As we’re going into the final stretch before the height of the shopping season I wanted to bring a few last-minute things you can implement to capitalize on your increased website traffic.
You work so hard to get attention for your brand and with the natural traffic increases coming your way it makes sense to do everything you can to not only grow your email list to increase the lifetime value of your customers but to also make sure that you’re capturing every dollar you can while they’re there right now.
Prefer to listen to the episode? Click here.
Add a Post-Purchase Cross-Sell to Increase Your AOV
This first tip I can’t really take credit for. I heard it on the Privy podcast, and the person who was sharing it experienced it from a brand they purchased from but the tactic was to offer a discounted gift card as a cross-sell after checkout. So instead of offering another product, they were offering a $100 gift card for $80. It’s a pretty smart idea because while the customer may not be ready to get another product right away, it’s a great way to guarantee a future purchase.
If you’d rather just move more of your inventory, I feel you – in that case, put a no-brainer product up there instead. Something that will make sense for 80% of your customers to purchase.
Implement SMS into Your Marketing Strategy
Speaking of future purchases – I talked all about how to bring your Q4 customers back in the new year on episode 171 a few weeks ago so definitely take a listen to that one if you haven’t already.
Next is to implement SMS if you haven’t taken the plunge yet. One of the recommendations I make for those who aren’t sure if their customers are going to be into SMS is to just add it to their sign-up form and see what happens. You’ve probably heard me talk about how I tested this with two past clients who had similar traffic and customers, one of them their SMS list blew up immediately – the other not so much. Ultimately you won’t know for sure until you test it and you can learn a lot faster if you’ve got enough people seeing that opt-in.
I’m not going to go too deep into the implementation of SMS here. I did talk about it on episode 18 a smidge. I will definitely be recording an updated episode in the new year – but to make sure you can get yourself started – think of SMS as a notification channel. It doesn’t replace email, it complements it. And if you use the SMS platform within your email platform it’s really easy to integrate these two together.
Easy Ways to Get Started with SMS
Some quick ideas on how to do this are to send an SMS as a follow-up if they don’t engage with their checkout abandonment email, to prioritize SMS for your back-in-stock notifications, and to send an SMS when a deal is expiring for instance.
If you do implement SMS and you’re a Shopify +
Implement an Exit Intent Pop-Up
This is also a great time to implement an exit intent pop-up. These trigger when someone is leaving your website so if they ignored your entry pop-up this is a last-ditch effort to get their attention. While these can be used for collecting emails and SMS, they don’t necessarily have to. In
Use Pop-Ups for More than Just Collecting Emails & Phone Numbers
Another way you can use pop-ups as a marketing tool is to let people know they can pick items up locally if you offer that. Create a segment in
Add a Teaser to Your Pop-Up So Customers Can Easily Get Back to Them
For those pop-ups that are collecting emails + phone numbers, make sure you add a teaser to your form. Teasers were launched earlier in the year on
Integrate Your Email Marketing Platform With Your Facebook Business Account
While you’re collecting lots of new email signups this Holiday season take the next step and integrate your email platform with Facebook Ads. Even if you’re not running ads right now, having the two platforms integrated means your Facebook ads audiences will be automatically updated with the new customer emails. This is a great complement to your pixel data and can help boost the success of your remarketing campaigns and lookalike audiences.
Add Payment Financing For Your Customers
Another thing you’ll want to turn on if you haven’t already is payment financing for your customers. You used to have to use tools like Afterpay or Klarna to do this so some eCommerce businesses didn’t bother – but now you can offer 4 interest-free installment payments through the Shop app. If you use Shopify payments, you already have access to this. If you’re not using Shopify payments because you sell a restricted product then you’ll have to use one of those third-party apps or speak to your payment gateway for options. Sezzle is the most liberal in terms of what types of products they allow, though higher-risk products come with higher fees.
Do An Audit Of Your Website
Do a quick audit of your website before the big day. Visit your website on desktop and on mobile in an incognito browser window and make sure there aren’t any pop-ups or widgets that you don’t realize are there. This happens more than you think and because you’re a returning visitor that has been cookie you don’t even see all the things that pop up.
Recently I’ve been turning off duplicate pop-ups, one from the theme and then one from the email marketing software. And very often you’ll find, especially on mobile that widgets are overlapping one another – like a rewards widget and a chat widget for instance. When you add the teaser to your sign-up form this can also happen – so just be as intentional as possible in terms of where you replace things.
Summary
Because every eCommerce business is different, with different products, different goals, different customers, etc. You don’t have to do everything on this list. Pick the ones that make the most sense for your business right now and re-consider these options as your business grows and evolves.
