E-Commerce has come a long way, from a doubted craze to an amazing tide that lifts up all boats in the retailing world. More and more people are starting their own e-Commerce business every day, believing in building a successful venture they are proud of.
When we say it’s not difficult to open an online store (you have Shopify, WooCommere, Weebly and many other eCommerce builder tools in hand), but damn hard to make great sales from it, we mean it. However, you don’t need to hire a large marketing & sales to build a 7-figure online store.
You can achieve it with Beeketing – a Marketing Automation platform for eCommerce – that takes care of everything: from upselling & cross-selling in store, growing customer lists, to sending personalized emails to your customers (and many things in between).
How so? Read on. We will show you how Beeketing apps can help you boost conversion rates, engage with customers, and grow 7-figure sales.
1. Capture 85% paid visitors into subscribers with coupon popups
Online sellers spend most of their budget on ads to attract visitors to their site. You’re probably doing the same.
Sadly, 80% of paid visitors might abandon an eCommerce site right within the first 15 seconds on it, without making a purchase. Do a quick calculation now: how much money would you lose if there’s no solution to this?
One simple but provenly effective solution is using popups to capture visitors into leads by offering a discount coupon as a reward.
When a new visitor enters to your site, a nice coupon popup will appear to catch their attention. The offer is simple and enticing: take 1 second to subscribe email for future newsletters, or follow a social profile of the store to receive an exclusive discount coupon on their first order with you.
What to expect:
- Different from a normal popup that asks for customer’s email, giving away a rewarding coupon makes it a win-win offer that motivates your visitors to subscribe or become your social followers
- Don’t be as commonplace as other pop-ups on millions of websites out there! Be creative and inspiring instead, by impressing your first-time visitors with holiday-themed or branded-theme coupon pop-ups that put them in the right shopping mood or get an instant impression of your brand.
- Even if they don’t buy, you get their email or social following for email follow-up or retargeting on social media to get them back a time later in the future. That’s much much better than losing them forever.
Tool: Better Coupon Box
2. Sell in bundles, Upsell & Cross-sell to the max!
Amazon once revealed that 35% of their total revenue comes from upsell and cross-sell deals. Why so? Selling more to current customers is always easier than selling to new ones. When customers buy a product, chances are that they may need complementary items to complete the package.
A woman who buys a dress might be interested in accessories. She might need to buy a bag or a pair of shoes later, so why don’t you cross-sell those items to her right then?
What to expect:
- By upselling & cross-selling more items to current customers, you can upsize the order value per customer and see a big increase in total sales.
- Customers become your loyal fans when they know they can receive best value deals from you.
Tools: Boost Sales
3. Prevent cart abandonment with exit-intent offers
Of 3 shoppers who reach cart page, on average 2 will drop orders and leave the store. You have put in so many efforts to remove as many frictions as possible to bring customers to the end of the conversion funnel, but 67% of them just leave right before checkout.
This is where exit-intent technology can do the trick: detect customers who are about to leave the store at cart page (by following their mouse’s movement) and show a last-minute offer (which can be a discount code, free gift, or free shipping), like this:
What to expect:
- Exiting shoppers are elastic to price and promotions, especially on holidays. A last-minute deal that offers lower prices or free shipping will make them seriously re-consider, and actually convert into paying.
- If you’re growing your social media channels: ask customers to share their carts on Facebook or Twitter accounts to receive your special deals, which are just 1 more click away.
- Social Word-of-mouth is beyond our expectations. One share can generate lots of visits to your site by the power of social network sharing. Prepare for endless social referral traffic with this awesome idea!
Tools: Checkout Boost
4. Increase cart value by gamifying shopping experience on your store
Considering offering discount, freebies or free-shipping a great marketing strategy to engage customers and boost conversion rate, it, of course, lowers your profit margin per order. Thus, it is suggested to maximize ROI (return on investment) of your marketing investment, by increasing order value purchased by each customer.
Here’s how: limit your offer only to orders above a minimum value, then add a small but fun and rewarding game along customer’s purchase journey, like this:
What to expect:
- By motivating each customer to spend a little more (let’s say $10) to receive a reward from you, imagine how much you can sell more to 100 customers? It’s $1000 in profit.
- Gamifying your offers is adding more to the WOW in customer experience on your store.
Tools: Boost Sales and Checkout Boost
5. Send personalized follow-up emails triggered by customers’ behaviors
Of all channels that you can actively reach out to customers in large scale, email marketing, no matter how old it might be, still works great and is the most low-cost channel.
However, how to do email marketing right and effectively is the big question. The answer is, Email Automation is how you should do email marketing now, not simply creating a promotional email and sending mass to all customers. How so?
New visitors on the store are different from those who have bought a jacket last week, or those who used to buy a lot but haven’t come back to your store for 30 days. If you send them the same email campaign, let’s say its subject is “Interested in our new Jeans collection that matches with your jacket?”, do you think it works the same for all those 3 groups?
Now’s the time to really think about personalization in the way you communicate with your customers: follow up using appropriate messages based on their personal actions on your store.
This works perfectly well on holiday season if you know your customers well enough to curate proper email campaigns.
For example:
- For customers who purchased on your store a few times but haven’t come back for 1-2 months: send them a Reward Coupon email so they will come back on holidays and purchase again with an exclusive discount
- For those who abandoned their cart in the past: send them a cart recovery email to remind them of items they were interested in but didn’t buy, and offer a discount if purchased on holiday season
What to expect:
- Customers are more engaged with your brand when they feel your emails are personal and offer what they really need just in time.
- A very low-cost channel to take care of all customers in large scale
- Easy to measure the performance of each campaign by statistics on open, click and conversion rates, thus easy to optimize.
Tools: MailBot
6. Personalized Recommendation – Sell like Amazon
We’re all very familiar with personalized product recommendation widgets on Amazon website. Are they really effective and impactful in generating sales?
A recent research by on Personalized Recommendations from Barilliance gives us some hints on the impact of personalized recommendations:
- The worldwide average of eCommerce revenues generated from product recommendations is 12%.
- The conversion rate of visitors who clicked on product recommendations was found to be 5.5 times higher than that of non-clicking customers.
The fact that 70% of Amazon’s homepage is dedicated to product recommendation says it all: if the tactic works well for the biggest eCommerce retailer in the world, there are no excuses for you to ignore it.
What to expect:
- Showing personalized suggestions based on customer’s choices increases the chance that they will buy something from you.
- Average cart order value increases
Tools: Personalized Recommendation
7. The mobile tweaks that drive tremendous results.
With more people using mobile than desktop, mobile commerce opens a new area of online shopping. But is your mobile conversion rate lagging way behind the desktop conversion rate?
If so, a sticky add to cart bar and mobile-optimized product image gallery are your solution since navigating and zooming a computer monitor-sized site on mobile screen are the biggest obstacles that make it challenging to complete an order.
Making your Add to Cart button sticky helps your customers always have a clear, impossible-to-miss call to action for mobile. Meanwhile, displaying your product images in a full-screen view with a sticky Add-to-cart button is the best way for your customers to view and buy your products conveniently and immediately.
What to expect:
- Mobile visitors are becoming more comfortable in taking action with their mobiles if it’s convenient. Your mobile conversions will surely increase once the mobile shopping experience is improved.
- Having a mobile-responsive site design builds trust and encourages visitors to stick around.
Tools: Mobile Converter
8. Quick chat on Facebook – the next tier of Customer Support
78% of customers believe that social media will be the next tier of customer service and 46% expect brands to provide customer support on Facebook.
In today’s eCommerce when people shop in a rush and have so many options available, brands that provide instant responses in time to any queries from rushing shoppers definitely have a competitive advantage.
Live chat popup, emails, voice calls are behind social media in this era. Today, it’s Facebook messenger where you can deliver a wow experience to your customers.
What to expect:
- Facebook Messenger is the most instant, simple and cost-saving channel to answer quick questions from shopper and convert them into paying
- Customers love to connect with real people. Chatting with you on inbox messenger gives them a special feeling that they are talking with real staff from the store
- When you have history conversation with customers, you can easily catch up anytime to introduce new items or promote promotion campaigns. People tend to ignore a lot of emails, but they’ll check 99% of Facebook messages.
Tools: Quick Facebook Chat
9. Empower social proof to lift up sales with notifications of recent sales
According to Neil Patel, “social proof means that people will copy others’ actions, assuming it’s the right thing to do.” When you see others engaging with a product, you also see that product as attractive. That’s why notifications of recent sales – is one of the most powerful forms of social proof. By dynamically displaying the live notifications showing what products others have recently purchased, you give online shoppers that all-important nudge to buy them.
These notifications create excitement and anticipation that drive customers’ action – making purchases, which help you grow your brand and increase sales at the same time.
What to expect:
- Your customers are social creatures. The notifications will be generated whenever a customer completes an order. With the customer’s name, location and a link to the product, the notification is a strong evidence of credibility and a big driver for purchasing decisions.
- If your store is fairly new, then building credibility can be crucial in increasing sales. In this case, you can create “fake” notifications of any products you want to promote as hot sellers as if they are really selling out.
- Remember that it’s important to strike a balance. Displaying too many notifications can create consumer resentment while doing too little is not likely to be effective.
Tools: Sales Pop
10. Create Urgency to Fuel Your Online Sales
When it comes to online shopping, the fear of missing out can have a strong and positive effect on conversion rates. It gives your customers a reason to take immediate action – hit the Add To Cart button. There are specific tactics that biggest eCommerce brands use to raise the urgency level on a site. Here are what work the best:
- Countdown timer to create urgency for your sales. Drive customers’ actions and urge them to buy before time runs out.
- Stock countdown to display the limited availability of your products. Create scarcity, increase the perceived value of your products and make your customers buy faster.Social proof to let customers know how many people are viewing your product and how many items were sold, thus strengthen their buying confidence. Build trust and increase sales.
What to expect:
- These tactics persuade customers that the time to buy is now before it’s too late by creating a strong sense of urgency and scarcity for your online store. They make customers buy faster and create a significant increase in your sales.
- Creating urgency without being pushy or turning people off, this will move the shoppers forward in the sales cycle
Tools: Countdown Timer
12. Web Push Notification – Recover abandoned carts efficiently
With the instant and direct nature, retargeting the customers who did not complete their purchases through cart abandonment notifications works much more effectively compared to email. At times, a customer adds something to their cart and forgets to check out. Simply sending an email no longer works, as they don’t create the urgency, and their open rates aren’t high enough. Whereas Push Notifications grab attention quicker, and take your visitors directly to the cart page, enticing them to complete their purchase.
Recover your abandoned shopping carts with notifications and go an extra mile to urge them to complete purchases with future alert on offers and price drops.
What to expect:
- A limited time discount or a notification saying that the product may go out of stock has been seen to be very effective in handling such cart abandonment.
- There is a series of push notification to target Cart Abandonment users. The minimum time of 30 minutes should be given to the customer after they have abandoned their carts to come back. If they don’t come back within the stipulated time, other notifications will be sent out after that.
Tools: Recover Cart Pusher
Conclusion
If you’ve come to this part, congratulations on being well-prepared for the upcoming holiday season.
No sales come easily without investing efforts into the work, from preparation to execution. A marketing plan ahead will make or break your holiday sales.
We hope this blog post will give you a bunch of great ideas to maximize your sales in the last 3 months of the year. With ready tools to execute these ideas on your own store, you have no excuses to lay back and wait for the miracle. Create your own dream year now!
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