When it comes to marketing your ecommerce store, you need to make the most of every advantage you can. Margins can be thin, and the cost of acquiring a client can be at the mercy of advertising platforms, like Facebook and Google, or an unforeseen event can interrupt your supply chain and leave you without stock.
So how can you stay ahead of the pack?
Use these two often-overlooked ecommerce marketing strategies to see a jump in your revenue without spending any more money on advertising.
1. If Someone Has Added Your Product to Their Cart, They Want It – Don’t Let Them Leave
Although there are plenty of tips for boosting service businesses with paid advertising, acquiring customers through paid ads is getting more and more expensive. So, it’s important to make the most of the traffic that is sent to your website. In ecommerce, cart abandonment is one of the biggest losses of potential revenue and ignoring it is one of the common ecommerce mistakes to avoid.
People add items to their cart and then leave your website, never to be seen again – talk about frustrating. In many ecommerce businesses, especially startups, you need to convert them. Otherwise, you have to turn your ads off. And, for some businesses, without your ads, you’re not a business.
While you’re never going to get everyone, you should be striving for the highest percentage you can. It’s crazy how improving your conversion rate a tiny amount can make a huge performance difference over the course of a year. Improving your abandoned cart rate is a great place to start and often makes a big impact.
Start by Considering Why People Abandon Their Cart on Your Site
To start tackling your cart abandonment problem, first consider why someone would add your product to their cart and then decide to leave your website without purchasing?
Did they realize they didn’t have enough money?
Were they on mobile, received a phone call, and forgot about it?
Sure, both of these are valid reasons, but they aren’t things you can control. So, what are the reasons someone would abandon their cart that you can influence?
You can work on trust. If someone doesn’t trust you and your brand, there’s a good chance that they will leave and never return.
Use Exit Intent Popups to Reduce Your Cart Abandonment Rate
But how can you influence this? Exit Intent Popups.
Exit intent popups appear when someone goes to close the page, which is usually based on mouse movement. Sometimes, they offer a small discount or ask you to sign up for their email list. But, there are a lot of different ways you can make exit intent popups work for your business.
For example. You can use them as a way to build trust with your customers. As they go to leave the cart, you can serve them a popup that shows them all the reasons they should choose your company.
You can use a tool like Socital or something similar to make it quick and easy. The popup can be simple and add some reasons to trust your brand, such as:
- Offering free returns on all orders
- Highlighting free shipping or free shipping over a certain point
- Including glowing customer reviews or other social proof
You can also get strategic with the reviews you feature. Because testimonials and reviews are trust signals, they can help improve your conversions. But, what could really make a difference for people considering abandoning their cart might be reviews that include common objections your potential customers might have.
In some cases, adding exit intent popups can make a difference in less than 24 hours. By making changes and testing different reviews, you can easily see what is working and what has the most impact on your cart abandonment rate.
One thing to consider when testing different exit popups is to change one variable at a time. Otherwise, you don’t know what is causing what. When you test multiple changes at once, you could even see no difference because one positive change has been negated by another one that is negative. This could make you overlook something that would actually be a big benefit!
2. Don’t Overlook Your Most Opened Email
The landscape of email marketing is changing. With email providers flagging more and more emails as promotional, more people are not seeing them, which can cause an overall reduction in open rates across industries.
A lot of ecommerce websites feel like they’re being left high and dry with the marketing channel. But, it doesn’t have to be this way. While these challenges are real and you are unlikely to see similar numbers as before these challenges, you can still generate leads with email marketing and gain revenue from it.
Put Transactional Emails to Work for Your Business
To really make email work for your business, you have to consider which emails are being opened the most. If you were asked the question, “what is your most opened email?” What would you say?
The welcome newsletter, once the person has signed up to your email list?
The black Friday discount letter?
These may be the first emails that come to mind, but they are almost always the wrong answer when you go in and look at the statistics. The most opened email that many ecommerce businesses overlook is the transactional email – the receipt of purchase.
These may just be receipts for now, but it doesn’t have to stay that way and you can put these transactional emails to work for your business. If someone has just trusted you enough to purchase from you, it’s a great time to make them another offer that they can’t refuse.
This is why putting these emails to work is one of the often-overlooked ecommerce marketing strategies that yield great ROI. If people are already opening these emails, making sure your business is making the most of them is worth the effort. Plus, if you consider that you have already paid the marketing cost to acquire this customer and there is no extra cost to include a promotion in this email, it’s a no brainer!
Using these two often-overlooked ecommerce marketing strategies, you can help to reduce your cart abandonment rate, generate more leads with email marketing, and increase revenue from your email marketing efforts.