How to get customers back to your online store
Over 80% of all shopping carts are abandoned costing eCommerce marketing teams literal billions in advertising dollars per year. It’s extremely frustrating because having people come all the way to your site and engage is a huge feat considering there are literally millions of online shopping options they have. When they bounce, there is a very slim chance they will make it back to your site without some effort on your part.
Just a few small adjustments to your customer experience and online store interface can bring potential customers back to your shop and increase your sales exponentially.
Make collecting customer information a priority on all landing pages:
94% of the potential customers that make it to your site for the first time are not there to make a purchase and the vast majority of those will bounce fairly quickly. Even if they are truly interested, the likelihood of them bookmarking or remembering your site are slim. You need to build in ways to collect customer information to retarget and begin a sales process with them off your site to get them back to purchase. Add actionable CTAs that prompt potential customers to give you their email. Incentivize this with a discount code or first look at your upcoming products, etc. Make sure email collection is present on every possible landing page, including blogs and individual product pages.
Build engaging and helpful email workflows (not annoying ones):
Once customers do agree to give you their email, make sure you are building a constructive and not annoying relationship. If once them give you their email, you do nothing but spam them with offers and an email every single time you add a product, they are highly likely to unsubscribe or being just ignoring your messages, even if they were interested. One way to avoid being another annoying company and increase your open rates is email personalization and targeting. Use a tool to send emails tailored to potential customers preference, demographic, and past behavior on your site. 79% of customers do not consider offers from companies unless they are personalized and relevant to them.
Deliver more than just products, sell an experience:
Some of the top performing eCommerce online stores go far just a page with products and reviews. People go to Amazon for that these days. If you’re a small online store, there is not a good chance that you will beat out Amazon products on shipping or price. You need to deliver something beyond the products to be competitive. Create a brand story and culture that speaks to your target audience that they want to be a part of. Some ways that brands build an experience online that gets potential customers coming back are:
- Lookbooks of products
- Content and articles that are interesting
- Suggested combinations
- Consistent and interesting social media pages
- Work with influencers and personalities within your industry
If you create an experience with a brand that goes beyond just products, potential customers are much more likely to return to your site and continue to keep up with what you’re putting up on your site and social media. The key is consistency and diversity. Learn about how you can take engaged traffic and turn them into customers.
Ad Retargeting:
This is one is pretty much a no brainer and very common yet effective. It takes very little time to set up and manage. If you’re going to be paying for ads to bring a potential customer to your website one time but it takes 3-4 visits to your site to get them to purchase, you’re going to want to maximize your budget and retarget the same potential customers who were interested previously. Using a tool like AdRoll, you can retarget users that have already expressed interest in your site and begin to push along the buyer process. You can even target them with items they viewed or offer them discounts as incentive to come back and take action.
Show you’re changing and build a sense of urgency with consistent updates:
If potential customers get to your site and see there is very little change or “events” (sales, deals, new products) happening, there is very low sense of urgency to take action or check back. If you have new products, deals, updates, new content, etc. clearly displayed, it’s much more likely that customer are going to take more immediate action.
One potential tool you can use for this is Beamer. Beamer is an in-site news feed of updates that anyone who comes to your site can explore. All users have to do is click a “What’s New” in your navigation or an icon in the interface to open up a whole feed of updates. You can create updates for new products, sales, discount codes, upcoming releases, etc. You can also target updates towards specific user groups by demographic, location, language, or past behavior on your site. Beamer has the option to enable push notifications as well to bring potential customer back. Once users have opted into your notifications, they will be send a desktop notification that brings them back to your site. It’s perfect or announcing sales and new releases and inspiring immediate action back on your site.
Don’t waste time and money on advertising to customers that will never come back and make a purchase. Just a few simple tools and tricks like these that take no time to set up and start implementing can help bring back customers and get them to the point of purchase.
