4 Not So Obvious Ways to Increase Sales of Your Ecommerce

You probably know that increasing conversion rates is usually a cheaper way of increasing sales than acquiring new users, right? I assume you do. This is why you use Google Analytics and collect data, to improve your website. At least some of you might be familiar with other techniques like heat maps and A/B testing. There are many tools for that and they are really helpful – no doubt about that.

However, there are a few techniques for improving conversion rates that are not as well known, but can greatly help you. They are not as sexy as heat maps, but it is worth considering them if you want to improve the performance of your business. Descriptions of all the techniques are extended with two tools which you can use.

Cart Abandonment

Cart abandonment means that you were able to convince them to add products to their cart, but something happened along the way and they did not complete the purchase. Somehow, they changed their minds.

Users often abandon carts. This statement probably won’t become Forbes’ quote of the day – but it’s obvious. Lost opportunities like these can have huge implications. Cart abandonment means that you were able to convince them to add products to their cart, but something happened along the way and they did not complete the purchase. Somehow, they changed their minds.

Manually sending emails to all registered users who abandon their carts sounds like a lot of work and it might not give you the results that you expected. What is more important is for you to get to the users who are not registered. Luckily, you can automate the process and achieve more than just simply sending emails.

• Picreel is a powerful and easy to tool to use. You can create nice pop-ups with no coding skills, and integration can make your work even easier.
• Upsellit provides similar services with a few additions. Abandon chat is the most powerful of them – which is a simulation of a live chat that opens up instantly when someone abandons their cart.

Onsite Surveys

Google Analytics can tell you that users spend an average of up to 3 minutes on your website. What does it tell you? Who knows? They might be interested in your products, but they might also be wasting 60% of your time due to unclear navigation. This is the reason why it would be nice to ask users why they perform certain actions or what they think of website. That would allow us to tailor our services to users’ needs, which should ultimately result in higher conversion rates.

And that’s basically what onsite surveys can do. You can run short surveys and gather users’ feedback. You can ask visitors what they think of your website, why they decide to leave it, or anything else. This is kind of insight that can’t be gathered with Google Analytics or any other tool that collects qualitative data.

• Qualaroo is the forerunner of onsite surveys. They know how to do it and their knowledge base is just a bit smaller than the Library of Congress.
• Survicate is a smaller company which also provides onsite surveys. Their product are especially suitable for small companies due to flexible pricing. In contrary to Qualaroo, all of their plans cover surveys on mobile devices with no additional cost.

Website Performance Monitoring

We all tend to make the same mistakes – we focus on the design and usability of our websites and forget about the technical side. We leave this issue to IT guys. But even those tech-savvy engineers sometimes sleep, make mistakes, and are simply not able to keep an eye out on every aspect of your website’s performance. That’s why other like-minded tech-savvy guys decided to create software just for that. By using it, you can continuously track the performance of your website and receive alerts if something breaks down. You can instantly act and fix it before it causes any more problems.

• Pingdom will let you know in less than a minute when something breaks on your website. Nice graphs will show results of all performed tests, so you will understand what is really going on. And it also comes with mobile apps so you will always be updated.
• Site24x7 is an even more elaborate tool. It allows you to check basically anything related to your website including broken links and impact of scripts on performance.

Brand Monitoring

One day you might notice that people point at you and smile. Is it something on your face? No. Did you forget to put your trousers on? Probably not. But after a week, it starts to become annoying and you want to find out what’s going on. You find out that somebody leaked an embarrassing photo of yours on Facebook. It was nice to find out, but it’s also too late to act. Everyone has seen the photo.

[Tweet “Around 95% of (negative exposure) will shortly end. But the 5% might turn into a disaster “]

The same goes for companies. Someone might start spreading negative information about you on social media or in a forum. Around 95% of situations like this will shortly end. But the outstanding 5% might turn it into a disaster for your reputation, and that’s a big problem. This is why monitoring your brand is so important. Clever software will let you know when someone mentions your brand or any other phrase that you decide to track. It allows you to get involved in conversations, and improve your reputation.

• Mention is the best known provider of brand monitoring software. All big fish use it and there is a reason for that.
• Brand24 is a smaller company. Their products are available at a lower price than Mention, and they offer more developed analytics.

You might find these techniques to be boring. Checking the response time of your servers or reading for the 30^th time within a week Yeah, I know this brand, it’s cool!” are not among the most interesting activities. You won’t see colorful heat maps or fancy charts showing increasing session duration. But all these techniques can greatly contribute to something incredibly interesting – profit for your business. So maybe it’s worth it to spend some time on some dull tasks if it yields a result that will end up with you buying a trip to the Bahamas.