How to Supercharge Your Magento Site: 8 Ways to Increase Sales & Revenue

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1 How to Supercharge Your Magento Site: 8 Ways to Increase Sales & Revenue

2 So You Wanna Make the Most of Your Magento Site? Maximizing your Magento website and finding the right agency to help you market and maintain it can be tough, so thanks for letting Groove Commerce show you 8 ways to supercharge your site. We recommend these same methods to all our Magento clients, so we know they work. Here s what you ll learn in this ebook: 8 methods to make your Magento website convert better How each method can increase your sales and revenue Step- by- step guidelines for implementing each method Extensions and extras we recommend to make certain methods more powerful Are you ready to discover proven ways to make more sales and revenue from your website? Read on to find out how to supercharge your site! Contents 1. Set Proper Goals (insert page # and link to it) 2. Tell Your Story 3. Take Advantage of Site Search 4. Build Your List 5. SEO in a Post Panda World 6. Improve Site Speed 7. Strengthen Your Product Merchandising 8. Optimize the Checkout Process 9. The Next Step gotgroove.com 2

3 1. Set Proper Goals Setting goals and metrics may not sound like a method for supercharging your website, but it s actually the most important thing you can do to set your site up for success. If you don t know what your goals are, how will you know if your site is successful? Determining proper goals and metrics builds a strong foundation for all the other methods described in this ebook, and it can help you increase sales and revenue in several ways: By defining a starting point so you can see if your site is as successful as you hoped By providing a benchmark to illustrate growth and progress By showing you what works and what could be improved Define Your GPCT's The first thing you need to do to set your website up for success is define your: G - Goals P - Plans C - Challenges T - Timeline 1. What are your goals? Make your goals as specific as possible. Bigger goals may need multiple action points or smaller goals to help you work your way up to the ultimate prize. To increase sales and revenue, your goals should influence your bottom line, but they don t have to be directly related. Some examples of appropriate goals include: Make a specific figure of revenue in a certain period of time Increase traffic to a certain number per day or by a percentage Increase visitors- to- leads ratio by a certain percentage Increase leads- to- sales ratio by a certain percentage Increase sales from specific channels, such as 2. What plan will you follow to reach your goals? Goals show you where you want to go, while plans help you see how to get there. For each goal you set, plan the actions you must take to reach it. For example, if your goal is make $1 million in revenue in a quarter, actions you could take range from increasing paid search advertising, to hosting social media contests, to implementing a large- scale content marketing strategy, and dozens more. But not all these possible actions would pay equal dividends. Determine which actions have the biggest return on investment, and then plan when and how to implement them to help you reach your goal. gotgroove.com 3

4 3. What challenges could your goal pose? Knowing the challenges you might face as you work toward your goal will prepare you to overcome them and help you form a better plan. By knowing possible problems ahead of time, you can have ways to get around them or alternative strategies already in place, so challenges won t be as big of a deal. 4. What is a reasonable timeline for your goal? No goal is too lofty, but a poorly chosen timeline can make any goal feel impossible. Give yourself enough time to complete every action step and overcome every challenge you ve outlined in your plan. 3 Main Metrics Once you know your goals, plans, challenges, and timeline, it s time to identify the most important metrics to watch: Traffic Average Order Value (AOV) Conversion Rate Depending on your goal, you may decide to keep an eye on other metrics, but these 3 are the golden triangle of web sales because they have the biggest impact on your sales and revenue. Increasing any one of these will increase your revenue, and increasing all three will make a dramatic difference in your bottom line (see calculator at the end of this ebook for a breakdown of how these metrics impact your own site). When planning how to reach your goals, consider which action steps will increase these metrics the most. When evaluating your success, consider how much progress you made increasing these metrics. Any increase in traffic, AOV, or conversion rate is a great result of your action steps on its own, even if you don t quite reach your goal. Groove Recommends We recommend installing the Magento extension Fooman Google Analytics+ for advanced Google Analytics tracking. 2. Tell Your Story There are millions of websites your audience could visit instead of yours, and plenty of competitors they could buy from. Why should they choose you? gotgroove.com 4

5 Beyond products and pricing, your unique story is the most important way you differentiate your site from the competition. Successful branding increasingly relies on giving your website and products soul. A unique story or personality can be very powerful customer attraction. Crafting an interesting story and giving your website and products soul will supercharge your website and help you increase sales and revenue by: Increasing traffic, one of the key metrics that affects your bottom line Attracting customers who find your story, mission, or soul appealing Engaging with prospects who hesitate to buy online or from a faceless brand How to Tell Your Story Once you know your story and soul, it s up to branding, design, and messaging to convey it clearly and often. Adding soul to your site most often means: A powerful domain name and tagline Sharing your story and history on your About Us page in a compelling, engaging way Unique product descriptions and content Creating buying guides and product reviews Sharing your opinions and demonstrating your expertise Match your unique style and voice with your custom logo and design Groove Recommends If you re considering adding a video to tell your story, we recommend using the Wistia service as it packs an unparalleled punch with features, including video SEO and analytics. 3. Take Advantage of Site Search When you shop online, do you browse a website by category or filter, or do you simply search for what you re looking for? Like you, your customers are busy. More often than not, they know exactly what they want to research or purchase, and they don t want to have to waste time hunting for it. Installing site search increases your website s sales and revenue in several ways: By creating a better user experience, so customers want to buy from you By making it easier for customers to buy By helping visitors find what they re looking for gotgroove.com 5

6 By showing customers similar products they may also need or want Plus, site search conversion rate is typically 3-5X what your normal site conversion rate is, and average order value through site search is typically 25-50% higher! In fact, installing and optimizing site search is one of the easiest ways to interact with your customers and raise overall conversion rates and revenue. How to Make the Most of Site Search Whether you build a site search engine yourself or install an extension, there are 2 major concerns to keep in mind: speed and relevance. Speed: A slow site search is just as bad as not having a search function at all. As attention spans continue to shrink, catering to your ideal market with fast site search is an easy way to supercharge your website. Relevance: Fast search results are important, but if they aren t very relevant to the query or don t contain the products your visitors want, you ve lost the sale. Site search must be as relevant as possible for this method to make the biggest contribution to your revenue. Some ways to optimize your site search include: Customizing synonyms Installing redirects Adding supplemental content such as Did you mean or People who searched for this also looked at Offering filtered navigation Displaying product thumbnails Showing top products above the fold Groove Recommends We have an entire ebook dedicated to site search in case you re looking for more guidance here. 4. Build Your List Although social media and mobile marketing are cool new methods for engaging prospects, is still the best way to connect with and market to your target audience. A personalized landing straight in a customer s inbox is much more powerful than a message on social media they may or may not see. How does building your list help you increase sales and revenue? gotgroove.com 6

7 Helps your ideal customers come to know, like, and trust you, eventually leading to sales Gives you permission to market directly to people who are likely to advocate your brand and/or buy from you Creates opportunities to engage with prospects and re- convert existing customers How to Start Building a List works best when you use it regularly. If you reach out too often, you ll have a high unsubscribe rate, but if you reach out too infrequently, you ll be marked as spam because subscribers don t remember you. Monthly newsletters are about the right frequency for most businesses. A smart approach to building your list might look something like this: 1. Place a compelling sign- up box in a noticeable place on every page of your website. 2. Give prospects a reason to sign up, such as a discount, free downloadable content, or access to premium content on your website. 3. Reward subscribers with regular s containing unique, useful content. A good rule of thumb is 3 or more content- based s or newsletter articles for every 1 promotion. In addition to sending regular newsletters, you can harness the power of in 3 specific instances to engage, sell, and re- convert your subscribers: in a welcome series for new subscribers, after a prospect has abandoned an order, and as a follow- up after a purchase. Welcome Series Once a prospect has agreed to let you him or her, it s vital to start building a relationship so the prospect learns what to expect from you, begins to trust you, and eventually chooses to buy from you. An welcome series helps you do that. The welcome series can be as long or as short as you want. If you send newsletters often, 1 or 2 welcome s may suffice. If you less frequently, or if your prospects need a high level of engagement and trust to buy from you, a longer welcome series of 5, 7, 10 or more s may be appropriate. Some things to keep in mind for your welcome series: The first welcome message must deliver the promise you made to encourage signups. This could include anything from downloads to premium access to coupons. Early in the series, help subscribers get to know and like your brand. Tell your story. Focus on how you help people and improve the world. gotgroove.com 7

8 Help subscribers get to know you better with a Start Here style that includes links to important pages on your website, social media channels, popular blog posts, and more. Shopping Cart Abandonment Cart abandonment s represent another opportunity to get the sale. They can be highly effective when done right, but many businesses still don t implement this technique. To start using cart abandonment s to your advantage, follow the following basic tips. Send the within 24 hours. After a whole day has passed, the prospect probably doesn t want to complete the purchase. Use urgency to your benefit. One of the most powerful tricks copywriters use to sell more is urgency. If the prospect doesn t act soon, they miss out on a great deal, a limited product, or other offer. This is especially effective if an item in the cart is on sale and the sale will be ending soon, or if your inventory of a certain product in the cart is running low. Be courteous and offer help. Cart abandonment s should focus on the customer. Prospects are more likely to return and finish the purchase if you offer to answer questions and help them. Offer discounts or free shipping. You don t always need to sweeten the deal to entice buyers to complete the sale, but it can really help, especially for loyal customers or prospects with lots of questions or problems. Test, test, test. Maybe 2 cart abandonment s or a graphics- heavy would convert higher for your customers than a single plain- text , but how do you know? By testing the current version against a different version. Once you ve sent each of them to at least 100 people, you can begin to measure ROI to see which version converts better. Post Purchase Follow Up is equally powerful leading up to the sale and reconverting customers after the sale. The post- purchase follow up helps you continue building and solidifying the relationship with the customer and begin prepping them to buy from you again. Some best practices to maximize the power of the follow up include: Thank them for their purchase. Thanks is one of the magic words for a reason. Ask for feedback. You can send a survey to mine uniform data or simply ask customers if they were satisfied with the purchase experience, customer support, and product. This gotgroove.com 8

9 can often lead to powerful testimonials and show where you have room for improvement. Invite them to engage with you again via social media, your blog, and other channels. Effective post- purchase follow up often becomes a series of s. For example, you could invite the customer to leave a review of the product a few weeks after the purchase. Product reviews supercharge your website and sales by adding instant credibility to your brand and boosting your SEO rankings. Incentivized We ve Missed You s a few months after the purchase and regular newsletters also contribute to reconverting existing customers down the road. Groove Recommends We recommend Listrak and their line of omnichannel marketing solutions if your site s traffic is moderate- high we ve seen terrific results with several of our clients here using them. If your traffic is low or if you have a tight budget, consider these alternatives: First Time Customer Lightbox Popup by Redstage Networks Follow Up by aheadworks 5. SEO in a Post Panda World Search engine optimization has fundamentally changed since Google released its major Penguin and Panda updates. Revising your SEO strategy to be in line with the new standards is just smart for doing business online, but it can also help you increase your sales and revenue by: Attracting more traffic, one of the key metrics that affects your bottom line Making your site appear higher in search results and seem more relevant and credible Directing visitors to your best pages How to Update Your SEO Strategy The newest sweeping changes to most search engine algorithms heavily penalize duplicate content. To modernize your SEO strategy, boost your rankings, and avoid penalization, you must remove and avoid duplicate content as much as possible. There are 3 specific places to do this: Product Descriptions: The biggest SEO problem we see our clients make is reusing the manufacturer s product descriptions. Not only do these standard, generic descriptions lack the soul that interests and engages prospects, they are also a huge example of duplicate content. Nearly everyone else selling the same product uses the same description. Original content helps you rise above your competitors. Rewrite the description in your own unique style to add soul. gotgroove.com 9

10 Share your opinion and expertise. Create buying guides and other helpful, original content. If this is the only step you take to improve your SEO, it can pay huge dividends. Page Titles and Meta Tags: If you re not using these already, you absolutely should be. Make sure every single page title, meta description, and image alt tag is unique. These places tell search engines what the page is all about and represent another opportunity to inject soul and help your customers. Canonical Tags: All major search engines support the use of canonical tags to avoid repercussions of duplicate content. This tag directs the search engine s crawler to the original or preferred version of webpages with identical or very similar content. Ecommerce websites often use it to distinguish between pages showing the same products but with different sorting filters applied. In addition to the big 3 places to update your search engine optimization, here are a few additional things you can do to supercharge your website s SEO: Use robots.txt to remove certain pages from indexing, thereby giving other pages more value Submit updated sitemaps to search engines regularly Spider your own site to see what search engines see so you can remove and revise duplicate and unnecessary content Groove Recommends We have an entire webinar on improving your ecommerce SEO in a post panda world in case you re looking for more guidance here. 6. Improve Site Speed Like a fast site search, a fast website makes a huge difference to your customers and your bottom line. Here s how: Visitors stay on faster sites longer and tend to bounce less. A fast site can raise your AdWords quality score, improving your PPC spend and results. Site speed affects your SEO now that Google is starting to track it. Higher site speed helps you diagnose and fix errors that might have been hidden by slow speed. Site speed directly affects conversion rate, so the faster the better. Improving site speed is one of the top things you can do to immediately supercharge your website and boost sales. Some ideas to help you speed up your Magento website include gotgroove.com 10

11 turning on compression, removing unneeded files and code, and cloud hosting images and other media. Groove Recommends If your development team has made tweaks to your Magento store configuration and your site is still running slow, it may be time to consider a new hosting provider. Groove recommends checking out Nexcess, Peer1, and Rackspace. 7. Strengthen Your Product Merchandising Buying online is tough because customers can t see or touch the product, making them more wary and less sure. Without a sales representative to reassure and persuade them, your products have to sell themselves with strong merchandising, namely unique and compelling product descriptions, quality product images, and visibility- boosting flags. Optimizing your product pages supercharges your website and increases sales and revenue in 2 major ways: Boosting the SEO of product pages, so they rank higher and get more traffic Increasing conversion rates Compelling Product Descriptions Unique, persuasive product descriptions are so important, we re mentioning them twice. Not only are they an easy way to make your website stand out from the crowd of sellers with duplicate content, they re also the perfect opportunity to use powerful copywriting to boost sales. You don t just want unique product descriptions. You need engaging, compelling, persuasive descriptions that convince visitors to buy. Keep these copywriting tricks in mind to make your product descriptions sell more: Grab attention in the first line. Focus on benefits. Features are great, but prospects want to know what benefits the product offers them. Be specific. Use data when appropriate. Vague descriptions indicate you don t understand the product or the customer, while specifics make you more credible. Tell a story or give real- life examples to help customers imagine using the product. Appeal to emotions. Use strong, descriptive language that matches your audience and your company voice and style. Quality Product Images gotgroove.com 11

12 Even the most persuasive product descriptions won t increase sales much without great product images. Many online customers won t even read the description without at least 1 tolerable image of the product. Ditch the standard manufacturers images and create your own high- quality photos, videos, and other product images. Great visual content captures visitors attention and helps them visualize using the product. Photos and videos can also be shared across visual social media to help you market your product online. Don t forget captions, image alt tags, and short video descriptions to boost the images SEO value. Visibility- Boosting Flags Attention grabbing words over product images calls attention to your best products and helps them stand out. This may seem like a simple tip, but it works. Some common flags are: Hot New Sale Reduced Price Limited- time Offer 8. Optimize the Checkout Process If anything goes wrong during checkout, you lose sales. Checkout is directly related to revenue, and that makes checkout optimization one of the best things you can do to increase sales and revenue. You could see as much as a 20% lift in revenue just by optimizing your website s checkout process! How to Optimize Your Checkout There are lots of possible ways you could improve your checkout process. Keep these considerations in mind to come up with the best ideas for your website. Multi- step vs. one- step checkout: More clicks in the checkout process usually means a lower conversion rate, but one- step checkouts aren t a good fit for every buyer persona or product we ve tested both numerous times and have seen mixed results. Consider your sales funnel, personas, and products to determine if you should use a multi- step or one- step checkout. gotgroove.com 12

13 Build trust: Because there are lots of problems that can happen when customers buy online, such as identity theft or fraud, your checkout needs to radiate trust and security. Some ways to do that include: Displaying security badges, trust seals, and other credentials Showing or linking to privacy, shipping, and warranty policies Including your complete contact information prominently on every step Test, tweak, repeat: Split test every change you make to your checkout to see how it impacts your conversion rate. Make more changes and keep testing to continually refine your checkout process. gotgroove.com 13

14 The Next Step? Are you ready to take the next step in optimizing your Magento site for increased revenue? Groove can help! ecommerce Conversion Calculator Check out Groove s free ecommerce conversion rate calculator to find out how an increase to Traffic, Average Order Value, or Conversion Rate will directly impact your bottom line revenue. (note: Mktg to insert HubSpot CTA) ecommerce Site Consulation Contact Groove for a free ecommerce site consultation. We ll talk about what you have in mind, what you re already doing, what opportunities might work for you, and create a plan to help you improve your online efforts. (note: Mktg to insert HubSpot CTA) CREATE INSERT CONTACT US BOX SIMILAR TO PHOTO ATTACHED CHANGE PHONE # to AND HAVE CONTACT US LINK TO NEW /CONTACT- US/ page gotgroove.com 14