4 Ways to Improve Sales at Your WooCommerce Store

Selling on WooCommerce? Then like millions of other e-tailers who rely on this WordPress powered shopping cart service, you want more sales. Presuming you have the proper products, selection and pricing in place, half the battle is already won.

But to really capitalize on long-term sales, you’ll want to take a few more steps to improve customer loyalty and retention. Here are four things you can start doing right now to make more out of every customer interaction.

Make Your Site Faster

Did you know that for every second a visitor waits to load a webpage their chance of converting reduces exponentially? A load time of three seconds can result in a customer bouncing away to a competitor’s site and placing the sale there instead.

In fact, for every second your website takes to load beyond one, the chances of customers leaving increases by 150% or more, second-per-second.

So, what can you do to improve your website speed?

Aside from talking to a developer that’s experienced in WordPress sites that are hosting WooCommerce stores, here are a few candid tips:

• Reduce the active plugins you have installed to increase overall site speed.
• Run a site speed optimizer plugin to find out what’s slowing your website down.
• Compress all images to conform with the new site speed standards issued by Google.
• Use custom CSS that reduces bloat and increases load time and page speed.
• Consider using a new hosting service that offers a higher bandwidth and faster speed.

If you’re not a web developer – and most of us aren’t – these suggestions might not make any sense to you. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t consult with a developer who can help you improve site speed, and thereby sales and conversions, across the board by making a few simple updates to your online store.

Keep the Shopping Cart Active

What is an active, commonly called a “persistent shopping cart,” and why does it matter in today’s online shopping world? First things first, a persistent shopping cart is like those that you see on Amazon.

Have you ever added a few items to the cart on Amazon but then clicked away to a different site only to return to and see that all your items were still in the cart? This is called a persistent shopping cart and it’s been shown to increase conversions by a large margin.

But why?

• Because around half of all shoppers webroom – which is the process of shopping around between different websites to find the lowest prices and fastest shipping.
• When you offer an active shopping cart, you’re saying “yes” to new sales because when those prospective shoppers return, all it takes is just a few clicks for them to checkout and become an active customer.

How you build the relationship from there is up to you, but our next tip can help you make the most of this, too.

Get a 360-Degree View of the Customer Journey

The customer journey is far from fickle. It begins with a product search, a need, an interest, a social media post, a conversation with a friend, and in many other ways. How you tap into this data and learn the behavior of your customers is the way that you can improve relationships and thereby loyalty.

To really put things in perspective, you’ll want a 360-degree view of this customer journey that enables you to map the DNA of your existing as well as prospective customers. To do this successfully, you’ll need a tool in your marketing arsenal, something called a WooCommerce CRM software solution. Here’s how it helps.

CRM for WooCommerce works by connecting to the shopping cart and importing the orders as they come in, generating detailed customer profiles that give you direct insight into each shopper. These metrics all integrate with your marketplace profiles, like Amazon and eBay, to give you a cross-channel picture, too.

Next, they help you maximize the benefits of this data by providing you with relationship building features like integrated customer notes, tagging, events, tasks and management and even email marketing tools complete with auto filters and more. With this type of leverage at your disposal, you’ll be able to connect with and understand your customers better, so you can improve relationships from day one.

Entice Customers to Sign-up for Newsletters

Who doesn’t like getting a great deal? Groupon knows this and has lured thousand of users into its fold by offering a great deal in exchange for an email address. You can, and should, follow this proven method at your online store as well.

• Offer subscribers a special, one-time deal for signing up to your email list, like 10% off their order.
• Use email personalization to reach out to customers on their birthdays to offer them a special deal.
• Send targeted, segmented emails every other week to increase sales uplift.
• A/B test your emails and modify them to improve click-throughs and purchases.

What’s more, this data can integrate with a CRM for WooCommerce, giving you even more ability to make your next marketing move resonate with your customers. Where you take things from there is entirely up to you.

But the chances are good that if you apply these proven methods and strategies to your marketing efforts, good things are yet to come for your online store.