What is your dream as a WooCommerce Store owner?
I bet a sudden rush of customers to your website.
Let us prepare a checklist of what you have been doing to promote your website.
- Social Media Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization(SEO)
- Reciprocal Linking
- Branding
- Quality Content
- Using Google Local Business for gaining the local audience
With these practices, you might have seen steady growth in your traffic right from the launch of your store. How about if you get the mantras to increase the traffic of your WooCommerce Store suddenly?
By the end of the blog, you will have a clear idea of what kind of problems the customer face while visiting your online store and a detailed list of to-dos for the sudden increase of traffic on your WooCommerce site.
The blog comprises of:
- Landing/Homepage
- Product Pages
- Shipping Costs
- Checkout Process
- Voice Commerce
- Provisions for Image Search
- Allow your customers to pay on Social Media
- Influencer Marketing
- User-generated Content
Before we dig deep, let us first analyze the problems that affect the reputation and cause a direct impact on sales.
- The homepage or the landing page is the first thing that the user lands on to your website. One of the most common reasons to abandon your site is the users don’t find for what they have visited the website.
- If the site takes too much time to load, they are more likely to abandon the site.
- The product pages aren’t connecting with the customers and lack the right message which results in less engagement with your website.
- Your checkout process isn’t giving the visitor a feel of security.
- The shipping process has less number of options and is expensive.
- Your site is not mobile-friendly.
In the first place, all we have to do is avoid these blunders and trigger ourselves to get ready for a surge in traffic for the WooCommerce Website.
Let us dive deep into how a sudden surge of traffic is possible.
With an average of 69.57% of the online shopping cart abandonment rate, you can imagine how much business you are losing. With multiple reasons in our kitty, in most cases, the customers need to be steered correctly.
The following tips will guide you through the fixes that you need to have in your WooCommerce website.
Landing/Homepages
As mentioned earlier, your landing/homepages are the ones that your visitor lands on. You have less than four seconds to grab their attention as a typical user has only 4 seconds of patience.
If the content on your website isn’t relevant as per the expectation of the visitor, there is a high probability of the visitor to hit the back button and abandon the site.
The navigation bar shouldn’t be an entire index. Rather keeping it simple by putting up the table of contents is desirable.
Check the loading speed of your website. You can use free tools like KeyCDN, Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom Speed Test, GTmetrix, and many more. You can get the entire list of available tools for checking the speed of the website from the link provided.
After checking the speed of your website, if you find it slow, then fix it. You can do it by render-blocking Javascript and CSS, removing unnecessary characters, minimizing HTTP requests, to list a few. Improving the loading speed affects the user-engagement rate and the search results as Google has made official that page speed will be a ranking factor.
Product Pages
We are in an era where everything needs proof. What you do while buying a product? Check for the ratings, feedback, and recommendations. Why do you check for all those things? The reason behind this is simple. You get assurance about the product before buying and are comfortable regarding the information that you get from other users. Precisely, you trust the product because you got proof of it.
Similarly, consumers trust online reviews before buying a product. If you are lacking this on your website, then this is the right time to invest in a review service now.
Nowadays it is a fad to tell a story about your product. Every product has its own storyline. Using a perfect story as the product description connects your users and establishes a connection with their need to fetch that particular product. A visitor always relies on the product images before buying. It is ideal to use a better version of the images.
Shipping Costs
Is your website offering the visitors a high shipping cost but a slow shipping process?
You are on the wrong track and this would cost you loss of customers.
Aren’t you convinced?
It is true that the shipping process is costly but not at the cost of losing a customer.
You can consider a flat rate or free shipping. Worrying about the losses with this step? Figure it out with the guidelines provided below:
- Baseline establishment: You have conversion stats with a free shipping order and without it. Compare both the stats.
- Thresholds: You can simply define a minimum value for free shipping.
- Restrict free shipping: Offer free shipping initially on selected products and check the improvements you have marked by this.
- Approve an increase in price: You can make up the loss that would incur while offering free shipping through a price increase in all the products and check for the profits you get.
Surprises are good if they are free of costs. Customers do have a mindset to pay shipping charges but aren’t ready to pay extra/hidden costs.
Offer shipping options. For example, you can charge extra for two-day shipping and free for more than three days. Let the customer choose the best for them. The tendency of humans is to get things fast. Thanks to Amazon Prime, they have set high shipping expectations for consumers and competitors.
Checkout Process
The checkout pages are where the users input their financial and personal information. If you are unable to provide the assurance, they will abandon the site immediately.
A lengthy checkout process where you force the customers to register is another reason for the abandonment of the cart.
You can use trust badges as they add extra assurance about the safety of their website. Another key point is keeping as guest checkout where people don’t need to register. Unnecessary registration may annoy the
With the huge competition among numerous e-commerce websites, the following high-impact strategies if implemented would drive traffic for 2020 and beyond.
Voice Commerce
Online shopping is taken over by Voice shopping and voice commerce. As per Gartner’s prediction, by 2020 30% of web browsing sessions will be piloted by voice.
We are familiar with voice search and other technologies flooding the market in 2019. 2020 and beyond will witness the adoption rate of voice commerce for e-commerce sites for boosting sales.
Provisions for Image Search
The e-commerce industry is going to witness an emerging trend in 2020 and that is image search. The user will have the option to search for a product online by just pointing the camera towards an item or by simply uploading the image.
Google lens, eBay’s visual search, and Pinterest are providing opportunities for searching for the product online.
Allow your customers to pay on Social Media
Social media has no look back in the coming years. It is predicted through research by Statista that 2021 will see a 3.02 billion social network users.
This number is not only increasing for social media users but also payments via social media for the e-commerce industry. Every major social platform owns a social payment platform such as Twitter buy, Apple Pay, Google Wallets, Facebook Payments, and so on.
Instagram launched a feature where the sites can tag up to 5 products in a post with a link to purchase and price.
Influencer Marketing
A colleague of mine recently bought a Rolex watch for her husband and to my surprise, Roger Federer influenced her purchase! Roger Federer is a Brand Ambassador of Rolex. Being her favorite player, she often followed him and thus her interest in Rolex was deeply influenced by the Swiss player.
The best ways to implement influencer marketing are as follows:
1. Find the right influencer, the one who is a perfect fit for your brand and its tagline. Also, search for influencers who are ranking high in your niche.
2. Once you find your influencer, simply try to build a strong relationship. Help him to know about your products and your business goals and why he should be interested in.
3. As mentioned, reviews are the best proof of marketing. Ask your influencer to review your products.
4. You can ask your influencer to contribute to entertaining content. This increases sales by increasing the engagement rate.
5. Feature the testimonials by the influencers on your product page.
User-generated Content
To determine the purchase intent, user-generated content is one of the most influential factors.
To simplify the concept, imagine you bought a pair of sketchers from a particular website. You post it on social media wearing this. Seeing you flaunting your new skechers, people from your communities will try to find one similar to yours. Indirectly you have influenced your circle.
The website from where you bought these sketchers will ask you to post this image on your behalf to their website. This would increase the authenticity and originality of the brand with a positive impact.
Your WooCommerce website, with these top 9 strategies, will definitely witness a sudden rise in the traffic. But your ultimate aim to attract customers to your store is to increase sales. You might face a situation where you have plenty of customers visiting but none are buying. Therefore, you need to consider other aspects and possibilities that would boost up both at the same time.
Wrapping Up!
It is exciting to see a sudden growth of traffic on to your WooCommerce store. But if your website is lacking the preparation, then it is going to be too stressful.
This is the e-commerce era and 2020 and beyond will see only the growth to new heights. Always remember that we are here to generate customers who in turn would generate more customers for your website. Always keep providing value to your customers as it is the key to increase the traffic to your store.
Admin
Marshal Hubs
Priyanka Srivastava
John Stephen