Shopify Conversion Rate Optimization
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Shopify Conversion Rate Optimization The Ultimate Ecommerce Guide to Increase Sales from Drive-By Visitors in Shopify by Joshua Uebergang of DigitalDarts.com.au Table of Contents 1 Part 1: Introduction and Principles Why This Could Be the Most Important Ecommerce Guide You Ever Read 2 The Goliath Product that Broke an Online Store 2 How to Maximize Your Store’s Conversion Potential 4 How to Use this Guide to Make and Not Break Your Store 8 Part 2: Positioning Why Someone Should Buy From You in an Ocean of Choices 8 Law of Category 9 Focus on Your Biggest Buyers 11 Leverage Profitable Traffic Sources 12 Sell to Your Foxes 13 Value Propositions 14 Survey Customers to Attract More 15 Survey to Find Out Why Your Visitors Didn’t Buy 16 Live Chat 17 Develop and Sell Your Own Products 17 Avoid Dilution from Extension 17 The Premature Test 18 Simple Customer-Focused Language 19 About Page 19 Brick and Mortar Location 20 Endorsements 21 Suggested Resources 22 Part 3: Design Ecommerce Web Design that Gets You Sales 22 Axis of Interaction 24 Color Contrast 25 Simplification 26 Carousels 26 Call-to-Actions 28 Hamburger Menu 29 Design of Collections 30 Trust Badges 31 Leverage Brands 32 “Model” the Big Boys 32 Spot Your Design Problems with a Usability Test 33 How to Test Design Changes 34 Suggested Resources 35 Part 4: Technical The Foundation of Ecommerce Profit 35 Speed 36 Site Architecture 37 Order of Collections 38 Breadcrumbs 39 Descriptive URLs 39 Title Tags and Meta Descriptions 40 Search 41 Filters 42 Perpetual Shopping Cart 42 Links and Images Work 42 404 Pages From External Links 43 404 Page 44 Mysterious Mobile-Device Performance Issues 45 Cross-Browser Performance Issues 46 Suggested Resources 47 Part 5: Product How to Craft Product Pages that Make Visitors Demand Your Products 47 Sell a Hot Product 48 Use Your Products 48 Product Name 49 Hot Product Photography 50 Video 51 Write Detailed Product Descriptions 52 Product Description Extras 53 Reviews 54 Testimonials 54 Customer Use of the Product 55 Out of Stock Reminder 55 Social Buttons 56 Show Notifications of Customers Who Purchased 57 Create Urgency 57 Cross-Sell and Upsell 59 Downsell 60 Suggested Resources 61 Part 6: Pricing Price Strategies to Increase Profit 61 Competitive Pricing 63 Raise Your Prices 63 Lower Your Prices 63 Clear Pricing 64 Subscriptions 65 Bundling 66 The Left-Digit Effect 66 Free Delivery 68 Suggested Resources 69 Part 7: Checkout How to Make Your Checkout Compel Visitors to Buy 70 Cement Trust 70 Make Fields Optional or Explain Them 71 Cart Up-sell 72 Payment Options 72 The Three Hundred Million Dollar Button 73 Coupon Manipulation 73 Thank You Page 75 Where to Next? 75 About the Author Before you continue: Step 1: Know of someone who runs an online store that would be happy to turn more visitors into customers? Feel free to share with them the following link so they can download the latest version of this free book: https://www.digitaldarts.com.au/shopify-conversion-rate-optimization Step 2: Learn the ecommerce growth secrets of “little” online stores owning their niche to hit $1,000,000 in sales a year and beyond. Free 7-part course made for Shopify store owners wanting more sales. Free sign-up available now: Part 1: Introduction and Principles Why This Could Be the Most Important Ecommerce Guide You Ever Read “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” Peter Drucker, the man who invented modern management large mining corporation in the early 1900s sent engineers to a rural area. AThe mining engineers from their mineral discovery work believed the soils to be littered with gold. The mining company setup shop to tap the riches below. 6 months later and 100 meters into the Earth, they found nothing. The company could not fund further exploration in the region with opportunities elsewhere so they departed. A couple came along that year to buy the property. They heard what happened with the mining company then proceeded to get out their rusty shovel, sifting pan, and explore the grounds where the company dug. One foot in, the couple found a three pound nugget gold. Then another. And another. I am sick of seeing good ecommerce entrepreneurs who have worked their butts off doing a lot right to get sales, but they miss 20% of tasks that lead to 80% of results. You pour copious time into your products, thousands of dollars into a nice looking store, and hundreds of sleepless nights to get traffic, only to be left with sub-par sales (or none!). Unbeknown to you, you could be one foot from sales you dreamed about. Here is one example. Part 1: Introduction and Principles 1 The Goliath Product that Broke an Online Store A store owner had no idea why people didn’t buy one product. It was a beautiful garden statue handcrafted by indigenous people of the land who used ancient stonework. Nothing like it was available anywhere. The statue’s product page had great photos, video, a clear call-to-action, and an interesting product description. It only cost a few dollars more than the ugly mass- produced statues from competitors. It was built to get sales. A lot of people were seeing it yet none bought. Zilch. The store owner decided to buy the statue herself after her frustration with sales. She added the product to her cart then proceeded to the checkout. She typed her address details to order. And there it beamed into her eyes. She was like a deer caught in headlights. The shipping cost was over one thousand dollars! No sane person forks out a few hundred dollars on a statue to pay triple for shipping. How to Maximize Your Store’s Conversion Potential “During an interview at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, a reporter asked him [Einstein] what he thought was man’s greatest invention. Einstein paused but a moment and replied, ‘Compound interest.'” Bank Performance Annual in 1978 This could be the most important ecommerce guide you will ever read. It is a complete step-by-step guide to get visitors buying – and to buy more over their lifetime - from your Shopify store. Your store’s ability to efficiently turn a visitor into a sale is the difference between a wildly successful store and one that bleeds on tight 20% margins. I refer to the number of store visitors who turn into customers as your conversion rate. The most common conversion rate is 1-2%. The metric itself is often flawed Part 1: Introduction and Principles 2 because stores have bad analytics that track spam bots, employee page-views, and factor in other behaviors like blog posts. If you write a blog post for your store that gets read a lot, your “conversion rate” will melt! (I will show you later how to correct this.) One puzzle piece could make all the difference for your store to turn 30% more visitors into buyers. Throughout this guide you will learn what many stores have done to achieve incredible sales. Some even doubled sales from one small alteration. Drastic changes are not always possible but nor are they always necessary. As you improve bit-by-bit working through this guide, these small improvements add up, until soon enough twice the people purchase from you. An increase in conversions lets you instantly pocket more money. You can spend more on advertising, out-bid your competitors in AdWords to drive extra clicks, and invest elsewhere for growth to extend your advantage. You feed the additional revenue created out of “thin air” into further traffic acquisition for added sales. A conversion rate improvement creates waves for years. How many times do you need to fold a standard piece of paper to make it reach the moon? One thousands times? One million? Scientists calculate forty-two times. People are poor at comprehending compounded numbers. A 20% increase in product views, 15% boost in add-to-carts, and another 15% jump from order completion is not a one-off boost of 50%. The lifetime sales from your store increase at least by 63% because more people reach the next step to order. If you do $50k a month, that's now $81.5k. What do you do with the profit from the $31.5k? You reinvest for more sales. The power of compound! An investment in conversion rate optimization (CRO) is one of the wisest decisions you can make to increase your sales. No one knows the exact conversion rate your store can reach. Rather than obsessing over your rate, your goal is to improve revenue per visitor month after month. I also want you to think about check-marking your store for the six critical areas of conversion optimization: Part 1: Introduction and Principles 3 1. Positioning. Get your positioning right and the rest flows to create a greasy chute that nabs sale after sale. I’m horrified at how no other conversion guide or book discusses this lifeline of ecommerce success. 2. Design. A beautiful store is not one that gets you sales. Amazon is ugly yet functionally brilliant. The crux of good ecommerce design is revenue. Discover the design principles any store can use to jack-up sales. 3. Technical. If your visitors cannot convert, they cannot convert. Learn the tactics without being a coder yourself to speed up your store, spot mobile device issues within one minute on thousands of phones, hunt down broken links, and bandage other problems that stop sales.