The goal of any eCommerce manager is to raise their conversion rates. In an ideal world, you’d convert on 100% of the people who visit your site… but alas, the average conversion rate for eCommerce sites across all industries is closer to 1-2%. During the holiday season, the needle may rise as high as 2-5%, but double digits are usually an unattainable dream.
Moving conversion rates higher means shoring up holes in your conversion pipeline and taking the time to investigate and improve different areas of your site that may be causing shoppers and customers to drop out. At no time during the year is it more important to explore this concept than the final quarter of the year, when seasonal shoppers come out in droves.
Finding missing revenue through lost conversions is like finding money in your pocket—it was always there, but you didn’t know you had it until you found it! Your eCommerce site is a lot more complicated than the pocket of your favorite pair of jeans, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities for discovering missing revenue. Let’s take a look at a few nooks and crannies where extra conversions have been known to exist:
Abandoned carts
Abandoned carts are far and away the biggest opportunity for recapturing lost customers and earning uncounted revenue. The challenge here is identifying these customers and marketing to them in such a way that it creates a conversion.
Triggering dynamic abandoned cart emails after a period of time is the best bet, with links and pictures of those items. Sometimes, offering a small incentive is the best way to make something out of nothing. No matter what you do, however, make sure your email is completely optimized for conversion. For example, create an email with responsive design. Roughly half of abandoned cart emails are opened on a different device than the initial one used for shopping.
Product recommendations
Product recommendations are a big draw for holiday shoppers—chiefly because they’re buying for others, which leaves room for upsells, shifts in focus and exposure to new products. Using machine learning to improve your product recommendations based on specific shoppers is a smart way to increase conversions through a sheer data-driven approach.
Use product recommendations to generate add-on sales for holiday shoppers, which will drive up the total cart value per checkout. Or, if you’re aiming solely on increasing conversions overall, deploy smart product recommendations in tandem with strategic merchandising, to create sales opportunities that are too good for a shopper to pass up.
Social buyers
2017 is already proving to be a case study in social media as a sales platform, and as we head into the holiday season there’s a lot to love about its prospects for increased conversion rates. In a BigCommerce study, an astounding 30% of online shoppers said they would be likely to make a purchase through social media. In addition, roughly 20% of customers purchasing through eCommerce would be open to following that brand on social media.
In a cyclical sense, this opens the door to a new purchaser ecosystem, just in time for holiday shoppers. If you’re looking to clean up your conversion rate, you might consider bringing your marketplace into the social realm.
Capitalize on holiday conversions
Knowing where to look to find missed conversions and unclaimed revenue is something every eCommerce business needs to consider. During a season when online sales become astronomical, adding conversions through these channels can help you capitalize on people who are willing to spend.
Black Friday, Cyber Monday on Steroids by Datacrushers
Now that you’re ready for the holidays, make sure you’re ready to capture every sale you can and stop any abandonment before it happens. Datacrushers is a revenue discovery platform and global leader in site-wide revenue recovery and acceleration.
Disrupting the status-quo, Datacrushers is fundamentally changing the way online merchants use real shopper analytics to boost revenues and improve client lifetime value. Using machine learning and artificial intelligence, Datacrushers is a technology and platform agnostic tool designed for rapid go to market deployment across any language and currency. Datacrushers enables revenue growth by the use machine learning and artificial intelligence to mine real user, site and product data into actionable analytics to drive highly targeted and personalized multichannel campaigns both on and off-site.
