50 tips to increase your online sales by Roger Willcocks

1. roger@screenpages.com
50 ways to increase your online sales

2.  300+ e-commerce websites since 1997
 Substantial e-commerce website experience (ca. 100 yrs)
 Magento specialists since 2009 (ca. 100 implementations)
 Award winners & award-winning clients
 New builds, migrations & upgrades
Screen Pages key facts

3.  Best practice e-commerce
 Brand enhancing
 Bespoke/customised
 Heavily content-managed
 Focus on sales & conversion improvements
 Functionally rich/complex
 Professionally designed & specified
 Fast, reliable & scaleable
Our philosophy

4. Agenda
Getting new customers
Engaging customers
Persuading them to buy
Making it simple to purchase
Getting them to come back

5. No silver bullets…

6. First…measure
 Analytics
 Surveys
 Usability studies

7. Google Analytics
Build a custom dashboard

8. Whatusersdo & attentionwizard
50 ££s of dynamite

9.  Order confirmation page
 Three questions
 One text box
 Surveymonkey £26 p.m.
Surveys

10. Getting new customers
 SEO
 PPC
 Direct
 Referrals
 Affiliates
 Refer a friend
 Catalogues/lists
 Offline (eg PR)

11. Getting new customers
Source Traffic Conversion £ per visit
Brand related searches 14.5% 6.3% £4.45
Generic search 14.1% 1.5% £0.55
Paid search 19.9% 3.4% £2.74
Email marketing 20.6% 4.9% £2.73
Referrals 10.5% 2.4% -
Average 3.9% £2.64

12. Funny thing, conversion rate

13. SEO in Magento
 Page titles
 Meta data
 Keywords in copy (& other places)
 Sitemap
 Magento lets you “content-manage” the onsite assets
 It’s all about (interesting) content

14. Other ways to get in Google
1.
2.
3.

15. Content marketing for SEO
 Category page copy (hardest pages)
 On domain blog (Wordpress, please)
 Content pages optimised for target keywords
 How to…
 Buying guides
 FAQs
 Ideas/inspiration etc
 Linked to around the site with “anchor text”

16. Articles, style guides [& video]

17. Buying guides

18. Social Media
 Facebook Like & Tweet (or Share This)
 Distribute your content
 Make videos, host on Youtube & embed
 Get a channel
 But:
 Ca. 1% of traffic & 0.1% conversion
 Exception: “causes”

19. How to measure SEO
 Organic search
 Filter: exclude <your brand name>
 Generic traffic is ca. 25%
Note: apportion “not provided” pro-rata

20. • Case study
• Holy Grail at the end of the ‘long tail’?
• 3,729 search terms = 55% of sales
 5x increase in generic traffic in 6 months
 Increase from 5% to 10% of total traffic
• Looking good!
SEO – holy grail?

21. SEO – the truth
 6% of total sales (vs. 10% of traffic) = lower conversions & ROI
 No. 5 “swiss watches” = 400 visits per month & no sales
 First page for “watches” (negative ROI)

22.  PR
 Catalogues
Offline marketing

23. 27%
21%Opportunity?

24. 2.9%
0.9%
4.5%

25. Mobile usage

26. Speed matters
Each second costs you 7% decrease in conversions

27.  85,000+ visitors on both 13th & 14th November
 20,000 orders processed
 Appeal raised £32m
 Two front-end, load balanced servers
 Hosting by Peer1
 One database server
 Magento Enterprise
 Synchronised with eBay store
 Integrated with warehouse
Scale, load & peaks

28. Engaging customers
 New/latest/sale
 Promotions (regular & varied)
 Content (lots of it) & photography (lifestyle)
 Make your landing pages compelling (category & product pages)
 Navigation
 Categorisation is critical
 Dropdowns (esp. multi-layered)
 Filters (price, colour etc – but caveat)
 Put your products in the “right” order

29. Customer engagement fail

30. Navigation

31. % landings bounce%
Home page 39% 17%
Category page 22% 31%
Product page 19% 56%
i.e. not on the home page. Opportunity.
Where do visitors land?
37%
37%

32. Special case: category pages
 25-50% of all entrances
 40-50% of all page views
 Three roles:
 Landing pages
 Routing pages
 Conversion pages (with add to basket)
 Yet, sadly overlooked…
Remember:
68% of people don’t arrive on the home page.
Nearly 4 in 10 of these bounce

33. Category page

34. Product pages
 Copy
 Photography/video
 Call(s) to action / how to transact / service
 Reviews/testimonials
 Instructions
 Delivery & returns
 What if it’s not quite the right product?
 What goes with this?

38. Write great copy
Buy this

39. Anatomy of a product page
Link: http://www.smartinsights.com/conversion-optimisation/product-page-optimisation/retail-product-page/

40. Persuading them to buy
What makes a good proposition?

41. But first: meet your competitors

42.  Desirable products
 Well presented
 Attractively priced
 Securely paid for
 Nicely delivered
 Communicated on every page
What makes a good proposition?

44. Persuading visitors to buy
Service & “hygiene factors”
Delivery
Returns
Packaging
Call-centre

46. Customer service
Source:: E-consultancy

47. Work on delivery options
 Standard delivery (free?)
 Next day premium
 Nominated delivery
 ….and communicate them

48. Reviews & ratings (social endorsement)
Onsite or offsite

49. Make it simple to purchase
 Basket
 Security
 Big buttons (especially for mobile)

50. Show your beautiful packaging

51. Make it simple to purchase
 Integrated payments (+ alternate methods)
 No distractions (different header?)
 Language & tone
 Registration or not?
 Example: “pay securely now” vs. “submit”

52. Quiz time: which checkout performs best?

56. Basket and checkout funnel

57. Abandonned basket chaser
 13.3% of such emails are clicked
 35% of these clicks lead to a purchase
 AOV is 19% higher

58. Getting them back
 Conversion data
 Surveys/Analytics
 Trigger emails
 Email marketing (once a week now, twice for VIPs)
 Loyalty schemes
 Catalogues
Recent survey
26% had 20%+ of traffic from emails.
20% had email traffic converting at 8%+

59.  Build your email database
 Those that do it well, benefit extremely well
 It can performs at 4-7 times regular traffic
 Emails are increasingly opened on mobiles
Guidance:
1. Design your transactional emails
2. Manage & update their content
3. Tag them for Google Analytics
Read this article:
http://www.screenpages.com/email-marketing-20-ways-to-expand-your-email-database
Email marketing (best converting traffic)

60. Loyalty schemes

61. Plan your attack

62. But first….
1. Agree & quantify business goal
2. Breakdown into key activities
3. Identify metrics for each activity set
4. Define activities to achieve the metrics
5. Measure results
“A goal without a plan is just a wish”

63. Planning taps you can turn
New
customers
Existing
customers
Visits/traffic sources % increase % increase
Orders/conversions % increase % increase
Average order values % increase % increase

65. Ling’s Cars £35m
“…On a website, you are competing with
You Tube, porn sites and Facebook. You are
not trying to out-bore your local council
website. So, open the energy taps, eat
sugar and get on with something exciting.
Split testing/focus groups etc, is just a fast
road to the lowest common denominator,
just as you see in politics; boring.”

66. Things change

67. 22. Keep it simple
“The best website is one that the
customer doesn’t notice”
Source: 5th E-commerce Forum, 2013

68. Bonus tip: pick the right platform & agency

69. roger@screenpages.com
@screenpages
01932 333 592
Questions?

70.  Thank you.
6th E-commerce Forum: end