Autochat TeamHello online store owner!
We know that you are always concerned and aiming for higher sales from your online store.
To accomplish this, you set aside a decent budget to drive traffic to your store.
And once people are on your website, you hope to convert most of them into sales.
Here’s a question.
How many of your total traffic end up taking some action on your site?
This is what’s called Conversion Rate.
If there is a strategy and science behind driving people to your online store, a similar methodology is applicable to converting your visitors into sales as well.
In the ecommerce industry, the average conversion rate is between 1% and 3%.
How do you calculate your Conversion Rate?
It’s really simple.
Your site’s conversion rate = (Total store transactions/Total visits to your website) * 100
Here’s an actual example:
(10 transactions / 500 visits) * 100 = 2% Conversion rate
Our aim with this blog guide
- to help you break down the aspects of conversion for easy management and implementation
- and give you a list of effective apps and tactics to convert your visitors into action-takers a.k.a. more sales
How does this guide help you?
We created this guide with you in mind. We want you to take these 10 features and implement the same on your online store and reap rewards.
This guide will help you understand what affects and triggers high ecommerce conversion. We also present relevant strategies and tools to help you implement quickly and easily.
So, let’s get started!
When we began thinking of putting these top 10 features to help you boost conversion, we looked at the information already available online thoroughly.
And then we decided to bring context before we present each feature.
The context we are talking about is how you view conversion and how many factors actually contribute and influence your site’s conversion rate.
You see there are 5 factors that determine your site’s conversion rate.
- Your website: how easy and engaging is your site to the user.
- Buyer psychology: how to influence buyer behavior.
- Visual elements: the need for visual content to grab audience attention.
- Guide and support: how you chaperone and assist your audience.
- Your audience: how you build and treat your audience.
So, we took the 10 best features and classified under these five factors.
Website features
Feature 1 – A well laid-out website
Your online store should be as good and well laid out as a physical store. Start with simplifying your navigation. Ensure that the navigation bar is well-defined and clearly visible.
1 – Navigation menu – Autochat – Minyona
The next step is to make categories and subcategories visible as well.
2 – categories – Autochat – Keap
Another idea is to put your SALES products under a different navigation section altogether. This makes the section easily accessible to your site visitors.
3 – Sale menu – Autochat – Mr Button
The same approach can be taken to create a different category for NEW ARRIVALS.
4 – New arrivals – Autochat – themodernshop
The basic tenets of an effective ecommerce website is to offer a rich shopping experience with fewer distractions, asking your visitors to make fewer clicks and offer information at the right juncture so as not to leave visitors in a dilemma for too long.
5 – Clean site – Autochat – thecandifactory
Feature 2 – Make your ecommerce website responsive
Making your site responsive offers a consistent browsing and shopping experience to your audience, across multiple devices.
Your website should work well on a PC, a smartphone, and a tablet seamlessly. This not only helps you drive better user experience, but also helps browsers like Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge load your site faster across devices.
Here’s food for thought.
Did you know that the layout, navigation, and faster site loading affects your Google search ranking?
Well, if you didn’t, now you do.
And according to Kissmetrics, page loading time is a bigger concern to your customers than anything else – including the way your site looks.
Almost 47% of online shoppers expect your web page to have loaded before 2 seconds are up, while over 50% say that quick-loading-page is key to customer loyalty. This can affect your bounce rate, conversion rate, and – most importantly – your sales.
Feature 3 – Create a smooth cart-to-checkout experience
While a well-defined navigation bar and categories help visitors discover your products quickly, you gotta bring this efficiency to the cart checkout phase as well.
Cart abandonment – Autochat – Baymard Institute
Start by eliminating actions that hinder or slow down your visitors from adding to the cart and checking out of it quickly.
Offer multiple payment options and showcase your security badges to drive trust and security.
6 – Payment options – Autochat – Comalytics
Remember, the moment a Visitor adds products to the cart, time is of the essence. The more time the Visitor takes to checkout, the more the chances of you losing that particular sale.
7 – Sad shopper – Autochat – VideoHive
Here’s one thing you can do which many ecommerce store owners fail to implement.
Show a progress bar that tells your visitor how they move from cart to checkout.
8 – Progressive checkout bar – Autochat
Making this process visible helps shoppers define their time commitment.
You wouldn’t want the checkout process to be like the wild west. Do you?
Here are some apps to help you implement, manage, and experiment with a quick checkout process.
- Skip To Checkout app enables fast checkout.
- Automatic Cart update app refreshes the cart when users add new products to the cart.
Visual features
Feature 4 – Highlight products through videos
While words can do a decent job of explaining the product features and benefits, there’s a certain attraction towards visuals – especially videos – when it comes to shopping online.
Videos can convey a lot more than words. From highlighting each feature and benefit, videos help you deliver product and brand information in a much better manner.
9 – Product video – Autochat – Tigren
If you think about it, watching a video has an added benefit. By watching a video, visitors spend more time on your site. The more time they spend, the more chances of them taking action and buying something.
Video content can delight your customers, proving to be a gold mine in the world of ecommerce. These videos not only give your visitors a better sense and a 360-degree view of the product but also decrease the possibility of returns and exchange after your customer has bought the product.
What do the statistics say?
Images and videos go hand in hand to help a customer make a confident buying decision. An emarketer survey says that US online shoppers expect to see six product images and three videos on average when buying a particular product.
But, what kind of videos should you create and publish on your ecommerce website?
From product demonstration videos to installation and even testimonial video clips, options are aplenty. We believe that you should ideally create videos to influence your visitor’s entire purchasing journey.
10 – Shopper journey – Autochat
Here are some apps that help you manage video uploads to your ecommerce site.
- Videofy app helps you produce product videos on the go.
- Typito app allows you to make product and social media ad videos.
Guide and support features
Feature 5 – Implement conversational purchase experience
Marketing personalization was a fancy term a few years ago, and it hasn’t been as relevant as it is today.
But what is marketing personalization?
In the previous section we highlighted the value of videos along a buyer’s journey.
Similarly, conversational marketing tactics empower you – the seller – to interact with your site visitors in real-time. This conversation is driven by context.
This is what we mean.
When you enable a Chatbot or a LIVE chat support on each page of your site, and visitors engage with this feature, you already know which page they are on.
You can respond to queries immediately, make the right recommendations, and increase your chances of sales.
Isn’t buying a product about a great purchasing experience?
Hubspot research revealed that 77% of customers would recommend a brand to a friend after having a single positive experience, and your conversion rate can increase by 8% when you include personalized consumer experiences.
The Chat button by Autochat lets your visitors initiate a WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger conversation with you directly from the online store.
11 – Autochat chat button
This allows you to stay connected with your customers on these popular messaging platforms all the time. It gives you the flexibility to follow up on the conversation threads of your existing customers and easily assist the potential ones with no time constraints.
Feature 6 – Empower your customer support
We would like to emphasize the term ‘context’ again.
Regardless of the size of your ecommerce enterprise, we know that you still put a lot of work into customer support.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to get context into real-time queries such as LIVE chat?
This would help you understand the source of the query and help you solve it sooner and better.
The other aspect to empowering your customer support work is to automate a few repetitive tasks.
Chatbots allow you to implement an automated query answering window on your website, round the clock.
The versatility of your chatbot is only limited by how you train it with data. The more data it has, the more efficient it becomes.
Then there’s the power of live shopper insights. What if you could see each and every visitor’s trail on your website right now?
Could you do it? Is it possible to see all this on a dashboard?
Yes and yes.
Autochat app is a well-rounded conversational ecommerce plugin that allows you to access a real-time timeline of all customer activity on the store available interleaved with the conversation.
Not only that. Autochat app gives you customer information right next to customer conversations – such as order history, cart contents, etc.
A feature called ‘Shared Team Inbox’ is ideal for customer support teams with more than one staff.
This is a state-of-the-art shared team inbox with features like:
Private notes (for team members to collaborate among themselves in context of a conversation) Initiate canned responses (to respond efficiently to customer conversations) and Assignment of conversations to other team members (let the best suited person respond).
In addition, you can also hook up various other messaging channels like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Twitter and Gmail to the Inbox. This helps your team communicate with all the customers from a single place.
Psychology features
Feature 7 – Highlight social proof in reviews
As a seller you want to boost your social rating.
But what is a social rating?
According to the most recent surveys, 92% of consumers read at least one review before buying something online. More striking, 47% of people will only buy products rated above 4 stars.
There are more numbers to prove the impact of social proof leading to higher sales figures.
- 95% of 18-35-year-olds read reviews before trusting a local business (2018 consumer review, BrightLocal)
- 63% of all customers check Google reviews before visiting a business (2018 internet survey, ReviewTrackers)
- Purchase likelihood with five reviews is 270% higher than with no reviews (2017 customer survey, Spiegel)
Like how a crowded, busy store attracts people in a mall, this holds true to ecommerce websites as well.
But how do you showcase your traffic, sales, visits, etc. to website visitors? And what information should you showcase?
Well, let’s start with the latter.
From highlighting a product as a ‘BEST SELLER’ or ‘FAST SELLING’ conveys social demand to your website visitors.
Pop ups such as ‘People also bought’ is a powerful influential information to boost your upselling efforts.
‘Number of people who bought’ or ‘recently bought by’ information can also translate product demand to your site visitors effectively.
Customer testimonials and product reviews are the absolute must and for obvious reasons. More reviews lead to higher product page interaction and eventually sales.
There are tons of superb, proven apps for popular platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, etc. that can help you highlight social proof on your ecommerce website. Here are a few:
- Fera social proof app allows you to highlight testimonials, reviews, recent viewers, and recent purchases.
- Nextsale app allows you to create recent sales pop ups, and cart timer pop ups.
Feature 8 – Create and automate cart abandonment solutions
Oh we all hate a cart full of products getting abandoned.
Though it’s a common occurrence, it is however not difficult to assess why shoppers abandon their carts.
Image: Cart abandonment TycheSoftwares
From high shipping costs, using carts as wishlist, to complicated checkout processes, visitors chose to jump ship when things don’t go their way.
Little tweaks to your business strategies can eliminate a few issues – such as complex cost calculation, lack of free shipping, lack of guest checkout, etc.
What about the others?
There are apps that help you achieve the following:
- Payment options and security: offer secure checkouts and payment options. Here are the best apps to consider.
- Returns policy: manage your returns with these apps – AfterShip Returns and Clicksit Return Center app.
- Exit popup apps: convert visitors who save products in the cart by offering them a relevant deal through these apps – OptiMonk app and Smart Popup.
Audience
Feature 9 – Retarget your valuable customers
Retargeting probably isn’t what you think. It has nothing to do with finding a new target audience and everything to do with customizing your ad campaigns based on your current audience’s behavior.
Have you ever noticed that you’ll see ads on Facebook for sites you recently visited? This is one form of retargeting – and it is highly effective.
12 – Facebook ad – Autochat
How and where do you get your hands on your audience behavior from your site?
How often do you retarget your old customers?
How many of your old customers make repeat purchases from you?
How many of those are of high order value?
Autochat app can bring a sense of context to all these questions by giving you access to your customer history.
This customer history comes with snippets of information on each of your customer’s activity on the site, from the last time they visited.
There are other apps which help you manage retargeting as well. Here are a few:
Feature 10 – Build and retain your audience
Let us ask you a question.
What is better?
- Targeting new customers?
- Or targeting your followers?
Are you conflicted to answer?
Ok, let us simplify it.
The point is, it takes a lot of time and effort to build your audience.
So, most ecommerce business owners skip this part.
But, if this is done right, it can help you reap rewards in the long run.
Because, what’s better than a ready-made audience to market your products to right?
13 – Email – Autochat – Campaign Monitor
From building a list of email subscribers to generating huge fan following on your social media pages, there are many apps that help you accomplish these strategies. Here are a few:
- Here are some apps to help you build email subscribers – Privy and CM Commerce.
- Push notifications are a great way to retarget your website visitors. Here are a few apps to explore – PushOwl and Smart Push Marketing.
- Creating, publishing, and automating social media conversations is a tough task. Here are a few apps to help you accomplish these tasks – Facebook and Instagram auto-post and Facebook and Twitter auto-post.
Final thoughts
Improving the shopping experience on your ecommerce website is an iterative process. So is managing and succeeding in this business, right?
This is why we founded Autochat. Our passion at Autochat.io is to empower entrepreneurs in the ecommerce domain. Like you.
This has led us to create a repository of actionable content to help you make informed decisions and remove friction in:
- achieving tremendous scale in your business
- and scale your customer service speed, accuracy, and quality
Do bookmark our blog and subscribe to our newsletter for well researched, informative, and actionable content each week.
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