About 96% of visitors that come to your website are not ready to buy, and without the right tools, more than half of those visitors can leave without completing an order.
That leaves you with only a handful of customers ready to buy, and as of 2021, there are between 24 million to 28 million eCommerce sites in the world, to say that competition for that handful of customers is getting fierce, is an understatement.
As an eCommerce store owner, how do you plan to take on the challenge of maintaining and growing sales in 2021 when everything else has been said and done?
You’ll need to step up your tech game if you want your eCommerce store to outdo brands in your niche.
So let’s begin, here are four tech capabilities that your eCommerce site will need to increase sales for 2021.
1. Hyper Personalized Emails
Let’s start with the basics, emails.
Sending your typical welcome and product email campaign has proven to help eCommerce stores retain more customers; however, have you considered investing in hyper-personalized emails?
If your email list has over 1,000 email subscribers, then it’s time for you to leveling up your emails with hyper-personalization.
Hyper-personalization is taking a customer’s data to tailor content to their preference, appealing to their buyer’s psychology which in turn improves sales.
We live in a world where customers are all about personalization. They want to feel special, embraced by their individuality, and they want to shop with a brand that understands and acts on it.
A survey from Dynamic Yield found that 62% of consumers feel “happy” and “excited” to respond to a personalized message from a retailer.
This proves that there is a demand for personalized emails, so it should come as no surprise that personalized emails generate tend to 58% more revenue than other emails.
Care/of, a health subscription service for daily vitamin packs made with quality ingredients, understands their customer’s demand for personalization from their product, email and website.
Source: Care/of
After asking a series of questions about the customers’ lifestyles and goals. Care/of uses that data to emails personalized recommendations for daily vitamins and water-soluble supplements to buy. And with each customer interaction, the brand gains more insights into how to improve its product and targeted marketing techniques.
Care/of website visitors can also provides recommended based on the same test so they can have their items readily added to cart or they can browse around and shop freely.
It all starts with customer data.
Without your customer’s data, you won’t be able to access or use it for your emails.
So how do you get data from customers so you can personalize their information?
Here are three ways to legally get customer data for your personalized emails:
- Segment your email list based on records of customers purchase/shopping cart abandonment history.
- Data from retargeting tools like Facebook pixels, Google Analytics and cookies.
- Data from personalized quizzes and surveys from your site or emails.
- An advanced CRM, to identify customer’s actions across multiple browsers by unifying complex data into one single and accurate customer ID.
Each takes time and effort, but the results are worth it. Remember, personalization isn’t just ‘Hi [your name]’ anymore, it’s about making their shopping experience feel seamless by offering them the things they want to buy.
The longer you wait to use hyper-personalization with your emails, the more time your competition has to create their database to outdo you.
Get started now!
2. Optimize Your Ecommerce Site with Visual Data Reports
When it comes to your eCommerce site, you might not be able to see exactly why your sales have dropped or what element of your eCommerce site is doing more harm than good.
So when they say that a picture is worth a thousand words – especially when you’re trying to optimize your online store and understand your customer behavior with data, visual data reports do all the talking.
Sas Insights describes visual data reports as the presentation of data in a pictorial or graphical format. Visual data helps the user to grasp data, behavior, or actions, whereas traditional data reports may find it difficult to identify patterns or conceptualize buyer behavior.
Smart marketers know that the combined efforts of A/B testing and visual data can help to find problem solutions on your eCommerce store faster and more effectively than when separated.
How do visual reports impact your conversion rates and buyers’ psychology?
Visual appeal and website navigation have the most significant influence on people’s first impressions of the site. It takes 0.05 seconds for users to form an opinion about your website, that determines whether they’ll stay or leave.
You’ll first have to identify barriers keeping people from shopping or completing an order. It sounds extreme, but it’s proven that your site’s images, apps, layouts, navigation, and CTA all affect your conversion rates.
For example, if you notice that your eCommerce store has a high traffic rate but meager sales, then somewhere along the buyer’s journey, there’s a disconnect, and you’ll need to find it.
Visual data reports can quickly help you to identify what’s working on your website and what other elements you can add to improve it.
When Wyldsson first launched its website, they spend months on their site’s design, development, and planning. But shortly after launching conversions and sales plummeted. Using visual reports (heatmaps and recordings), they were able to determine that users were having trouble logging into their accounts.
Source: HotJar Visual Data
The customer found creating accounts to make purchases lengthy and confusing, asking for too much for a brand they weren’t fully invested in. So Wyldsson made a sign up optional and used pop-ups with discounts and deals to help smoothen the shopping experience. Over time they saw a 40% increase in sales.
3. Integrated Marketing Automation
Integrated marketing automation is the ability to connect and sync your marketing automation software or tools with other programs. Giving you the flexibility to create a comprehensive marketing campaign for your landing pages.
The difference between marketing automation and integrated marketing automation is that instead of using separate tools, you have a more cohesive marketing funnel.
In layman terms integrated marketing automation is an “all-in-one” tool.
Integrated marketing automation can cut down the cost of paying for added features, the time it takes to switch between platforms, and being overwhelmed with multiple reports.
Source: Advanced Marketing Strategies
The next step to consider is incorporating CRO, CRM, and multichannel marketing automation for integrated marketing.
Contract research organization (CRO) and customer relationship management (CRM) should be implemented in your integrated marketing automation.
For each stage of your buyer’s journey, your CRO and CRM team or software needs to be on the same page and have a system in place that removes confusion.
CRM has to know the list of customers who’ve shopped on your site so it can start off sales activities and emails to turn them into repeat customers. Your accounting app needs the details of orders to send invoices. If you fail to inform or create a workflow, you’ll lose customers along the way.
The next step is to add multi-channel platforms to your integrated marketing. Each channel plays a role in capturing and engaging with buyers as they enter, leave, or return to your eCommerce store. This means incorporating the following:
Social Media Ads: Providing awareness of your eCommerce store to a global audience and allowing you to meet your leads where they frequently consume content and search for solutions to their problems.
Source: Everlane
Retargeting Ads: Retargeting and remarketing can increase your chances of recapturing leads who left your landing page without completing an action.
Source: Le Fleur
4. Use Dynamic Content Personalization for Your Website
Customer Think found that marketers have a strong belief in the value of personalization. Globally, about 26% of respondents said that personalization is at the core of their marketing/customer experience efforts.
Dynamic Content Personalization is content that changes based on customer segmentation or data that influences rule-based triggers. From there, the content changes to match the variables such as location, preferences, purchase history, and even gender.
Personalization links the gap between data and customer experience that helps to cultivate a tailored shopping experience.
Combine dynamic content personalization and your ecommerce store products, and you’ll be able to optimize your website for far more impactful than with A/B testing tools alone.
For example, let’s say that a fitness brand with dynamic content personalization you can show each person fitness gear based on their different climate conditions. So, If someone from Germany in December visits your eCommerce site, they’ll see options to buy winter gym gear that will keep them warm, as opposed to thin cotton tank tops.
Sounds very high tech but all you need is the right dynamic content tool, like Hotjar or website developer and you’ll be on your way.
Conclusion
A word to the wise, these are not “get fixed quick” tools, take your time to master them, or find an expert to help. Once your tools are in motion you’ll begin to see the difference.
Combine all the tools and tech listed here and your eCommerce store will be optimized, personalized and generating sales.
Here a quick recap of four best tech you need to boost online sales for 2021:
1. Hyper Personalized Emails
2.Optimize Your Ecommerce Site with Visual Data Reports
3.Integrated Marketing Automation
4. Use Dynamic Content Personalization for Your Website
That’s a wrap!
How are you currently optimizing your or your client’s eCommerce site for a better 2021?
Comment below and let me know 🙂
Bio
Victoria is a Marketing Generalist at Wishpond specializing in all things digital marketing and social media marketing. In love with blogging and Taco Tuesdays. Follow her on Twitter @vicknwsbest or IG @vitalvines.co
