This isn’t your first Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) rodeo. By now you’re well aware of the chaos that accompanies what is probably your most profitable period of the year. But maybe you weren’t completely satisfied with your store’s performance during the last BFCM? Perhaps you’ve been wondering whether it’s necessary to redesign your store to increase your sales in general and during BFCM.
We advise against tackling a project as big and complicated as a redesign so close to BFCM. However, there are several ‘smaller’ improvements we can make to your site within a relatively short period of time to turn it into a big, mean, earning machine for BFCM. These tactics will lure new customers to your store for the big event, will make the most of existing customers, and will encourage shoppers to capitalize fully from your fantastic deals. The bonus is that these changes are an investment in your store that will benefit sales beyond BFCM.
Page speed performance has a direct impact on engagement and conversion rates. A Deloitte study, aptly named ‘Milliseconds make millions’, found that a mere 0.1 second improvement in site speed saw retail consumers spending almost 10% more. Increased page speed also improves lead generation, number of page views, conversion rates, and average order value. Speed improvements on mobile sites have a direct correlation to improved funnel progression.
ShopCreatify will audit your site to determine how fast your store loads. Based on the outcome, there are several changes we can make to improve site speed. This includes image optimization, reducing clutter and the size and complexity of pages, optimizing scripts, and removing or updating unnecessary code and apps.
Conversion rate optimization is important because it takes existing visitors to your store and turns them into paying customers. This helps you make the most of site traffic instead of spending money and time on acquiring new customers.
Before working on how your site functions, it’s important that we consider your business goals. There’s no point in focusing on your conversion rate if you don’t know what you’re aiming towards. How many sales do you aim to make and what conversion rate are you hoping for? Make sure that your business goals translate to goals for your online store and that you have metrics with which to measure success.
There are several reasons for a low conversion rate. This could be due to bad site design, lack of customer trust in your store, low quality photos, limited product details, and hidden call-to-actions. Stores with a high abandoned cart rate and poor mobile optimization will likely also experience a low conversion rate.
Our intention when helping clients with conversion rate optimization is to streamline the content and visual hierarchy, and improve the design and usability of critical storefront sections to remove as many barriers to conversion as possible. Other tactics that we may implement could include promoting upsells and cross sells, social proof, trust stamps, engineered scarcity, price anchoring, and optimizing checkout.
Another quick enhancement ShopCreatify can assist with is improving the usability of your store. User experience considers your customer’s journey on the site and how to make it as easy and intuitive as possible.
This means doing a high-level usability audit of your store. Then we’ll look at your sales funnel and the route you want your customers to take when they arrive on your landing page to the moment they buy a product. We want to keep the unnecessary steps a customer must take to a minimum.
Once we have looked at your funnel we will remove any points of frustration or confusion on the customer’s journey so that they can find what they are looking for with ease and enjoy engaging with your brand.
Photo by Oleg Magni
Mobile devices accounted for 71% of retail site visits and 56% of online shopping orders in the US during the third quarter of 2020, Statista reports. Nearly 86% of abandoned carts occur on mobile devices, which is more than 12% higher than the rate for desktop sites.
It is obvious then that mobile optimization is crucial when considering the usability of your store as well as conversion rate optimization in general. Many older sites are not well optimized for mobile devices and it’s important to remember that what works well on a desktop site, may not translate well on mobile.
Some of the things we look at when auditing your mobile store is its load speed, how efficient it is to do a transaction on it and whether the menus are easy to use. We will also make sure the calls-to-action are obvious to spot and that it is straightforward to add additional items to the shopping cart.
Three-quarters of shopping carts are abandoned, which is easy money left on the table. In fact, the Baymard Institute worked out that optimizing checkout in large ecommerce stores can result in a 35.2% increase in conversion rate. That translates to a whopping $260 billion worth of sales that is recoverable in the US and EU.
There are several reasons your store might experience a high percentage of abandoned carts and we will do an audit to figure out where the problem lies. In some cases, shoppers are put off by unexpected shipping costs. Other common reasons for abandoned carts are that users are deterred by having to create a new user account to complete a purchase or they have concerns about payment security and a site’s trustworthiness. Almost 10% of shoppers drop off because of a long and confusing checkout process.
One of our areas of expertise is how to retain users on your Shopify store. If you don’t already have an abandoned cart recovery strategy, we will work on implementing one. This could include automated emails and exit intent popups – which get triggered when a visitor tries to leave without buying the items in their cart. These popups give users a reason to stick around by offering a discount or introducing new products or content.
Marketing is essential before and during BFCM and the subsequent gifting season. Competition is strong during this period and you want your customers, or potential customers, to know what discounts you are offering and why they should support you rather than other businesses.
ShopCreatify can support you in developing BFCM promotional campaign content for your website, social media and email marketing. This could include designing banners, as well as focusing on organic, paid and other content.
View the Grip6 Case study.
Landing pages are another must-have to boost BFCM sales and take advantage of increased site traffic. We make sure that these are highly focused and conversion rate optimized to highlight your BFCM sale products and collections.
BFCM landing pages feature a strong call-to-action and help to filter out other ‘noise’ on your site so that shoppers aren’t confronted by too many choices, but are rather funnelled straight to the sale items you want them to be focussing on.
As with any big event or campaign, it’s important to have a strategy for BFCM that details your plan and your goals. As mentioned previously, you will want to make sure that your goals align with those in your business plan. Having a strategy can take a lot of stress out of this stressful period, giving you a roadmap from which to work as you prepare for and execute your BFCM tactics.
ShopCreatify has helped several merchants to define their sales goals, projections, key performance indicators and metrics with which to measure the success and return on investment of their BFCM campaign.
This is a taste of the enhancements we can make to your store with the limited time available before BFCM to improve your site’s performance and conversion rates. Get in touch with us so that we can determine where you need help and then implement these tactics in time for you to see a massive improvement before BFCM. While these improvements will help you cash in on the flood of BFCM shoppers, they will also help increase day-to-day business on your store.
