Presentatation by Roger Willcocks at Sheerluxe B2B conference, London, 13th & 14th May 2015 - 50 tips to improve your online sales performance

1. roger@screenpages.com
50 ways to increase your online sales

2.  300+ e-commerce websites since 1997
 Substantial e-commerce website experience (ca. 100 yrs)
 Magento specialists since 2009 (ca. 100 implementations)
Screen Pages key facts

4. Best practice e-commerce
Bespoke/customised websites – down to the
last pixel
Professionally designed & specified &
constructed
Heavily content-managed by you
Functionally rich/complex + integrated with
ERP/back office
Fast, reliable & scaleable
It’s going to be changed almost as soon as it’s
Our philosophy to website building

5. Agenda
Getting new customers
Engaging customers
Persuading them to buy
Making it simple to purchase
Getting them to come back

6. No silver bullets…
….it’s good old-fashioned hardwork

7. First…measure
 Analytics – build a custom dashboard
 Surveys
 Usability studies
50 ££s of dynamite

8.  Order confirmation page
 Three questions
 One text box
 Surveymonkey £26 p.m.
The answer to the “survey debate”

9. Getting new customers
 Email
 SEO
 PPC
 Referrals (Sheerluxe emails)
 Affiliates
 Marketplaces
 Catalogues/lists
 Offline (eg PR)
 Hidden gem: retargeting

10. Getting new customers
Source Traffic Conversion £ per visit
Brand related searches 14.5% 6.3% £4.45
Generic search 14.1% 1.5% £0.55
Paid search 19.9% 3.4% £2.74
Email marketing 20.6% 4.9% £2.73
Referrals 10.5% 2.4% -
Average 3.9% £2.64

11. Funny thing, conversion rate

12. SEO basics
 Page titles
 Meta data
 Keywords in copy (& other places)
 Sitemap
 You should be able to “content-manage” the onsite assets
 It’s all about (interesting) content
 You can’t trick Google
 Mobile is now a big issue for many

13. Other ways to get in Google
1.
2.
3.
4.

14. Content marketing dumbed down
Category page copy (hardest pages *** more later)
On domain blog (Wordpress, please)
Content pages optimised for target keywords
 How to…
 Buying guides
 FAQs
 Ideas/inspiration etc

15. Articles, style guides [& video]

16. Buying guides

17. How to & tips

18. Social Media
 Facebook Like & Tweet (or Share This)
 Distribute your content
 Make videos, host on Youtube & embed
 Get a channel
 But:
 Ca. 1% of traffic & 0.1% conversion
 Exception: “causes”

19. • Case study
 Holy Grail at the end of the ‘long tail’?
 3,729 search terms = 55% of sales
 5x increase in generic traffic in 6 months
 Increase from 5% to 10% of total traffic
• Looking good!?
SEO – holy grail?
 6% of total sales (vs. 10% of traffic) = lower conversions & ROI
 No. 5 “swiss watches” = 400 visits per month & no sales
 First page for “watches” (negative ROI)

20.  PR
 Catalogues
 Inserts
Offline marketing

21. How to get good PR

22. 27%
21%Mobile opportunity?

23. 2.9%
0.9%
4.5%
Mobile conversions

24. Mobile usage

25. Speed matters
Each second costs you a 7% decrease in conversions

26.  85,000+ visitors on both 13th & 14th November
 20,000 orders processed
 Appeal raised £32m
 Two front-end, load balanced servers
 One database server
 Magento Enterprise
 Synchronised with eBay store
 Integrated with warehouse
Scale, load & peaks

27. Engaging customers
 New/latest/sale
 Promotions (regular & varied)
 Content (lots of it) & photography (lifestyle)
 Make your landing pages compelling (category & product pages)
 Navigation
 Categorisation is critical
 Dropdowns (esp. multi-layered)
 Filters (price, colour etc – but caveat)
 Put your products in the “right” order

28. Navigation

29. Customer engagement fail

30. % landings bounce%
Home page 39% 17%
Category page 22% 31%
Product page 19% 56%
i.e. not on the home page. Opportunity.
Where do visitors land?
37%
37%

31. Special case: category pages
 25-50% of all entrances
 40-50% of all page views
 Three roles:
 Landing pages
 Routing pages
 Conversion pages (with add to basket)
 Yet, sadly overlooked…
Remember:
68% of people don’t arrive on the home page.
About 4 in 10 of these bounce

32. Category page

33. Product pages
 Bullets and copy
 Photography/video
 Call(s) to action / how to transact / service
 Reviews/testimonials
 Why are you selling it?
 Instructions
 Delivery & returns
 What if it’s not quite the right product?
 What goes with this?

37. Write great copy
Buy this

38. Anatomy of a product page
Link: http://www.smartinsights.com/conversion-optimisation/product-page-optimisation/retail-product-page/

39. Persuading them to buy
What makes a good proposition?

40. But first: meet your competitors

41.  Desirable products
 Well presented
 Attractively priced
 Securely paid for
 Nicely delivered
 Communicated on every page
What makes a good proposition?

43. Persuading visitors to buy
Service & “hygiene factors”
Delivery
Returns
Packaging
Call-centre

45. Customer service
Source:: E-consultancy

46. Work on delivery options
 Standard delivery (free?)
 Next day premium
 Nominated delivery
 ….and communicate them

47. Reviews & ratings (social endorsement)
Onsite or offsite

48. Make it simple to purchase
 Basket
 Security
 Big buttons (especially for mobile)

49. Show your beautiful packaging

50. Make it simple to purchase
 Integrated payments (+ alternate methods)
 No distractions (different header?)
 Registration or not?
 Language & tone
 Example: “pay securely now” vs. “submit”

51. Quiz time: which checkout performs best?

55. Abandonned basket chaser
 13.3% of such emails are clicked
 35% of these clicks lead to a
purchase
 AOV is 19% higher

56. Getting them back
 Conversion data
 Surveys/Analytics
 Trigger emails
 Email marketing (once a week now, twice for VIPs)
 Loyalty schemes
 Catalogues
Recent survey
26% had 20%+ of traffic from emails.
20% had email traffic converting at 8%+

57.  Build your email database
 Those that do it well, benefit extremely well
 It can performs at 4-7 times regular traffic
 Emails are increasingly opened on mobiles
Guidance:
1. Design your transactional emails
2. Manage & update their content
3. Tag them for Google Analytics
Read this article:
http://www.screenpages.com/email-marketing-20-ways-to-expand-your-email-database
Email marketing (best converting traffic)

58. Loyalty schemes

59. Plan your attack

60. But first….
1. Agree & quantify business goal
2. Breakdown into key activities
3. Identify metrics for each activity set
4. Define activities to achieve the metrics
5. Measure results
“A goal without a plan is just a wish”

61. Planning taps you can turn
New
customers
Existing
customers
Visits/traffic sources % increase % increase
Orders/conversions % increase % increase
Average order values % increase % increase

63. Ling’s Cars £35m
“…On a website, you are competing with
You Tube, porn sites and Facebook. You are
not trying to out-bore your local council
website. So, open the energy taps, eat
sugar and get on with something exciting.
Split testing/focus groups etc, is just a fast
road to the lowest common denominator,
just as you see in politics; boring.”

64. Things change

65. Keep it simple
“The best website is one that the
customer doesn’t notice”
Source: Screen Pages’ 5th E-commerce Forum, 2013

66. Bonus tip: pick the right platform & agency

67.  Tinkering
 Wasting time on the SEO black hole
 Looking at your site on a PC
3 things to stop & 3 things to start
 Listen to the voice of your customers
(analytics, user testing, surveys)
 Send targeted, personalised emails
(automatically)
 Create more & better content

68. roger@screenpages.com
@screenpages
01932 359 160
Thank you