In our September newsletter, we posed the following question to 2000+ fellow digital marketers and eCommerce readers:
As eCommerce marketer, what’s your biggest eCommerce challenge to growing your business?
To limit the range of possible options, we proposed 3 general areas.
- Grow visitor traffic
- Convert visitors into customers
- Get more returning customers
Well, the results are in! ?
While the responses are insightful, we are not entirely surprised by the results.
Nearly half of the respondents (45% to be exact) considers sales conversion optimization as a major eCommerce challenge. This corresponds to recent studies that place visitor abandonment to ~92% of all eCommerce traffic after just browsing a few pages. After spending significant marketing budget on CPC Ads that drives traffic to the website, losing the majority of the traffic is indeed a major headache for most marketers.
In second place is “growing more visitor traffic” for 36% of the respondents. Lastly, 1 out of 5 marketers see getting more returning customers or repeat order as a challenge.
So, What’s The Takeaway from the eCommerce Challenge?
The opinion results have helped us to further refine our content strategy, where we look to build more resources, guides, and insights to help our readers address the conversion challenge — turning more visitors into customers.
Fortunately, we already have some guides that may be of help. We’ve listed the links below for easy navigation, in the order of the visitor conversion funnel.
1. Visitor lands on website
This is often the first impression a visitor has of your offering and overall brand. So be prepared to put your best “face” forward. ? Ideally, a visitor to land on your site will follow thru to complete a purchase. However, reality – and also supported by stats – shows that it typically takes time for new visitors to get accustomed to the business and brand. To increase the changes for future conversions, you should deploy on-site personalization tactics to engage visitors while they are on-site, and better yet, capture their contact details for continued lead nurturing.
2. Browse/search for products
There are many eCommerce tools that focus on cart recoupment, but yet the majority of the visitor abandonment takes place after browsing. Browse Abandonment occurs when a visitor leaves the site after browsing products without placing items into the shopping cart. Based on aforementioned statistics, that comprises nearly 92% of visitors. What are some ways you can mitigate browse abandonment? See how you can Take on Browse Abandonment for Ecommerce.
3. Add item to cart
An “Add to cart” action indicates a strong interest on the part of your potential customer, so it’s ideal to use that insight to better attract his or her attention. The most common way to do that is remarketing via paid display channels or triggered cart reminder emails. In 5 Tips for Success Cart Abandonment Email, we have covered the key elements of a good cart reminder email. Furthermore, there may be a few tactics that you have not deployed yet to optimize its effectiveness.
4. Checkout
At this point, the visitors are extremely close to the final goal. However, there are still factors that cause a potential customer to abandon at the final step. This may be anything from lengthy checkout process to payment failures. To address checkout abandonment, check out That’s the E-commerce Checkout Best Practices that Convert Visitors to Customers. It’s one of our top read posts this year!
5. Complete purchase
Hurray, you have a sales conversion at this point! ?But your marketing or branding efforts should not stop here. It’s still important to continue engaging with your customer base with the goal of growing average customer value.
That’s a Wrap
Many thanks to those to have responded to our September post. We hope to add more valuable and insightful content for your marketing needs in the near future. If any of the above is also a key eCommerce challenge you experience or if you have any other marketing needs, please let us know in the comments. Or simply drop us a line, we love hearing from you.
Till our next poll!
