Welcome to Part 2 of Ladder’s go-to eCommerce growth tactics, as chosen by our strategists. In Part 1, we kicked off with 7 tactics as chosen by four of Ladder’s strategists.
Let’s keep going with 7 more!
Growing an eCommerce business can be tricky. That’s why we’re publishing this two-part series — because our strategists have figured out some go-to tactics that they rely on when growing our eCommerce clients.
Below you’ll find exactly which tactics we consider to be ROI-drivers. With each tactic you’ll get:
Let’s continue where we left off:
Last time, we finished off with the first of Darrick’s two tactics. This second tactic is all about testing out value propositions to help eCommerce businesses understand how to write copy and messaging for their audience.
There are multiple benefits to buying or using your products – have you tested which one is most engaging? The various major ad platforms are really powerful these days, making it trivial to A/B test various value propositions for each of your audiences and figure out what works (or doesn’t).
You can test this tactic on Facebook, Twitter, Bing, AdWords, etc… but we’d suggest Facebook because you can get tons of clicks at a low cost per.
Run your A/B test until you get at least 10 conversions per variation (though 30 is usually better) or the equivalent based on your current customer acquisition costs.
And if you don’t have the budget to keep running the ad for a long time and get up to 30 conversions, you can also use clicks as a proxy for performance. You can make an educated guess that the ads that get a better clickthrough rate have a more attractive value proposition and can be more easily optimized for conversion.
Ed is our in-house Instagram growth genius. He’s grown Ladder’s Instagram account from an afterthought to an engagement and lead-gen machine. He does the same for eCommerce businesses. Beyond that, Ed also likes using segmented retargeting ads where he boost conversion rates by targeting people differently based on their most recent action on a website.
Launch an Instagress campaign (<$10/mo) to drive people to engage with your Instagram page and follow your CTA.
Make sure to optimize your Instagram profile (name, description, link) with CTA and strong copy, directing viewers toward designated link, first.
Instagress lets you directly engage with your exact target audience on Instagram, get them to follow you, and get them to like and share your content. From there, your bio link can do the heavy lifting for conversions, but the overall benefit of a robust Instagram profile will be on your brand awareness.
A strong eCommerce brand on Instagram can leverage social engagement and activity to reach a broad audience interested in buying their products.
eCommerce websites collect a ton of data from visitors. From browsing around different products to hitting buttons like Add to Cart to entering emails, there are a lot of different actions that you can track and then segment your audience by.
This segmentation can be extremely powerful — you can deliberately target people by the amount of time since they’ve added something to their cart, for example.
What Ed does in these cases is test out different segments against one another to see which performs better. He also tests different creative and copy to increase performance for specific segments over others.
The aim of this tactic is to drill down different audience segments and find which ones you should be spending the biggest part of your budget on. But beyond that, it’s also about optimizing messaging for weaker segments so you can still effectively retarget people that have visited your site.
Luke’s go-to tactics for growing eCommerce clients focus on two ideas: showing your customers what they want to see, and showing them what others are saying about your products.
Give a visitor less choice, instead of too many options. Too much choice can limit conversions: The more options you give a potential customer, the harder their decision-making process becomes.
Barry Schwartz’s famous Ted Talk on the Paradox of Choice gives a great overview of how too much choice can lead to over-analysis and buyer’s remorse. There is an argument to be made that giving the customer a lot of choice can be freeing for them, but as with all solutions, the best approach is probably to rigorously test each hypothesis.
Show your customers what they want to see. They came to your site for a reason — whether that’s via an ad, organically, through reviews, etc… Whatever the case, they have an expectation of what they’ll see. Showing all your products at once? That doesn’t vibe well with their expectations.
Try adding customer ratings and reviews on your site. This is one of the most credible ways to build trust. The perfect place to put these reviews is just below the buy button.
Don’t make the mistake of faking reviews – users typically go to great lengths to validate the reviews are real and will quickly abandon the purchase if that trust is broken.
Instead, reach out to current customers and ask them to drop a review on your site.
Emailing a customer to ask for a review or feedback just after a purchase is an easy way to establish a connection and obtain information on how you can improve your business. Warby Parker’s post purchase review emails are successful because they make customers feel valued and provide a bonus for completing a review.
Use this approach to craft a post purchase review email that is a win-win for you and your customers.
You’d be surprised how many will actually go ahead and do it. Populate your products with five-star reviews and positive feedback and you’ll see trust and purchases increase.
As Ladder’s lead designer, Natalie’s worked with a ton of different eCommerce businesses, optimizing everything from their product pages to their checkout flow and beyond. She knows how to design a high-converting eCommerce store, and she shares her top tactics below:
A smart bar sits at the top of any page you want it to appear on and can be used for many purposes. From allowing your visitors to join your newsletter to providing them with special offers, you can pick exactly what you want to show on your site.
A smart bar is much less aggressive and more effective than email capture exit intent or scroll boxes, but can have an equally high impact on growing your email list and increasing sales with discounts and freebies.
If you’re running a site-wide sale, don’t just pop it into your homepage. Have a smart bar follow your visitors across their entire journey on your site until they make a purchase or give you their email address.
You can use SumoMe’s implementation of the smart bar as an easy-to-install way to set up your first bar.
A full redesign of a checkout page can be a brilliant way to increase sales. Reconsidering your user interface in the checkout process to make it easier and simpler for a visitor to become a customer can remove a ton of friction in your eCommerce store.
If funnel analysis shows that a majority of users are dropping at the checkout stage, a re-design of the UX/UI of the page might be in order. Take into account the important information and how the layout can be re-arranged to promote simplicity and easy conversion.
Some places where this can be tested are through CTAs promoting next steps, overhauling form boxes, and minimizing how much information is needed to successfully complete an order.
Whenever Natalie starts working with an eCommerce store, she looks at their entire checkout process to identify places where simplicity can be introduced. She then makes design recommendations and implementations geared towards making it dead simple for a visitor to finalize a purchase.
And that’s it for our go-to eCommerce growth series. As we grow in both staff and clients, we’ll keep updating this as we discover new reliable ways to grow eCommerce stores. Until then, try some of the above tactics and head back to Part 1 for more inspiration.
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