Mistakes Online Store Owners Make – Part 4

This is probably the last part of one of our most popular blog series “Mistakes Online Store Owners Make”. There were still stuff left to discuss about and I couldn’t just leave this blog series unfinished. Read the full blog series if you want to take your store from an amateur level to a pro level!

Read the previous parts:

• Read part 1 here.
• Read part 2 here.
• Read part 3 here.

 

1. Zero Communication With Your Customers

You don’t have to be a pro marketer to set up simple thank you emails and to send out an email, at least once a week, to your subscribers. It’s not only to make more money but more importantly to build trust and let our customers feel comfortable when purchasing from us.

Setting up automatic emails is simple: If you’re selling on Shopify, you have plenty of apps you can install like SmartrMail, Omnisend, Seguno and others that can help you quickly setup a few professional looking emails. Some of the apps have really generous plans for beginners like a free plan for the first 1000 subscribers with almost all features available for free.

The photo you see above is actually one of my thank you emails on one of my stores and it’s made with Abandonment Protector Shopify app.

After setting up the automated emails we need(thank you emails, recovery emails, etc), it’s time to think about what non-automated emails are we going to send to our subscribers. First thing that comes to mind are weekly promotional emails. Something like a flash sale only on weekends can bring some good sales 😉

But my suggestion is to send some informative emails as well – Eventually people will get tired of your promotional emails and lose interest so we have to mix it with some quality emails like blog posts about a certain topic, product reviews, etc.

Let’s say if we’re running a cat niche store, then a blog post about allergies cats have and how to identify and treat it will be a nice addition and your customers will love it! Or a detailed product review with videos and photos.

Communication is they key – Your customer email list and the connections you’ve built will never disappear.

 

2. No Trust Badges On Your Checkout Page

If you want you checkout flow to be truly perfect, then you ABSOLUTELY need to have trust badges on your checkout page. Always think of your customers as if they have the worst memory ever – Ask yourselves these questions and act accordingly:

Will my customer remember the trust badges he saw on my product page? NO. Then I must add trust badges to my checkout page as well.

Will my customer remember we offer free shipping on this product? NO. Then I must add a “free shipping” message on my checkout page.

You may think it’s nitpicking but unfortunately it isn’t… You can have the perfect store and product page with everything set up perfectly for the customer to feel comfortable, but the moment he goes to checkout, if he doesn’t see any trust he will leave your store without buying.

And it won’t take you too long to setup something like this so why not? It won’t hurt that’s for sure.

And don’t remember to create policies on Shopify so they appear on your checkout as well:

Some store owners prefer creating their own policies and not use the automated ones Shopify generates for us. It’s fine to do that(we do that too) but we also generate the policies to have them appear on our checkout page as you can see in the picture above.

 

3. No Guarantees, Shipping/Delivery Times, Etc On Your Product Page

It’s good that you have all the necessary pages where you provide information about your shipping times, refund, etc but this also has to be displayed on your product page. You can’t expect the customer to look around your store for your shipping times…

This information needs to be easily accessible and what’s easier than writing it on our product page? And don’t worry about displaying long shipping times on your product page. Most customers go through it briefly and if the product is good, they won’t have any problem waiting 2 weeks or more for their product.

They just want to see the regular “guarantee” texts just to be sure everything is legit 😉

Make sure to change your shipping & handling times for each product and don’t just copy the same text as you see here. It’s important to give realistic times and not promise a 24 hours handling time when it will actually take you 5 days for the item just to be shipped.

For support, you can just write the same as you see in the picture above or you can share your full support email address which will be even better.

 

4. No Exit Popup

It’s probably one of the most important apps you can install on your store. An exit popup app, if setup correctly, will not only recover lost sales on the spot but will also collect emails for later use. If you won’t get a sale, at least there’s a chance you will get an email from it. And an email is better than nothing right?

Another reason to install an exit popup app is that it can help us identify a problem with our price. If almost all of our purchases are because of an extra discount the exit popup provided, then there’s a chance we priced our product too high. Thus lowering our price will result in more customers purchasing our product!

I recommend setting up an exit popup after at least 20-30 seconds have passed and the customer didn’t click on anything – On desktop and mobile. On desktop we also have an option to activate the exit popup on leave intent by default and it’s fine. Unfortunately, on mobile phones we don’t have this option so only the time spent without any action is available.

And please don’t setup the exit popup to appear too fast – It looks spammy and will make your store look “cheap”.

Choosing the amout of discount to give is up to you but be generous and offer a good discount. The customer was about to leave you store, so make it worth his time if he stays 😉

 

To Sum It Up:

This was the fourth and the last part of the “Mistakes online store owners make” blog series and it should take your store from amateur to a pro level. Make sure to read the first three parts and if you have any questions, I’m here to help.

Thank you for reading and I hope you liked this week’s article 🙂

 

Struggling to find good products to sell? Not sure who’s your target audience? Tired of losing money on products you were sure were “winners”?

Then Ecomhunt is what you need! Find hot winning products that are added daily, spy on their ads & stores and import them into your store in 1 click and Start Selling Today!

Must Read Articles:

• Winning Product #13: Men’s Photo Wallet With Full Testing Strategy Using Facebook Ads
• From Real Estate To Ecommerce: How This Italian Entrepreneur Grew His Online Store To 6 Figures In 3 Months
• 5 Tips To Successfully Promote Products Using Instagram Influencers