It’s the little things - 4 small tips for BIG holiday conversions

Who doesn’t love spending money during the holiday season? There’s obviously no shortage of people looking to spend money, but getting more people to spend at your online store can be a challenge. While you may not have the time and resources necessary to revise your strategy or test new theories, don’t be afraid to dabble in some tried and tested techniques to boost conversions.

1. Improve (or add) a Search function

It’s time to take a good objective look at your site’s search feature; you may even want someone outside your company help out. Is it easy to find? Are people able to easily find what they’re looking for via the search function?

It’s likely no surprise to you that many people’s first action when reaching your web site is to search for what they are looking for. Google has turned us all into search maniacs, and unfortunately since Google searches are very accurate, we all have high expectations. If your search function is confusing, or not providing the results people are looking for you may want to change.

2. Let customers review your products

“But… what if we get a bad review??” Is what you’re probably thinking right now. Truth is, you might get a bad review, maybe even a couple. However, the information-overloaded world we live in now has given consumers more buying power than ever before. The more transparent and honest your company is, the more you will be rewarded by customers. According to a recent e-Marketer article, most online retailers using consumer-generated product review found that it improved conversion rates and customer loyalty, as well as helped with search engine optimization.

Linus Gregoriadis (head of research at UK-based E-consultancy) said one-third of online sellers were concerned about negative reviews, “but retailers are finding that they can improve conversion rates, drive sales and increase customer satisfaction even if customers aren’t necessarily singing their praises all the time.”

As long as you provide a great product and have solid customer service staff, there’s no need to worry about bad reviews. We all know people can be very different creatures, so most of us are willing to forgive a bad review or two - and we’re likely to actually think positively about it since you aren’t trying to hide it.

3. Change a button

It’s almost ridiculous - something as silly as changing the color of a button affecting your conversion rate. However, according to MarketingSherpa, these little changes can have a fantastic effect on your conversion rates. Unfortunately the case study is no longer open access, but here are some highlights:

• A larger ‘Proceed to Checkout’ button lifted conversions 44.11% over the existing ‘Add to Cart’ one. On the cross-sell page test, the words ‘Proceed to Cart’ beat ‘Add to Cart’ by 21.8%
• With the Buy Now button on the product pages, red out-converted dark blue and the existing light blue by 4.03%
• Rather than apply a consistent look and feel across all buttons on the site, key learnings demonstrated you must continually test in order to make sure you don’t make false assumptions.

This is definitely something you need to test, but if your results are anything like this case study — it’ll be well worth it!

4. Use triggered emails

What, you think I was going to get through a whole post without mentioning email??

I could go on all day about changes you could make to your email program to improve conversion, but the point of this post is about fast & easy changes to boost conversions. So assuming you are already using email effectively enough and have a good tool, setting up triggered mailings can be quick and easy and have a very positive effect on conversion goals.

Depending on your email marketing tool, triggers are dead simple to set up. It usually just involves creating a trigger (i.e. When someone abandons a shopping cart) and then content to go with it. Three no-brainer email triggers would be for shopping cart abandonment, “email me when in stock” and purchase reminder emails, which I’ve blogged about before…

There you go! Have you tried any of these before? What were the results? What about other techniques you’ve used? Drop a comment below, I’d love to hear some feedback on this!

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Posted in Kelly Rusk, eCommerce