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3 Risky Ecommerce Techniques That Could Actually Increase Your Conversions

3 Risky Ecommerce Techniques That Could Actually Increase Your Conversions

Increasing your conversion rates using ecommerce sites can be difficult since almost every business owners are already using the internet and have been taking advantage of the use of websites. There are many arguments that have been placed when it comes to the challenges in increasing conversion rates.

 

Web personalization is one of the most common aspects that web developers have been using to increase conversion rates. However, using this component can be critical nowadays.

 

Here are some of the few components that you can use to increase your ecommerce conversions:

 

  1. Three Risky Ecommerce Techniques That Could Actually Increase Your ConversionsUse a popup.

What’s the first word that comes to a user’s mind when they see a popup?

 

Hint: It often contains four letters, and is represented with symbols ($%#&)

 

“Popup” is synonymous with “annoying.” And you should avoid anything annoying on your website, right? Maybe not. Popups, annoying though they may be, can drastically improve your conversion rate.

 

Popups are successful for the same reason that they are annoying. They demand a response. Some people are going to get ticked off at your popup. That’s a risk you’ll have to take. The upside is that a ton more people will probably convert.

Here are some case studies.

 

WPBeginner, a WordPress tutorial business increased their email subscription rate by 600% using a lightbox popup with exit-intent technology (OptinMonster).

Matthew Woodward tested an opt-in popup and discovered that 1) user experience decreased, while 2) conversions increased by 44%.

One blogger with an Etsy shop implemented a popup on her blog, and her subscription rate grew by 1,375%.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger grew his newsletter signup rate by 900% after adding a lightbox popup.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to do popups. Plus, there are a ton of different types of popups, each with dozens of different variations. Here are a few tips that will make your popups more successful:

 

Popups are best for email subscription opt-in.

Make the popup big.

Use a lightbox popup.

Provide an easy way to close the popup.

Show your popup infrequently.

Time the popup to appear at least 1 minute after the user lands on the page or after the user scrolls 75% of the way down the page. Setting up the popup with parameters like this is a good way to qualify a likely level of on-page engagement.

Popups do not have to be a UX disaster or a source of heart-surging anger. They can be slick, impressive, and satisfying, especially when you tailor them towards user intent.

 

This popup from WordStream uses large imagery, an appealing aesthetic and a simple question to focus the popup:

 

 

Three Risky Ecommerce Techniques That Could Actually Increase Your Conversions

For WordStream’s audience, this kind of popup is perfect. It meets the audience’s need, and provides them with an easy-to-convert action.

 

The approach used by Conversioner is similar. The popup is clean, intuitive, and simple. The open and airy design scheme is a marked contrast from the noisy and intense design of old-school, annoying popups.

Wishpond uses a popup to provide a free guide for conversion tips. Again, the principle of simplicity and intuitiveness prevent the popup from being over-the-top annoying:

  1. Do stuff for free.

Zappos has legendary customer service. They offer free shipping on deliveries (which isn’t really unusual) and free shipping on returns (which is unusual)! If you’re selling shoes and apparel, such a return policy might sound suicidal. Their return rates are estimated to be as high as 30%).

 

The homepage of Zappos, along with most of their landing pages, features “Free shipping and returns.” They recognize the customer’s love of free, and focus their marketing accordingly.

Zappos does a lot of stuff for free, and from a business perspective, they seem to be doing just fine, thank you.

Giving away free stuff — shipping, books, products, studies, etc. — will endear you to your customers and improve your conversions.

The most popular form of free is free shipping offers for physical products. Customers detest tacked-on shipping charges, so they spring for free shipping. Another popular form of free is the free ebook or whitepaper. Usually, these free downloads are used as newsletter opt-in bait. Another freebie technique involves a contest, such as a drawing for a free iPad. A standard free methodology for SaaS businesses is the free trial version of software.

For SaaS, free has a proven business model of success. There are expected dips, but continual gains, based on new feature introduction and improvements.

Ecommerce marketers have long understood the power of free. In fact, much of the holiday-season shopping craze is fueled by its power.

Free will always have its challenges — both from a revenue and a customer service perspective. Here are some of those challenges, as indicated by eMarketer.

In spite of those challenges, however, there is consistent payoff. Free works.

In a marketplace that is crowded with free stuff, it takes a special form of free to stand out. Here are some suggestions for making your free stuff matter, and for making it improve your conversion rates.

Make it easy to qualify for the free product or service. Forcing the user to fill out long forms can reduce the amount of conversions you’ll get. Don’t make people feel like they are working for the free product. Make them feel like they’re actually getting something for free.

Do a “giveaway” rather than a “promotion.” Unbounce’s research determined that the word “giveaway” produced 27% more conversions than “sweepstake,” and 50% more conversions than “promotion.” Specific words matter.

Show a picture of the free product. Images will improve the likelihood of conversions by as much as 22%. Even if your “free” product is non-physical like shipping, cash towards a purchase you can still show a picture (a delivery truck, a pile of cash, a gift card).

  1. Create a landing page that is 4,499 words long.

Amazon’s landing page for Kindle is 4,499 words long.

That’s a really long landing page. What’s going on? Is Amazon being stupid?

You’ve probably heard the conventional wisdom on landing page length.

“Make it short.”

“You’ll lose people on a long page.”

“Don’t make users scroll!”

As one Unbounce article admitted about longform pages, “They’re ugly. They feel icky. You don’t want anything to do them.”

So marketers make short landing pages, cross their fingers, and hope that conversion rates will hit the roof.

I’ve discovered that long landing pages can be just as effective, if not more so, than short landing pages. Marketing Experiments tested the following two landing pages, and found that the long landing page produced a 220% improvement in conversions.

But long is boring, right? People don’t read long content, do they?

That’s what we’ve all been told. But that’s wrong. Web users read content that they are interested in. As long as that content is well-written, engaging, and relevant, people are going to read it. A landing page that tracks a user’s cognitive flow needs to be long, and it will convert better.

Basecamp’s landing page — unarguably long — is killing it with conversions. They are not shying away from lots and lots of content.

Here’s an idea of their landing page length:

On Crazy Egg, we created a landing page that was 20 times longer than the original. It boosted our conversions by 363%. Moz revamped their landing page, ballooning the size by a multiple of six. Conversions rocketed by 52%, netting Moz an additional $1 million.

Here’s a comparison of the Moz redesign:

3 Techniques That Will Double Your Social Media Content with Half the Effort Too often, doing social media can become a pain. This is especially true for startup environments, run by busy people with more “important” things to do than post on Twitter and check on Facebook engagement levels. But we all know, deep down inside, that social media is important. And we know that we have to do it. So we might as well figure out how to do more social media in less time and with less effort. The following tactical methods have been proven to produce twice the amount of social media with only half of the effort. The great thing about this approach is that higher output on social media generally produces a greater level of engagement. Here’s how to do it. 1. Create a schedule. When you create a social media schedule, you immediately reduce the level of consistent effort required throughout the day. The inherent advantage of social media is also its disadvantage. True, you can keep your brand message and presence in front of people all the time, but this requires consistent output and daily effort. When you unplug from one task to “quickly” post to social media, you’re doing yourself a serious disservice. You waste time on your current task by having to pause and then come back to it. Even if it takes just a couple minutes to post to social media, you’ve lost your entire train of thought on the project that you were working on. A couple of minutes interruption may require double that amount just to move your mind back to the point where you left off. You waste time on social media by having to reopen your social media tools or log into the accounts again. Keep in mind that every task has a cluster of other related tasks that require time. For example, if you’re not using a social media management tool, you may have to log into the business Twitter account. But in order to do that, you have to find the password. And in order to find the password, you have to look it up in an encrypted password file. And in order to do that, you have to find the file in your company’s intranet. It goes like this for every little task we have to do. What all this amounts to is a lot of wasted effort. The solution I’m proposing is to deal with your social media in a single session of unbroken concentration. The scheduling approach has three components. In the first place, you must set aside time in your calendar to schedule your social media. The approach I advocate is to allocate an hour (or two, or three) to deal exclusively with social media. This is your social media time. It’s on your calendar like an inviolable appointment. Most people who are responsible for social media report doing this on a daily basis. Some people — usually the very-organized type — can get away with doing it once weekly. Second, during this time, you schedule out your social media posts. Using a tool like Buffer, schedule out the times and messages that you want to post to your social media accounts. Be sure to follow industry best practices for the best time of day to post. The great thing about scheduling posts is that you can produce two or three times as many posts, but take a lot less time doing it. You can sit down for fifteen minutes and hammer out six tweets to release throughout the day. But what if you had to unplug at six separate times to post to Twitter? You’d go crazy, while at the same time cannibalizing your time and productivity. Scheduling your posts is a far superior approach. Third, take some time to monitor your social media metrics. This is the practice of social media listening, and it’s an integral part of any approach to social media. Rather than dink around checking out RTs and Facebook likes throughout the day, take a single point in time each day or week to analyze your metrics and make decisions based on what you see. Constantly flitting in and out of social media is a huge drain on your time, effort, and mental energies. Scheduling — whether it’s scheduling your day, your posts, or your listening — dramatically reduces the level of effort that you put into social media, while dramatically increasing your output. 2. Collect as you go. One of the most important features of posting to social media is also the most time-consuming — finding content to post. Vertical Response has found that the single-most time-consuming factor in social media management is “finding & posting content.” The amount of time and effort that you pour into finding and posting can be reduced. I already showed you how the simple practice of scheduling will reduce that effort. But what about the process of collecting the content to post? You need a collection system. Create a collection system for content. The system you choose is totally up to you, but let me provide a suggestion. I use Evernote along with the Evernote Chrome extension. In my Evernote folder, I can create a specific folder for things I want to collect and share later. Whenever I come across something interesting to post on social media, all I do is click the Evernote button in my browser. From there, I can adjust how I want this article to be saved for future reference. I’m putting it in a sub-folder of my social media folder called “Business Ideas.” I’m saving the “Bookmark,” not the entire article, and I’m tagging it with “social media.” I’ve also added a quick note: “This would be a good one to post on Tuesday.” When I click “save,” I now have this article saved in Evernote. When it’s time to schedule my articles for posting, I simply open up the correct Evernote folder and go to my saved bookmark. This is nothing more than a collection system. I’m simply taking the process of collecting content, and distilling it to a quick-and-easy process. As I move throughout my day, checking emails, visiting websites, doing research, etc., I will come across interesting articles, studies, or websites that I’d like to share. All I do is click my Evernote extension, and I’m done. It’s saved for the next day’s scheduling session. Create a focused time for content discovery. Another way to reduce your overall effort is to create a focused time for discovering great content. Buffer has an article on “Always Have an Amazing Link to Share,” in which they discuss some of the most effective places to find great content. This is a great starting point for discovering great links to share via social media. You should also do some spadework to discover your own content. I suggest a technique in my Buffer article, that requires spending just thirty minutes to come up with content to post for several days. This goes back to my whole thesis: With half the effort, you can produce double the content. You just have to be smart, scheduled, and intentional about it. 3. Share it more than once. Here’s the ultimate hack for less-effort/more-content. Share the same stuff more than once. There’s logic to back up this simple technique. Different people will see your different social media posts, depending on what time you post it. Joe checks his Twitter feed at 8am, but Marie doesn’t check her Twitter feed until her lunch break at 12:30. Joe’s going to see your morning tweet, but maybe not your noon tweet. So why not share the same thing twice? Or why not three times? Or more? Can you get away with this? Absolutely, and there’s nothing cheap about it at all. Garrett Moon discussed how he recycles his posts, and even shows his schedule for doing it. Moon has had zero complaints, higher interaction, more output, and even the possibility that some of the reshared content could go viral after several takes. If you share your content more than once, you can get three or four times as much mileage from a single post than you would if you were only to post it once. Obviously, you’d need to jigger it a few times to make it unique each time, but the overall principle is incredibly effort-saving and traffic-increasing. Conclusion Tips, tricks and hacks can make social media more effective than it is. But let’s be careful not to view social media as a waste of time. Although social media can be a black hole of time-wasting (if you do it wrong), it is actually an investment in your overall business marketing efforts. Increasing your output on social media while you reduce your effort is simply a matter of being smart and productive.

Conclusion

Risk-takers win. In the ever-evolving field of ecommerce, sometimes the riskiest moves are the best.

“Annoying” users with popups, giving stuff away for free, and dumping a long page on your visitors might be risky.

Basically, it’s a give and take process. You will be able to find increasing conversion rates if you offer free trials or software to your audience. In this case, your audience will recommend you to fellow internet users. You will gain more prospects with a little give back. In the field of ecommerce, giving will always be rewarding.

This article was written by Neil Patel at https://blog.kissmetrics.com. You Rock Neil.

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