, allowing them to improve themselves or transmit emotions that make them want to buy.
The acquisition strategy is an important element for the success of your business.
According to a study on more than 350 DNVB, it was shown that successful e-commerce brands have focused on Facebook, Instagram and Google (+ Youtube) Ads to find customers in recent years.
Depending on the industry, LinkedIn and Twitter can be interesting if your business is in BtoB.
Pinterest, Snapchat and Tiktok Ads platforms are more recent and their algorithm is less powerful than Facebook and Google, however the cost per impression and cost per click is generally lower and some brands have had a lot of success, especially with Gen Z on these platforms.
And of course the strategy of celebrities endorsement influences marketing and public relations with the press and media articles which helps a lot with the authority and social proof, especially on the website.
The key to success on online advertising platforms is to test and test again.
I would recommend starting with a Google Search campaign with the relevant keywords and Google shopping to test your conversion because people who search on Google by typing a keyword are already intending to buy, so your conversion rate should normally be higher.
Facebook and other social media will require more budget because you will have to invest in the creation of advertisements with specific formats, and the algorithm will be a bit greedy in the budget at the beginning to pass its learning phase.
In addition, the quality of targeting and results has decreased since Apple’s IOS 14.
If you have a lot of products you want to showcase and you want to send your traffic to your homepage instead of a product page, here’s a technique that too few brands use.
Customize your landing page with relevant information for each campaign you run. If the traffic comes from Google Search, make a different landing page than if the traffic comes from Facebook.
You can use landing page tools such as:
Best practices for a landing page that converts:
23. Custom landing page per campaign, you want to A/B different versions to find the best one.
24. Target specifics keywords and persona
25. Build hype for future product launching to get an email for pre-launch
26. Make the buying process more accessible with a clear call to action
27. Integrate trust signal to build trust
28. Use social proof with testimonials, reviews, videos from customers
29. Remove links and useless sidebar menus
30. Use heatmap to analyze where your visitors click the most.
Example: https://www.livelarq.com/
What works:
- Clean design with a concise headline
- High-quality images featuring the product
- States value proposition of “Eradicate >99.99& of germs”
- CTA button is clear, bright and related to the offer
BONUS
Ideally, you use Shopify so that you can quickly and easily integrate applications that will allow you to test the conversion of your e-commerce website pages to find the one that will convert the most, without needing to add extra code manually.
I recommend testing different landing page formats in your sales funnel, depending on the persona:
- A landing page for people who have never heard of you and come to your website for the first time.
Example: A video awareness presenting the brand and products, a section with the different collections available, and lifestyle images for the branding.
- A landing page for people who re-engage with your brand and are leads that have already visited your website but not purchased yet.
Example: A focus on social proof, product value, brand value, customer testimonials, and media.
- A landing page for your customers who have already purchased previously on your website.
Example: new product launch, contests, upsells, pop-up join the club.
The goal is to know where the customer is in his buying journey and design the perfect landing page that will meet his expectations.
Be careful not to make a complicated conversion funnel when you start.
Keep it simple. A clear and simple offer to enter the first sales funnel.
Resources:
Erza Firestone about CRO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnN8WSrnmjk
High converting landing page by shopify: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnhcMbr-uXs&t=1s
Hi there just wanted to give you a brief heads up and let you know a few of the pictures aren’t loading correctly. I’m not sure why but I think its a linking issue. I’ve tried it in two different browsers and both show the same outcome.