10 quick-win tactics to revamp your ecommerce strategy

Whether your sales revenue is dipping, your conversion rate falling or bounce rate climbing, there will be moments in ecommerce when you’re under pressure to turn things around. As a leading ecommerce consultancy, we’ve seen this predicament countless times and helped numerous ecommerce businesses and retail brands to pinpoint the source of their slump and implement changes to improve performance across a range of KPIs. Stephen Elldred is an Ecommerce strategist at Space 48 and he outlines 10 quick-win tactics to revamp your ecommerce strategy:

1. Drill down into your analytics

Check your data. This is perhaps the most crucial of our quick-win tactics. Why? Because if you’re not taking your analytics seriously, you have no serious strategy.

Use Google Analytics and the reporting tools at your disposal, to continually monitor and assess your data, to highlight the areas you’re succeeding in, where you’re performing badly and give you key insights about your customer behaviours.

We recommend you:

• Set up funnel tracking
• Implement Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Analytics
• Troubleshoot your ecommerce website and utilise your data
• Look into device data, splitting out data for desktop and data for mobile devices.

2. Carry out an audit of acquisition channels

What is performing well? What is not working? Carrying out a performance audit of your acquisition channels will tell you where the gaps and opportunities are. You may need to reach out to an experienced ecommerce agency to give you a clear, specialist and unbiased view of your acquisition performance.

This will allow you to assess channel suitability and see the effectiveness of your PPC (volume and bidding strategy), remarketing, email marketing, social media activity and affiliate marketing.

3. Take a holistic view of third-party technologies

You may work with a range of different third-party solutions, but are they integrated with your website? Take the example of an email marketing provider, such as Dotmailer and a personalisation tool, like Nosto or Peerius. These are powerful tools for driving your ecommerce performance and nurturing your customers, so it’s important that they’re integrated correctly with your ecommerce website.

The reporting, data and recommendations encourage repeat purchases and increase AOV. Make sure these third-party integrations are working together, to learn from each other, to boost ROI and to ensure continuity, which directly impacts customer experience.

4. Nail your cart abandonment emails

Cart abandonment is a common problem in ecommerce, but it’s also a big opportunity for nurturing customers and encouraging them to convert. Whether it’s via an ESP or another third-party solution, nailing you cart abandonment emails is an easy win for increasing conversion rate.

Consider the following factors:

• Deliverability
• ROI
• Timings/frequency
• CTAs/CRO

Analyse the optimal send times and time-delay strategy and create persuasive copywriting to make your cart abandonment email series as effective as possible.

5. Experiment with new customer pop-ups

A great quick win for gaining new customers is using pop-up offers. Often implemented using a third-party plugin, new customer pop-ups are an effective way to incentivise customers with relevant offers and encourage them to convert. Pop-ups also help increase AOV and reduce abandonment rates. Split test different formats and see which ones work best for your visitors.

6. Rethink your cart to checkout journey

If your website conversion rate is low, we highly recommend you revisit your cart to checkout journey. There are many factors that can cause customers to be blown off course during the route to purchase. Consider the following:

• Streamline your checkout journey
• Remove distractions from the header and footer, especially on landing pages
• Don’t split your “view basket” and “go to checkout” CTA buttons – have a single journey
• Keep users on a consistent journey and match expectations – this helps tracking too

7. Focus on your convincers

Convincers are forms of content which help to turn browsers into buyers. It’s often data and content which already exists, but isn’t being leveraged properly or isn’t visible.

These persuasion tactics and social proof convincers help build trust and can be the final nudge required to gain conversions.

8. Ramp up your personalisation

Personalisation is crucial these days for successful ecommerce businesses. It’s easy to implement, especially when using proven personalisation tools, like Nosto. You’ll gain immediate uplift and it’s virtually risk-free as CPA pricing models exist. Implement it gradually and build it up according to your ROI.

We created an extensive personalisation guide for nurturing customers. Download the guide to learn more about key personalisation tactics.

9. Offer the right delivery and payment options

It’s vital to give your customers the right variety of payment gateways and formats, to cater for customers seeking quick-pay options, such as PayPal and Amazon Pay, or more traditional payment card input options.

Also, ensure all relevant and suitable delivery options are covered and meet your customer’s expectations on speed (next-day delivery), convenience (pick-a-day delivery) and reputation (premium carriers like Royal Mail vs cheaper options, such as Yodel).

10. Improve your on-site search

These days, customers have high expectations for onsite search on ecommerce stores, so you need to ensure your search feature (perhaps enhanced by a third-party solution) reflects the user experience of Google search – as much as possible!

If consumers browsing your website find the products they’re looking for with relative ease, using your onsite search, then your chance of gaining conversions and increasing customer retention will be much higher.

In summary

Most common issues in ecommerce can be quickly resolved by putting your focus and resources in the right places. Understanding the reasons for your failings is crucial, so you can use the insights to tweak things on your ecommerce website and integrated channels, to align them with what your customer needs and expectations.

Space 48 is a leading UK ecommerce agency based in Manchester, specialising in Magento website development and ecommerce consulting services. If you’re in need of conversion rate optimisation, why not download our must-have ecommerce strategies guide to increasing conversions or get in touch with our ecommerce experts now?

The must-have ecommerce strategies to increase conversions