SFNdesign

Category: Conversions

  • Increasing WooCommerce Sales at Checkout

    If you’ve got someone at your online store already making a purchase, they already trust you. That means you can use this time to provide more value to them and increase your sales.

    I wrote more about this in my recent article for Practical eCommerce.

    Increasing sales from shoppers that are in the process of buying is easier than recruiting new customers. In-process shoppers have jumped the trust barrier.
    In this post, I’ll address five ways to increase sales from consumers who have added items to a WooCommerce shopping cart.

    Read the whole article.

  • More Automation Tips for WooCommerce

    Here is my latest post at PracticalEcommerce:

    There is so much to manage with an ecommerce store. You need to maintain adequate stock. You have customer issues, server and hosting issues, and software bugs.

    A store owner should focus on the big picture items, not managing every detail. In this post, I’ll address six WooCommerce plugins that can automate details of your store management.

    Read the whole post

  • Abandoned Cart Recovery on Practical Ecommerce

    New post at Practical Ecommerce on abandoned cart emails, why you should do them and how to get them setup.

    In “Optimizing Checkout Flow in WooCommerce,” my previous article, I offered tips on reducing abandoned carts by streamlining the checkout process. To be clear, however, you could spend years optimizing your checkout process and not eliminate abandoned carts.

    There are options to bring shoppers back to your store once they’ve moved on to other things. One of the best ways is to send emails to shoppers about the products they’ve left in their carts.

    Read the rest at Practical Ecommerce

  • Developing your member personas so you can target your marketing

    Developing your member personas so you can target your marketing

    In my last post I talked about the importance of building your marketing to speak to all levels of your prospective customers. You can’t only focus on the experts and those that know you well. You need to spend time nurturing those that are getting to know you.

    This task of speaking to all your prospective members is easier once you’re already established. You can pick people you’ve met right out of your community and use their traits in your persona’s. If you’re developing a new membership site, it’s a much harder endeavor.

    You don’t have members that you can draw on for inspiration. Instead you need to build up these persona’s from scratch.

    Here is the research strategy I use with my clients when we are looking deeper in to their market to develop their marketing strategy.

    Develop your keywords

    Before you can dive in to the research phase you need to know what you’re looking for. You’ll need a few keywords to use in your content research.

    For this site I’ve used:

    • WordPress Membership site
    • Membership site
    • WordPress Membership
    • and a few others

    I walked through each of the terms using the research template below. Now I wasn’t new to the WordPress Membership site market so it didn’t take me long to work through each term. In many cases I didn’t even need to click through the search results because I knew what the site was about.

    The newer you are to your market the longer this should take.

    Blogs

    It all starts with blogs. Yes there are many other social networks and media channels that can bring in prospects, but blogs are king. Blogs are text that’s easily read by search engines. This is going to help you now because you’re going to use Google to investigate other sites in your niche.

    Start by going go Google and typing blog: $keyword where $keyword is one of your search keywords.

    Make note of the names of the site. Check the comments and make note of the names of the people that have something good to contribute.

    Forums

    Next we’re going to dig in to the forums for your industry. Again, go to Google and search forum: $keword. Make note of the sites that come up.

    Visit the forums that come up and make note of the names of the participants. Make note of the brands that are mentioned.

    If the forum has a search function use it to search for ‘help’ or ‘question’. Doing this can help you see what problems your customers suffer from.

    YouTube

    YouTube is the second biggest search engine. While the medium lends itself to less text, you can still glean lots of information by watching the top videos in your market.

    Use each of your keywords in the search field. Watch the videos and make note of the people that are doing them. It’s likely you’ll start to see some overlap here between the blogs and those that produce video.

    Also note the brands and products that are mentioned.

    Take a minute to look at the comments to see if the viewers are asking any questions. Make note of these questions because they are problems that your possible clients are having.

    Podcasts

    Next up let’s dig in to podcasts. Use the following search with your keywords to find podcasts in your field.

    "$keyword (incontent:podcast OR intitle: podcast OR inurl:podcast or inurl: episode)"

    As with the other search’s, make note of the names you see. What brands are mentioned? Who makes comments on the episodes?

    As you see repeats across your research, add stars beside the ones that keep coming up.

    Influencers

    If you’ve don’t the rest of this well then you’ve likely amassed a list of influencer’s. It’s time to dig a bit deeper in to them. Start by using their name to see if they have a site. If you they do and they dominate the results for their name (and they likely will) then add -influencersite.com to your searches to exclude their sites.

    With this research in hand you’re ready to dive in deeper to your marketing. You know the podcasts you should be trying to get on. You should have seen the same brands and sites come up a number of times. Target these as the relationships you want to build.

    You’ll also have a great handle on the users in your industry. You can use this to develop the persona’s that you need to be marketing to.

    Every time I tweak my content marketing or business positioning I work through the process above to make sure that I’m targeting my prospects properly.

    PS: If you need help digging in to your market we should talk.

    photo by: edwicks_toybox

  • Plan your content so you talk to all your prospects

    Plan your content so you talk to all your prospects

    Every piece of content that comes out of your business should be aimed at a specific person in your target audience. Writing content with no target person in mind will lead to unfocused content. Unfocused content is not compelling. Content that’s not compelling won’t bring readers.

    In addition to targeting a single person for each piece of content, you need to make sure that you spread your marketing efforts across all the experience levels of your prospects. It does you little good to only talk to the people who have followed your work ‘forever’. Nor is it effective to always target those that have been recently introduced to your work.

    I’ve been building membership sites for years, but not all of my clients have. When I mention churn, a number of my prospects don’t know what I’m talking about. The longer I’ve been building websites the more I’m tempted to use insider terms that my clients don’t understand.

    Don’t fall victim to this trap. Maybe you have been running your Crossfit Box for years and all your marketing efforts unintentionally assume that the person you’re talking to knows what a Power Clean is. Most of the people looking for a place to workout with a group that they can connect with won’t know what that is and using insider language will make them feel like they can never be an insider.

    Your marketing should make them feel like they can be insiders and that working with you is the best way to get what they want.

    How to make sure you speak to all your prospects

    The first step to making sure that you speak to every level of prospect is to define who they are. That means sitting down and developing ‘personas’ for your business. A persona is nothing more than a name you use to describe a certain type of prospect. Maybe ‘Ben’ is the beginner that you talk to.

    Your persona’s should cover three areas in your business. First, you should have that beginner. Second you need to develop a persona for your intermediate prospect. They know a bit about your field, but aren’t experts yet. Finally, you develop the expert persona. This final one knows lots about the same things you do, but they look to you as a leader in the field.

    With these three persona’s developed it’s time to look at your content. Assuming you’re writing once a week you should work to have 1 blog post a month geared towards beginners. Two should be directed to your intermediate persona and the final 1 post should address the concerns that your expert has.

    This break down of persona’s should go for all your marketing efforts. Go to conferences where you’ll meet colleagues, but don’t only go to those. Make sure you head out to meet the beginners in your field.

    Most sites slowly start to neglect the beginners. This is a death knell for your sales funnel because beginners are looking for someone to walk along with them. If that’s not you, then when they’re ready to purchase as intermediate or experts, they’re following someone else that talked to the beginners.

    If you need help developing your marketing plan we should talk.

    photo by: cross_stitch_ninja

  • Smooth User Onboarding

    Something that some sites do well is onboard their users. For those not familiar with the term onboarding I’ll define it.

    Onboarding: Walking new users through a series of step designed to help them get the most out of your site.

    Most membership sites do nothing about user onboarding at all. They don’t spend time identifying what the key things a good long term member has done. Then since they don’t have that information they don’t do anything to make sure that all new users do those same things.

    Cushion

    I recently got beta access to Cushion and it did a great job of walking you through the 3 steps you need to do to setup your account. You can see the 3 steps below.

     

    One thing that’s not 100% clear in the shots above is that the only thing on the page during the onboarding process is the goal you need to currently accomplish.

    Nothing distracts you from the task at hand.

    How are you going to figure out what the key things are your long term members have done? How are you going to define your onboarding process?

  • How to increase email engagement

    Yup we’re still talking about email. Here’s what we’ve covered so far.

    Today we’re going to talk about how we increase the conversions in our email campaigns.

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    What’s a good conversion?

    First off what is a good conversion rate for email? According to MailChimp it can depend a bit on your industry. A good ‘rule of thumb’ for a while is somewhere between 1 – 5% of the people that get your email will actually click on something in it.

    Currently my opens are around 39% and my click through rate is 10% which is high but has actually come down as I’ve built my email list more. As I’ve cast my net wider I’ve been pulling in a few more people that aren’t super fans of my content.

    That’s not technically a bad thing since it’s still more people and overall more people are interacting with my sites, but it can feel a bit like a fail as your clicks and opens go down.

    Another thing to remember is that all conversions aren’t the same. Is it better to have 2.5% conversions on a $.99 product or 1% on a $900 product?

    You’re going to make much more with that 1% conversion. So don’t just look at the raw number figure out which type of conversion is best for you.

    What’s your goal

    Before you start your email, what is your goal? Is it a regular content message so you stay valuable to your readers or is it time to make a bit of a pitch to them?

    If it’s a content email then maybe the tips below aren’t what you should be using for this particular email.

    Watch that subject line

    First off you need to hook the email reader so that they open your email and that means writing a compelling subject. Did you know that email subjects of fewer than 10 characters convert better than longer titles?

    A great way to lead in is to put a question in the subject line. Maybe even make it a bit shocking/funny to intrigue them. How about “Did you know that you wake up with a zombie?” for an email about a better morning routine.

    ‘How to’ subject lines also work well. For our morning routine email we could use “How to wash the morning zombie out of your brain”.

    There are a number of other awesome ways to write subject lines and Campaign Monitor has a great post on them all.

    The takeaway is, don’t just write something and let it go. Put some thought in to your email subject lines and you’re going to get a better opening rate.

    Personalize the email

    Do you like talking to someone that obviously hasn’t done any research on you or someone that actually engages with you? Pretty obviously you prefer to talk to someone that has actually taken time to do some research on you and knows your name.

    All the email providers have the ability to use a ‘fill in’ which is a bit of placeholder text that becomes the user’s name when the email is sent.

    Make sure you use their first and last name in their email if you have them.

    I regularly go through my MailChimp lists and try to find out the first/last names of the subscribers and put them in to MailChimp and when I do, opens and subscribes get higher.

    Invite personal reply

    What’s your biggest business problem? I’d love to hear about it at curtis@curtismchale.ca.

    See that, that’s a question and when you put those in your email broadcasts your going to get replies. Yes that’s work but there is no magic bullet to building a solid email list with great fans of your brand.

    Asking them a question and engaging them will increase your conversions on later emails as well because they now have a person connection with you.

    Send it again

    You may think that because someone didn’t open your email they aren’t interested in what you have to offer, but that’s totally not true.

    Look at what Nathan Barry says about his second email for the launch of his Authority book.

    …that email drove $5000 in revenue

    He made around $26,000 in 24 hours on the product launch and $5000 of that came from the second email. That’s users that didn’t purchase with the first email and it’s almost 20% of the total revenue.

    If you can, track the conversions on your email list right through to the site then segment out the users that already purchased your product and only send the second email to those that haven’t purchase.

    If you can’t then send the email to everyone on the email list again. Remind them when the sales window is about to close and invite them to purchase again. Provide them with the coupon you gave your email list (if you gave them one).

    Make it easy for them to buy from you.

    Make it mobile friendly

    Please oh please make your email mobile friendly. According to reports between 48% – 55% of email opens happen on a mobile device.

    You know you do it to, roll over and check your email before you’ve even had breakfast. Maybe it’s just to delete the crap you don’t want in your inbox, but you at least look at them all.

    Mobile users are increasingly purchasing on their mobile devices with 1/3 of all eCommerce purchases being made on a smartphone in 2013.

    So right in your users hand is a device that they’ll check first thing in the morning and then use to make purchases.

    One of the best resources for mobile friendly emails are the MailChimp email blueprints they put out for free.

    For my email lists I use a basic MailChimp template since it’s already ready for a mobile device. They simply work and you don’t need fancy you need something that converts.

    Ask them to share the email

    Once the email has been opened and actions have been taken make sure you ask them to share the email with someone they think would find the content useful.

    A personal recommendation from a friend goes a long way to building trust with a customer you may not have contact with.

    The easiest way to approach this is to simply write it in to the initial email you send. Something like “If you know someone that will benefit from this email list please share it with them”.

    In MailChimp you can also segment users to find the top openers/clickers on your list and send them a custom email thanking them for their participation in your content and encouraging them to share it with a friend that would also benefit from your content.

    Which ever way you do it, make sure you ask your subscribers to tell their friends about your email list to help build it.

    photo credit: wbaiv cc

  • Don’t always just ask for the sale in your email list

    Last week I talked about the fact that if you’re not building an email list you’re leaving sales on the table.

    But how on earth do you use it? Do you just blast people with the sales you have? Do you email them daily or weekly or monthly? Do you send extra emails during the holiday’s or for big sales?

    The 80/20 rule

    The best rule of thumb to start with is the old 80/20 rule. Provide 80% useful free content to your email subscribers and only ask for sales 20% of the time.

    By bombarding them with requests to purchase all the time all you’re going to do is tire them out and make your real call to action when you’re launching a new product something that your users are blind to.

    If they even read your email anymore.

    Now putting a ‘brought to you by’ section with a link to a product you sell at the end of every email is different. That’s a ‘soft sell’ that people will just see in the bottom.

    When I’m talking about not selling to them, I’m saying that you shouldn’t just make the whole email about selling for 80% of the email you’re sending.

    What’s in the 80%

    So you’ve got the 20% taken care of right. You’ll write some stellar copy (hey have you seen the CopyHackers material on awesome copy?) and people will purchase your content in droves.

    What goes in the 80% though?

    For my email list on my personal site I email weekly and most of the time I send people the content from my blog post for the day.

    I also send them some awesome content I’ve found around the web during the week that’s not mine.

    Yup I may even send them to competitors and no I don’t worry about it at all.

    See I’m the one that found it so I’m still the contact to the competitor. I’m the one that will be remembered as the connector, even if they purchase from the competitor.

    The goal is to make sure that you’re providing relevant content to your subscribers so that they keep opening your emails and reading them. If they’re not opening them then they’re not going to see when you’re launching something new so they’re not going to purchase it.

    The exception

    The only exception to the 80/20 rule is when the sole purpose of your email list is to send people information on products. That’s what AppSumo does so all you get from them is emails on deals they have on products.

    Screen Shot 2015-01-17 at 8.20.17 AM

    If that’s the type of email list you’re building then my all means email about products all the time.

    No go forth

    Now it’s time to set up that email list (I recommend MailChimp and Leadin) and start using it for awesome content so you can get more sales.

    Not sure how to set it up, get in touch and we can help.

  • Increasing Membership site conversion

    What’s the main thing you need if you run a membership site?

    Paying members that keep paying you.

    There are 2 aspects at work here:

    1. Getting new members
    2. Retaining existing members

    We know that it’s safe to assume that it costs 5 times more to get a new member than retain an existing one (PDF download).

    Today we’re going to look 2 ways you can learn about your user interaction with your site with an eye to increasing paid users of your site.

    Start with a survey

    Before you can set up your email campaign you’re going to need to know where the pain points are for your users. One of the best ways to figure that out, is to simply ask them.

    You’re going to need to customize the questions based on your site but here are a few to get you started.

    • What was the hardest part of the course?
    • Was there a module you particularly struggled with?
    • How could we increase your success in the course?
    • Why did you (or did you not) sign up for the mastermind coaching package?
    • Was it easy to find the membership content?
    • Was there something in the membership content that you expected to see but didn’t?

    Not only are you going to find some key pain times for your users, you’re also going to find some things that you’ve simply missed.

    Maybe users expected a link to their account on a page of the Web site that you didn’t even figure needed one. Maybe your login process is hard for some users.

    Maybe you have users that need assistive devices (think lack of good vision) and your site is hard for them to use.

    That’s the type of stuff you’re trying to find out with this survey. Make sure to ask open ended questions and give users lots of space to write as much as they want.

    Sometimes it’s obvious

    Now you may not actually need to do a full survey because the problem may be obvious.

    For a recent client of SFNdesign there was a waiting period of up to 2 months from product purchase to course start. That was a big pain point where someone was waiting for the material they purchased to actually become useful to them.

    They had 30% of people that didn’t show up to the course. Worse, they had a number of paid customers that asked for a refund in a few days and their reasons came down to wanting the content now and feeling they could get similar content somewhere else.

    For that client we did a few things to stop the refunds and increase engagement.

    First we cut the wait period and took smaller classes starting on the first of each month. This change meant people that just didn’t show up dropped from 30% to around 18%. They were also more likely to stay around and pay for the monthly mastermind sessions after the intensive course was done.

    Second, we added a follow up email campaign to users.

    Within 2 days of purchase we sent the users a great PDF that summarized a bunch of the main points that the course would make. This provided them value right away and kept them interested in the course.

    Our second email was a bunch of tips on how to maximize the course when it started. We gave them tips on the forum and how to figure out which mentor was best for them.

    Our third email came the day before the course started, reminding them about the course and pointing them to the ‘course success’ page which covered much of the same content in our second email.

    Customize it to your users

    Maybe it’s not obvious though and maybe you don’t have highly engaged users that will fill out a survey. How on earth are you going to convert trial members to paid members of your site?

    Using tools like Intercom you can track how users are using your site. This can help you identify the things that the paid users do.

    In this great example from Ghost which saw a 1000% increase in paid users they used Intercom to identify that users needed to add themes and make a post before they really were ready to pay for the service.

    Ghost conversion increase

    With that information in hand they added a ‘Getting Started’ checklist that showed up in a user dashboard. This encouraged users to actually complete their account which in turn makes them more likely to convert to paid users of the Ghost blogging platform.

    Wrapping it up

    Just because you have a membership site, doesn’t mean you have any paying members. Make sure you build a solid follow up email campaign with tools like Follow Up Emails for WooCommerce.

    Identify the things that your paying best members do and build in ways to encourage your new members to do the same things.

    Don’t just put up your content and hope it’s going to speak for itself.

  • Do you have password issues blocking sale conversions

    Passwords are hard.

    I’ve got over 1000 of them when I look at the information from clients.

    They should all be different and they should all be long and random so they can’t be guessed.

    Are you making it harder

    I recently wanted to purchase a course from How to Fascinate based off an email they sent me.

    I clicked through the email.

    Then read the text and watched the video.

    Then added it to my cart.

    Then filled in a bit of personal information.

    Then it asked if I had an account, and I did so I went to sign in.

    But unfortunately it didn’t work so I checked my password on their main site again.

    Well it worked on the main site.

    So I tried it again on the purchase portal, and it didn’t work.

    And I couldn’t sign up for the course.

    The likely problem

    Unfortunately you encounter bad usability like this on a regular basis.

    Typically it means that the sign up form allows 50 character passwords while the sign in form only allows 20. Thus your 50 character password is now actually 20 characters.

    But of course the site never told you.

    Worse is when the sign up form allows special characters (!$^) but the login form strips them out. Or maybe the sign up form allows you to enter them, but just removes them from the password.

    Reporting

    Being a good web developer I reported the bug and was basically told they know about the password issue but they’d like me to sort out how many characters a password can be because they know it’s a problem but they don’t have a real answer.

    So their password problem should be solved by me their customer?

    They weren’t even sure where the problem was exactly. Is it 20 characters or 25 or does it cut ‘funny’ characters like #?

    But as the customer I’m supposed to figure that out for them so I can purchase their product.

    How many conversions do you drop?

    It’s likely that for every complaint you get about issues like that on your site you actually have it happen 10x more without being reported.

    So you could be getting 10 extra sales for every one complaint or 100 sales for 10 complaints.

    It just doesn’t make good business sense to leave the problem up to your customers to solve. Even if all 10 people that complain do stick through and purchase you’ve dropped the other 90 you never heard from.

    Getting a lot of spam on your forms? Don’t add a CAPTCHA that just makes it harder for real users to submit the form and forces them to solve your problem.

    If you’d like a review of your site for conversion issues get in touch with us. We can help you find and fix issues that are killing your conversions.