WooCommerce and A/B Testing

If you’re looking at doing some A/B testing with your WooCommerce site then head over to Liquid Web to see the piece I wrote on A/B Testing for WooCommerce

A /B testing, also known as split testing, is the process you use when you test out two or more different versions of your content. That may be changing the button color on your products, testing out where you introduce other products a customer may be interested in, or how you ask for an email to grow your newsletter list. There are a few things to remember as you start with A/B testing on your WooCommerce store.

First off, you need to make sure that you’re only testing a single thing at a time for most sites. Sure you could change the font size of the product headings, and change the language on the buttons, and change their size and color. You could get lots of variations of your pages out of all that work.

The problem is, how do you know which variation positively affected your bottom line? Was it the color change? Maybe the language change? Did the font size make a difference at all?

Read the whole thing

Increasing the Average Order Price of your WooCommerce Store

Yup it’s Black Friday, and if you run an online store you should be working to increase the average order price. I just published an article on Liquid Web about this.

Today we’re going to look at some of the features WooCommerce offers out of the box to help store owners increase the average order price by showing users other products they may be interested in. We’ll explore why they may not be the best options for some stores. Then we’ll dig into how Smart Offers resolves many of the issues you can encounter with the stock WooCommerce related products options. Finally, I’ll walk you through how to set up Smart Offers on your WooCommerce site.

Read the rest at Liquid Web.

WooCommerce and Analytics

I wrote a post for Liquid Web on Getting Started with Analytics for your WooCommerce store.

One thing my clients often ask is whether my services include adding a site analytics package (usually Google Analytics) to their site. My usual response is that not having site analytics on their new store is like purchasing a new car and not getting the tires.

Yes, I set analytics up to work with WooCommerce for you the day your site goes live. Today we’re going to walk through adding Google Analytics to a WooCommerce site, and then more importantly, what you can do with the information once your site has been running for a while. We’ll end by looking at a few options that are not Google Analytics but will give you similar features.

You can read the rest on their site.

Adding a WooCommerce Store to Your WordPress Blog

Over at Liquid Web I addressed adding a WooCommerce store to your existing WordPress site. It includes a step by step walk through of WooCommerce setup and includes screenshots.

There comes a time in the life of many WordPress sites when you want to start selling something. Maybe you wrote an ebook, or are looking to offer a way for your users to support your work?

Whatever the reason is for looking to sell something if you’re on WordPress the easiest way to do this is to install WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a standalone plugin that sits on top of WordPress, and is very easy to use, has tons of support, and is very popular (for a good reason!).

Today I’m going to walk you through what it takes to set up WooCommerce on your WordPress blog. I’m also going to talk about a few extra plugins you may want to use to maximize your store.

Read the whole post at Liquid Web

Affiliates and WooCommerce

If you’ve ever wondered about affiliates for your site, then I tackled that topic recently for Liquid Web.

Getting traction on many stores is a hard thing. The “build it and they will come” idea just doesn’t hold up even to basic scrutiny. Many sites look at standard marketing like online ads and content marketing. A smaller number look towards adding affiliates to their store.

Today, I’m going to walk you through what it takes to have a good affiliate offering to attract high-quality people to your store. I’ll tell you some of the best methods to use to make sure that you have high-quality affiliates and to avoid fraud. Finally, we’ll look at helping your affiliates succeed and provide a quick overview of some options for setting up affiliates on your site.

Read the rest on Liquid Web

Setting up Pingdom on Your WordPress Site

I was recently doing some site optimization work for a client and find that there were a few setup steps with Pingdom that weren’t 100% clear.

Today we’re going to take a look at how you set up Pingdom to monitor your WordPress or WooCommerce site.

Taking your Online Store Offline

It’s fairly well understood that for most businesses an online store is a good thing. It will usually increase your reach into places you can’t reach from retail locations.

My latest column for Practical eCommerce talks about some tips for those online only stores so that they can make better connections offline.

Many brick-and-mortar stores have found success in migrating online. But the trend has reversed somewhat. Pure-play ecommerce companies are finding success with physical stores. We addressed the topic last month, in “Ecommerce Merchants Embrace Brick-and-mortar.” We cited the example of Warby Parker, which found that having locations for customers to try on glasses led to higher conversions.

Read Offline Sales Tips for Online Merchants

Membership Site Teardown Geeks Life

Today we’re going to look at a membership site called Geeks Life. As always we’re looking for three things.

  1. Recent decent design
  2. Regular content for users
  3. Clear call to action

Geeks life does a good job on all points. Watch the video to hear the full commentary.

Site Tear Down – The Willoughby Book Club

Today we’re going to look at The Willoughby Book Club.

As always we’re looking for three things:

  1. Reasonably recent design
  2. Content that engages readers
  3. Clear call to action

First off, the slider is not great. Not only does it do something funny on an iPad Pro, people don’t look at sliders. Something like 98% of people never look at the slider. Out of the 2% remaining 99% look at the first slide.

Sliders are only useful for telling your boss that you have all 5 of their ideas on the homepage.

After that, the design is decent. Minimal and nothing fancy which is far preferable to a design that is fancy and ugly or outdated.

For content, they really don’t have much. A bunch of text lists and stuff but nothing that’s going to get me coming back to see what’s up with the book club. I’d love to see them showing off their bundles on the site so that I see what I’m missing because I’m not subscribed. Maybe even do a reading each month for one of the books and do it right on Youtube?

Finally, call to action? Well they have a bunch so it’s not super clear the exact action I should be taking right off the bat. If this was my client I’d have them make one single call to action that linked to some video or maybe an email series that explained the club.

Overall, the site isn’t bad, but it could be refined to be a much more effective sales tool for them.

Coaching Site Teardown – Natalie Bell

Today we’re going to do a site teardown. I really just randomly searched for a site in a field where I know there are a bunch of poor sites so I have no idea who the coach is that we’re looking at.

On every site teardown we’re going to be looking for a few things:

  1. Reasonably recent design
  2. Content that engages readers
  3. Clear call to action

Today we’re going to look at Natalie Bell.

First off, the design is clearly dated. I always find this discouraging because it’s so easy to get a decent design that’s current. Head over to StudioPress or Array Themes or The Theme Foundry and purchase a recent design.

Heck even head over to WordPress.org and get a free theme that looks decent. It’s not hard to get a credibility upgrade by having a decent design.

Second, content to engage readers. Looking at Natalie’s homepage we can see that she was on the Today Show. I’m sure that this gave her a boost in credibility, but that’s really the only content we have from her. If we look at her blog, the most recent post was from late 2017 and then it quickly heads back to 2013.

Nor do I see any social media profiles like Instagram that might be driving traffic to her coaching programs.

If you want to get your membership site found, you need some content that is going to be compelling.

Finally, call to action. If we look at Natalie’s homepage, we don’t see any clear and obvious CTA’s. Her contact link in the top navigation is the same as everything else. Her “book here” or really any of her links that are CTA’s look exactly the same as the rest of the content.

Further, there are no less than 9 actions she gives you the opportunity to take right on the homepage. Keep your CTA to one main thing, that’s it. The rest of the stuff needs to not even get in the face of anyone.

Recommendations for Natalie Bell

  1. Update the design
  2. Start getting some content out there that is engaging

– If you’re not sure how to do this I recommend reading 10x Marketing
3. Get a single clear main call to action on the top of the page

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