By Omri Yacubovich | Head of Marketing @ Commerce Sciences
You’re getting the right people to your site with your remarketing and you’re serving them a mobile-enhanced experience. Your email marketing campaigns integrate with your on-site offers, making redemption of email offers a fluid and seamless experience.
Now, seriously up your conversion optimization game just in the time for the holidays with these proven tactics:
1. Employ E-commerce CRO Best Practices
Make sure you have a solid foundation on which to build your enhanced CRO strategy. Use the Google Developers PageSpeed Insights Tool to check your load speed and identify opportunities to improve it. Optimize your site for simple navigation and to show off your top products. Build trust and credibility with available live chat, prominent contact information, visible policies and guarantees, etc. Use this article as a checklist to ensure your site is adherent with basic CRO best practices.
2. Use Remarketing to Drive Higher Quality Traffic to Your Site
Tag site visitors and remarket them using Google AdWords, Facebook or Twitter remarketing. This allows you to target people who already expressed an interest in your business with relevant offers and messaging. When they arrive back on your site, seal the deal with an offer they can’t refuse.
3. Deploy Real-time Offers & Coupons
Coupons and offers must be timely in order to tap into the powerful psychological motivator of ‘fear of missing out.’ However, online coupons can be difficult to control and might drive a lot of traffic to your site that will only use the coupon and never visit you again. Used cleverly, real-time offers and coupons can be triggered based on the behaviors of people who are already on your site, compelling more of them to convert.
4. Take a Page from Amazon’s CRO Book
Is there any other retailer on the planet so laser-focused on customer obsession, continuous optimization, passion for invention, and agility? Amazon grew into the goliath it’s become by slaying the competition in personalization and conversion. Use behavioral triggers to understand your visitors’ motivations and intent, then meet them at critical junctions with personalized offers. See more on Amazon’s proven CRO tactics here.
5. Focus on Trust Factors
Build a trustworthy ecommerce brand and website to overcome potential objections before they happen. Create logical shipping, privacy and return policies, and use slideouts to ensure they’re displayed prominently around your site. Ensure your contact information is correct and up to date. Emphasize trust elements at nighttime, when consumers tend to be more suspicious. Learn more about building trust in ecommerce here.
6. Win Customers Over with Shipping Offers
In 2014, retailers who offered free shipping with no restrictions during Cyber Week saw a 48% increase in their shipping volume compared to the previous week. Use triggered slideouts and modal messages to assure customers that you ship to their location and offer free shipping for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
7. Optimize your Checkout Flow
Resist the temptation to upsell or cross-sell to customers already in the checkout process; it just distracts them and anything that takes a customer back out of checkout can result in the loss of the sale. Instead, use triggered messaging in pop-ups and slideouts as consumers are shopping to make personalized product recommendations and offers. Remove navigation from inside the checkout funnel and focus on making it as seamless a process as possible.
Kick Up Your E-Commerce CRO Throughout the Holidays
This year, experts predict holiday shoppers will be on the hunt for deals throughout the entire 60-day period leading up to Christmas. Date-specific sales just didn’t pique consumers’ interest as much as they have in years prior.
Using the tactics above, you can put your online retail business in a better position to convert more site visitors to buyers throughout the holidays. Customizing your site’s content to offer each visitor a personalized experience is an excellent e-commerce marketing strategy this year. It’s not too late, either. Download our free 2015 Holiday Guide to make this your most profitable holiday season ever!