How To Increase Your Average Order Value(AOV) With Bundles And Upsells

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May 11, 2019

So Video ads or Photo ads?

Video ads are amazing! They work great and you can showcase a lot of your product features. And as we already know, customers LOVE videos and basically our entire newsfeed on Facebook and instagram is dominated by videos. But let’s not forget that photo ads are still working(and working goood!). And on certain products, photo ads can bring much better results than video ads!

In this post, we’ll give you some important tips about photo ads and why you should use them for your business.

Why Should I Use Photo Ads For My Business?

Reason number 1 – Photo ads tend to be cheaper than video ads.

Unless you’re using professional photos that were taken in a photo studio for your product, photo ads will always be cheaper than video ads.

With video ads you basically have only 2 options. You either create one yourself or pay someone to make it for you… Most of the dropshippers we know have a limited skill set when it comes to creating video ads. They can do some basic editing on Camtasia or other video editing apps so when the time comes and they need a more professional looking video, they will have to open their wallets and say goodbye to Mr. Franklin(or a couple of them).

And there are also online services that offer their video creating services for a fair monthly fee which do deliver some good videos but sometimes it’s just not enough. And the options are quite limited so you almost always depend on the service to offer new templates.

Reason number 2 – Time.

It will take you much more time to create a video ad than a photo ad. This point is self explanatory so there’s really not much to talk about here. If you’re looking to run some quick tests on a certain product, photo ad is your best friend.

It shouldn’t take more than 2-5 minutes to create a reasonable quality photo ad and test whether your audience likes your product or not.

Reason number 3 – Why not offer something fresh?

When the whole newsfeed is dominated by video ads, Offer something fresh and show a photo or two of your newest product.

2-3+ years ago, almost every ad you saw on Facebook was an image. Banners, product photos, clickable photo ads and more… But then, Facebook decided to change it all and focus on videos and suggested we ran video ads. And today, almost all the ads we see are videos.

So this is why you should try and run some photo ads to show your audience something else and not only videos. There’s a big chance that they automatically scroll down whenever they see a video ad. So if you show them a photo ad, they might just stop by and engage with it.

Reason number 4 – It works!

There isn’t a product that we run ads to that we don’t test it out also with photo ads. Sometimes, we even begin with photo ads and later on try some videos too.

If you’re running a jewelry or a POD(Print on Demand) store, photo ads are a must! Even if you’re running a store with products that have a lot of features, photo ads can still work and do some magic for you. So no matter the product, make sure to test it out with photo ads!

Up next are the best ways to use photo ads.

Photo Ads Recommended Dimensions:

We recommend using a 1200×1650 or 1200×1200 photo ads. These are the official ad image sizes which are supported by Facebook.

While the 1200×1200 image size is probably the most popular option, we found out that 1200×1650 works much better. It simply gives our product more screen space and looks amazing on mobile phones.

And there’s no need in any special effects or backgrounds. A single product photo on a 1200×1650 canvas with a white background is enough to get you sales.

Clickable Photo Ads:

You can use both 1200×1200 or 1200×628 image sizes. We recommend using the 1200×1200 image size simply because it’s bigger and looks better both on mobile and desktop.

Make sure to always include a “Buy Now” button and a good promotional text. Don’t just write your product title. Instead, let them know about your “FREE SHIPPING” deal for the first 100 orders 😉

Retargeting Photo Ads:

When you’re running retargeting ads, it’s always nice to show the customer something new. He already clicked on your ad and visited your website, but something stopped him from purchasing your product. This is where retargeting ads kick in.

Instead of just showing him the same video he already saw(or a different video that basically still shows the same thing). It can be really helpful to show him some good quality photos of your product. So make sure to run some retargeting photo ads for your products.

Customer photos ads:

In my opinion, and it comes after a lot of money spent on ads, nothing beats a genuine photo taken by a customer.

A simple photo taken with their phone that shows the product in their hand is the best social proof you can get! If you have some customer photos and a permission to post it on your page and run ads to, you should definitely do that! And also don’t forget to use the customer photo as a retargeting ad.

And it’s also best to edit the original photo and change the size to 1200×1200 or 1200×1650 if possible. If not, then run it as it is.

How to get customer photos:

Wait for them to post it somewhere on your page. Some customers are kind enough to get back to your original post and leave a comment there with a photo of the product that they just received. If you see such comment, make sure to contact them and ask for permission to post it on your page and run ads to. It shouldn’t be a problem to get them to agree, but if you want to increase your chances, then you should offer a freebie for a permission to use their photo commercially.
You can always use shopify apps like Loox that sends automatic emails to your customers and asks for photo reviews. When a customer agrees and uploads his photo review, you can later post it on your facebook or instagram page and drive some traffic to it.
Send private messages asking your customers for some photos. If you see someone who left a comment that he just received his new product and he’s really happy, then don’t forget to send him a message asking for a photo. A simple photo taken with his phone.
Manually send emails to your customers asking for photo reviews. Just like loox but it won’t cost you anything to do that 🙂

Sometimes, the photo can include your customer’s face and he can be a bit embarassed and not give his agreement to post it on your page. So make sure to insist one more time and offer something in return. Customer photos are super important!

To Sum It Up:

Photo ads are powerful and sometimes can work a lot better than video ads. And you don’t have to be a Photoshop master to create stunning photo ads that will make your potential customer stop and click on it.

When everyone follows a certain trend, you should definitely check it out. But never forget the basics.

Thank you for reading and have a great day!

5 Tips To Increase Your Store’s Conversion Rate

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April 17, 2019

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Increase Conversion Rate — Increase your store's conversion rate

Your online store’s conversion rate doesn’t just depend on how fast it loads and if it’s mobile friendly. There are many other technical and psychological factors that can drastically hurt your conversion rate if not applied properly.

Make sure to read these tips in order to maximize your store’s potential!

Send Your Customers Straight To The Cart Page:

We don’t want our users to click on our “add to cart” button only for a small cart popup to appear and disappear after 3 seconds. We want them to checkout as fast as possible without any delays or interruptions. By transfering them straight to the cart page, we increase our chances to get a sale.

On most of the themes we used, ajax cart was set as default. Or a different kind of popup cart. Make sure you change this option in the theme settings and transfer them to the cart page. You can also transfer them to the checkout page but we personally don’t use this option because some users get confused and leave. But you can always test it out and see what works best for you.

Keep Your Cart Page Clean:

Our cart page is clean and doesn’t show any upsells or related products. Now, don’t get me wrong – Upsells and related products feed work well and can increase your average order to get you much more profit from one customer. But in our case, we were losing much more than winning.

What actually happened is that our customers were checking the upsells or the different products and ended up without buying anything. By giving them an option to check out different products, they got lost in the process and left. This is why we decided to change our system.

Instead of offering upsells and showing them other products, we decided to clean our cart page and first get a sale. Once we had that customer in our pocket, it was much easier to sell him something else numerous times by using personal email marketing or simply by retargeting him with different products on Facebook and other platforms.

In the future, if we wanted to increase our AOV(Average Order Value), we offered bundles on our product page and made sure our ad clearly displayed our deal. For example: Buy our “Neon Shoes” and get this “Neon Hoodie” for 40% off! And of course displaying the products in our video or photo ads.

Don’t Give Your Customers Too Many Options:

By giving your customer too many options, he may really have a hard time to choose one. This is quite common with dropshippers who important products from aliexpress with a lot of variants. Instead of your customer spending 10 seconds reading and clicking on the “add to cart” button, he will be checking out all the colors and sizes or whatever options your product has. This is a big NO-NO and you’re going to lose a lot of customers to this.

Make sure to keep just a few relevant/popular variants available so your customer doesn’t get lost. A good read on the subject by Psychologist Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice.

Offer Multiple Payment Gateways:

This might be obvious to some of you but there are a lot of people who have only one single payment option on their store. If you’re only accepting credit card payments, adding PayPal can substantially increase your conversion rate. Even if you don’t like PayPal and have bad history with this company, it’s not a valid reason to deny this option from your customers. Same goes if you’re only accepting PayPal.

In case you can’t offer any other checkout options, It’s best to let your customers know about it. For example: If you’re only accepting PayPal, you can let your customers know that they can checkout on PayPal without having an account there. Simply by checking out as a guest.

Or if you’re only accepting credit cards, you can always set up a followup email for the ones who haven’t completed the checkout and ask if the lack of payment options made them leave without buying. And if the customer replies back, you can work stuff out and hopefully get him to purchase from you.

Remind Your Customers About Your Store’s Deals:

If you’re running a FREE SHIPPING store, an announcement bar saying “FREE SHIPPING ON ALL ORDERS” isn’t enough. You need to constantly remind them about your free shipping promotion.

If he’s on your product page, make sure that “FREE SHIPPING” is written in your product title and description. When he goes to the cart page, make sure the text under the total price is saying something about FREE SHIPPING and not the regular “shipping and taxes calculated at checkout” text. This may cause confusion and you’re going to lose a potential customer.

Same goes with every other deal. You have to basically show it to your customers in every place possible on your store!

To Sum It Up:

You need to always think as a 1st time customer visiting your store. Everything needs to be organized in a logical way so that the buying process is quick and easy.

Make it easy for them to understand and the sales will follow!

Why Reviews Will Boost Your eCommerce Business In 2019!

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April 1, 2019

There have been so many positive recommendations of the value of reviews for e-commerce, that the case doesn’t really need to be made anymore. Quite simply, user reviews increase conversions. They can eliminate any doubts potential customers may have about a product or can help product selection.

We like leaving reviews too. Stats reveal that 47% of online shoppers have reviewed products online, which suggests there is no shortage of people ready to provide their opinions.

Why You Need Customer Reviews

Tip Number one, why you need customer reviews. Most websites don’t even have reviews setup on their site. They use outside sources like Google or facebook reviews.

This doesn’t help them any with SEO and search engine results. This will provide social proof, but most likely customers will never see it unless they go searching for it. Take any reviews from other sources and make sure you publish them in your site so your potential leads and visitors.

See the reviews, see your social proof and see the other customers trust you. This is most important for e-commerce business to have reviews listed underneath each product. You can do this by asking customers for reviews on the specific product that they purchased. You can also send follow-up emails asking them for the reveal or incentivize them with discounts, coupon codes.

This’ll provide social proof not only in Google reviews and facebook reviews but also on your website during the checkout process.

The Stats

Tip number two, the stats. Did you know that businesses and websites that have customer reviews or more than one product can mean a five percent increase in conversion rates? Sixty-three percent of customers are most likely to make a purchase from a website that has reviews on the ideal and identical products that they’re getting ready to purchase.

Consumer reviews nearly 12 times increase for products when they’re being sent there from other websites and businesses. Think of it as a word of mouth referral online.

When somebody sees people just like them trusting your product, purchasing certain products, and leaving their honest opinion, they’re more likely to trust your brand and make that purchase on checkout.

Think about it for yourself. When you go to Amazon to make a purchase, most likely you’ll scroll to the bottom, read four or five reviews, and if they’re all happy customers, you’re much more likely to purchase that product.

According to Reevoo stats, 50 or more reviews per product can mean a 4.6% increase in conversion rates.
63% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a site which has user reviews. (iPerceptions, 2011).
Site visitors who interact with both reviews and customer questions and answers are 105% more likely to purchase while visiting and spend 11% more than visitors who don’t interact with UGC. (Bazaarvoice, Conversation Index, Q2 2011).
Consumer reviews are significantly more trusted (nearly 12 times more)than descriptions that come from manufacturers, according to a survey of US internet users by online video review site EXPO. (eMarketer, February 2010).
According to Reevoo, reviews produce an average 18% uplift in sales.

Long Tail Targeting

Tip number three, long tail targeting content strategies are changing day to day and month to month, but especially in the next coming year. Your content strategy needs to be completely different. Use your reviews to make long tail targeting.

Short term targeting is clearly out of the question for most businesses. If you’re not already a trusted website on Google for years, it may take you even longer to get to the first page of Google rankings, but if you use long tail targeting around your reviews for not only social proof but also for common searches customers might search for, you’re more likely to show up in the Google rankings.

If somebody’s searching for your ideal product, which may be four or five words long, make sure you’re getting reviews on that product page, so when somebody types in that exact product, you are most likely to show up.

The additional content generated by user reviews increases the chance of ranking well for long tail searches. In addition, people leaving reviews tend to use the same language that other people will use when actually searching for them.

Email Customers Post-Purchase

Tip number four, email customers post-purchase. After any customer makes a purchase on your website, you need to have a strategy to email them, thanking them for making the product and continuing the relationship. If you can set up your email marketing like using MailChimp or constant contact based on your e-commerce products, you’ll be able to email them automatically with the product that they’ve purchased, thanking them.

Now that you have this data, you can ask for reviews on the specific product pages that they purchased. If they purchased a large black t shirt from your website yesterday, you can send them the exact link to that page asking for a review the next day or after they’ve it, it’s arrived at their door. Use this to make it easy for your customers to sign up, leave a review, and come back to your website on a consistent basis

Sending an email after a customer has purchased an item to ask for a review is a good idea, but the timing is a key issue here. You need to give customers enough time to have received the product and had to chance to start using it and form an opinion, but it still needs to be sent when the purchase is fresh in the customer’s mind.

Make The Process As Simple As Possible

Tip number five, make the process as simple as possible. Most customers will not go searching for the review page to leave you a review. You need to make it easy for them to go to the page and we recommend even giving them ideas or writing half of the review in your own language, so all they have to do is copy and paste most of it into the length of you provided.

After they purchased the products arrived and they’re happy, email them with the link to the product page that they purchased on asking for the review. With that quote that you’d like them to stay on that page, you’ll increase your chances of getting a review on that exact product. If you can set up a strategy like this,

Some users may not have a lot to say about some products or may have a limited attention span, so make it nice and easy to leave opinions. Offering customers the option of leaving a quick rating out of five or ten is one way and provides a useful summary score to add to product pages, while another way to get a little more useful detail is to ask users to give different aspects of products a rating, as Reevoo does.

The Key Takeaway

We recommend making it as easy as possible for leaving reviews, always asked them to leave reviews on your website. This will not only increase customer satisfaction return rates, but we’ll also leave social proof and get SEO content from each review and product that you have on your e-commerce website.

The Complete Blueprint For YouTube SEO

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March 28, 2019

The Complete Blueprint For YouTube SEO – Youtube SEO is different than the Google Search. Though both are owned by Google they both have different search algorithms. There is never a right or wrong plan for SEO, create videos around what will help your customers the most and they’ll come back to watch more. To rank your video you need to focus on a few important aspects:

Create a Video First: A very engaging video because the user engagement is the Most Important Factor that will rank your video.
Keywords: Without keywords, every SEO campaign is a waste. Relevant keywords enhance the user engagement.
Title, Description & Tags: Don’t forget these basics. You’ll see better results if you provide subtitles to your video.

Content is the king

I know you heard it before but let us tell you a trick that will help you gain longer watch times. While making your video remember the first 15 seconds are very important! These 15 seconds will decide whether the viewer will watch the video for more or will just leave. So to use this formula while making a video, tell viewers what you are going to tell in your video, tell the problem they are facing and how your video will solve their problem use this in first 15 seconds.

Make it easy to find

Now after you have made a really good video after using the formula we told you in the previous step. Now comes the most important aspect – optimize your videos. To optimize your video you need to optimize your title, tags, and description. Follow these step to gain maximum results.

keyword research – Find the combination of low competition and high competition keywords. You can use a website like Google keywords or Quora. This tool will do all the work for you just need to enter your keyword and it will suggest a lot of tags both long tail and short tail keywords. Add these in your tags section.
Title – Now after you have done the above step select 3 keywords from your tags, 2 low competition, and 1 high competition keywords and include it in your title and also make your title is eye-catching.
Description – Now you need to write a description of your video, we will suggest you write at least 1000 words description and include those keywords you used in your title one or two times but not more than that.

Interlinking

After you have done all the above steps you need to interlink your videos back to your website. We suggest inserting a link into your description that redirects the viewer back to a similar blog post or page on your website.

Optimizing playlist

Playlists play a very important role in the overall growth of your channel. Combine all similar videos into one playlist. If you’re making a group of videos regarding Shopify or e-commerce, create a playlist with all of your videos regarding these categories.

Thumbnails

Like the title, they are the first thing that the viewer will see. Make your thumbnail bright and eye-catching and they should create a sense of urgency in the mind of the viewer. They will help you to get that first click. If you have done all the above steps but have don’t have a good thumbnail all the steps are waste then.

The YouTube Quick Tips:

Most important Part of Youtube Seo is Video Title. So Put your main keyword in first of your title.
Video Length: Create long length video, the Long video gets a higher rank than short video. at least create a 5-minute video.
Use advance Tags tactics which help you to suggest your video on Youtube and help to get more views.
Increase Audience Retention, Increase Watch Time minutes and Percentage view duration. Hook up your viewers to your videos.
Use Youtube Feature content Tool.
Your Video Social Engagement is also important means How many Social Share, Like and dislike of your video.
Your Subscribers. If someone subscribes to your channel after watching the full video then it gives a strong message to Youtube that this video is worth to rank.

Copy the bullet points below and save them so you can go down the checklist everytime you upload a new video.

Title tag information
Audience retention
Keywords in the description tag
Tags
Video length
Number of subscribers after watching
Comments
Likes and dislikes

Obviously, you don’t want to use keyword stuffing or any shady stuff like that. Just naturally sprinkle in words and phrases that you want your videos to rank for. We hope this guide helped show you how to rank your YouTube videos.

4 Quick Website Marketing Content Ideas

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March 11, 2019

4 Quick Website Marketing Content Ideas Blog 1

Now we all know content is a great idea for your business to build your brand and to get more traffic back to your website. Today we’re going to share our top tips on creating content for your website.

Content around your website is helpful tips and different things that people can go to, like guides, case studies, and things to help them even more. As soon as you build trust and authority through your website, visitors will continue coming back because they know that you’re going to be able to help them. So let’s jump right into it.

Tip number one, live videos;

Now, this is going to be quick techniques. You can go for longer techniques later on, but this is something quick. You can do a live video on either Facebook, Instagram or YouTube.

You can save it to your phone and then upload it into your website, this is like multitasking one-on-one. Do a live video and use that for all these other purposes. This is a great way to get video as content on your website.

Use the same piece of content for multiple channels and get customers coming back if that video really helped them. Now you can also use this to share on YouTube, Facebook, depending on the platforms and link back to your site.

Now you have links coming to your site from social media and also people wanting to go to your site to watch your video.

Tip number two, podcasts;

Podcasts are a great way for content on your site. You can even use the video that we mentioned in tip number one, turn that into a podcast and upload that into your blog.

You can use the multiple channels to put all the content in one place and put it as a new post in your blog. You can also use podcasts to get links back to your website, so when the podcast is over, write a short description with a link back to that specific page on your website.

Tip number three, messaging communication;

As you are creating content, you’re asking your customers to leave you comments, to message you and ask you questions. Now you can use that content, if somebody sends you a text, a Facebook Message, leaves you a review or leaves a comment, you can copy and paste that and use that as a piece of content.

This provides social proof. It shows that customers are reaching out, they’re asking you questions, and most importantly you’re helping them. This will relate with any new website visitors, so you can snapshot images of your messaging with your client’s text messages and even the reviews anywhere on your website.

Tip number four, case studies;

You have your current clients you’re working with, use this to create case studies. If you’ve helped somebody out, mention it in your next blog posts, in your next content about the steps that you took to make sure that they were successful.

You can lay it out, you don’t have to give them all of the details, but you can do a step by step process as a case study showing how they got those results.

Now, when a potential customer sees those results from somebody, sees the actions that you walk them through it, it’ll make them much more likely to want to reach out and work with you.

The Key Takeaway

The point here is to make it easy, don’t overcomplicate content. You’re never going to be number one on Google if you’re just starting out, but you can show up for certain niches in keywords that are a little bit longer, so use these content ideas and just post consistently to your website.

Use the same videos, podcasts, or blogs, or even images, share them everywhere. Get those links out there and you’ll see an increase for your business.

6 Email Marketing Tips for Ecommerce

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March 4, 2019

In e-commerce, you can either spend all your time and energy selling to one-time customers, or you can invest your time and energy into establishing and nurturing relationships that drive brand loyalty and repeat purchases.

Most e-commerce business owners prefer the latter option, so the question is, what can you do to transform one-time customers into lifelong brand loyal customers who buy from you over and over again?

One of the easiest and most effective ways to do it is with email. Despite the popularity of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and others, email remains one of the best tools you can use to effectively communicate messages, engage with your customers and would-be customers, and drive more sales.

Want to make sure you’re crushing email marketing for your e-commerce business? Use our top 6 tips to increase e-mail sales.

1. Identify Your Goals

Before you get too far into testing tools, creating opt-in forms, and putting together your email marketing strategy, it’s important to first think about your goals. You should ask yourself what you’re hoping to achieve by investing in email marketing.

Goal setting is crucial to email marketing success. Defining your email marketing campaign goals helps guide the direction of your campaign, and makes it easier to measure the success of your efforts. It also helps prevent batch-and-blasting and sending an email just because.

2. Choose the Right Tools

The next step in building an effective email marketing strategy for your e-commerce business involves testing and using tools that can ultimately help you automate processes and make your efforts more scalable over time.

Security & infrastructure – Ensure you the platform you choose is reliable because your clients will perceive it as an extension – even a product – of your business. If it’s unstable, it makes your business look unreliable. So, what exactly constitutes “reliable?” As a reference point, Campaign Monitor has a 99.9% uptime.
Support – Occasionally even world-class email marketing solutions don’t work exactly as you might expect them to, so it’s important to assess the vendor’s support offering to make sure you have support when you need it. But what’s the standard of support you should be looking for? Campaign Monitor offers 24/7 email support and Phone support options. It’s worth considering whether anything less than this could be a hindrance down the road.
Deliverability – Your team may be design experts, but you likely don’t have a team dedicated to understanding deliverability laws. Find an email marketing tool that will worry about that for you and ensure your clients’ emails always land in the inbox.

3. Make it Easy for People to Join

In order for email marketing to work, you need to be actively collecting email addresses from the people who land on your website. At one point it might have been enough to simply include one opt-in form at the footer of your website, but these days if you want to connect with the right leads, you need to include opt-in forms in a variety of places throughout your website.

4. Share Enticing Offers

Once you have a steady stream of new email subscribers coming in, your next step it to start nurturing them and moving them closer to the sale. One of the easiest and most effective ways to start doing it right away is by sharing enticing offers with your list. There are a number of offers you can create and send to your list using one of the email marketing automation software tools mentioned above.

5. Test, Optimize, and Analyze

At the end of the day, you can’t make improvements to your campaigns and overall strategy if you’re not testing, optimizing, and identifying opportunities. To be a successful email marketer, you need to be willing to spend time and money on tools that allow you to test everything in your emails—from subject lines and delivery timing to email length, body structure, images, links, call-to-actions, offers, and anything else you can think.

The purpose of testing and optimizing your email campaigns is to ultimately zero in on the best and most effective tactics as fast as possible in order to drive more traffic and conversions in less time. We’ve tested the 6 best Shopify apps to help you increase sales here.

6. Show Them That You Care

The best way to be successful when it comes to email marketing is to show your subscribers that you actually care about them. It’s a big deal to give a company your email address—don’t make people regret their decision. When in doubt, always focus on providing value to people.

Help them understand who you are, why you do what you do, and how your products can make their lives better. Finally, don’t come across like a robot—be real with people.

Create A High Performing Landing Page

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February 26, 2019

When planning out your marketing strategy for your e-commerce business, you need to make it easy for customers to sign-up and work with you. One of the best ways to do this is by using landing pages for your business.

Some of the newest software out there are putting their focus towards “only” using landing pages for marketing. Businesses can easily go out and use copied landing pages and set up their own in minutes. But will it work for you?

Some questions you need to ask yourself as the marketer are;

will this landing page grow with my business as we expand?
can we continue to add updates and new features?
will the software sync with my other software?
and finally will the performance match my product?

When planning out your marketing strategy we highly suggest planning for the long-term growth of your business. You’ll need something that can provide fast loading pages, unlimited integrations and overall help you increase conversions.

In this article, we will be explaining how you can use WordPress as your marketing landing page going forward. You’ll see how you can get started for free, integrate all your current software and be confident that your landing pages will perform at the highest level even as you grow.

What Is A Landing Page?

Landing pages make it easy for you to come up with a page on a quick schedule, optimize it for sign-ups, and use it for any advertising you may do. Landing pages are easy because you can change the colors, add images, easily type content copy, and add sign-up and opt-in forms throughout the page.

Many businesses use this for their social media advertising for when customers click on the link, they only have one option and that option is to sign-up as a new subscriber.

Great Functionality

WordPress offers great functionality for landing pages. It provides unlimited plugins for anything you may need to convert customers on your page.

You can easily customize the look, appearance, colors, plugins, and even sign-up forms on the page.

When thinking about functionality, you may also consider a mobile-friendly design. All WordPress sites are mobile friendly and will automatically update from desktop, iPad and mobile phone devices.

Complete Control

Having complete control over your website/landing page allows you to easily be able to split test different offers and make changes easily.

You can add subscribe buttons like subscribing to Youtube or like your Facebook page right inside your landing page. Additionally, you can add any type opt-in form on the page. You can use popups and other techniques to get new subscribers and get people to sign-up for your offer.

You can also set up WooCommerce or Shopify in your WordPress landing page to make it easy for people to not only sign-up but also purchase your product.

Increasing Conversions

We spoke previously in the article about sign-up subscribers and popups on your landing page. There are many great plugins to use to get more subscribers and increase sign-ups.

There are also many plugins and software you can use to set up pop-ups like exit intent, so when somebody goes to leave your website, you can remind them to sign-up before they leave. You can also make it easy for them to provide their email on your landing page if you’re offering a webinar, an ebook, or some free offer if you want to gain new subscribers.

Automating Your Landing Page

Now we’ve spoken thoroughly about setting up opt-in forms on your landing page and even providing services and checkout pages to help grow your business online.

Once you have forms, checkouts, and other plugins set up on your page, you can start automating your process. You’re sending traffic, you’re getting sign-ups. Now, what?

This is your time to add automation, to automatically welcome new subscribers and continue following up with them until they purchase your offer.

As an example, if you’re offering a free ebook but you want to sell your service later on, you can send them the free ebook automatically through an automated email and then continue marketing to the customer by sending out weekly emails until they decide to purchase your product.

The Key Takeaway

We always recommend using WordPress to set up your landing page, not only because it’s free to get started, but also because of the unlimited possibilities. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or you’re just starting, you can use landing pages on WordPress for almost any type of business.

If you’re just getting started, try taking some free YouTube courses on how to set-up a WordPress site. You will want to purchase a domain name, invest in a good hosting provider to host your landing page and also look for a WordPress theme to use if you want to easily get started. Here are some extra steps to follow when starting your e-commerce business.

Why Page Speed Is Key To Improving Your Website’s Ranking In 2019

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February 18, 2019

Why Page Speed Is Key To Improving Your Website’s Ranking In 2019

Why are you reading this article? Because it ranks well and loads quickly. The simple fact is that unless your e-commerce site is the Shopify of your industry, your ranking and load speed dictates whether people will visit it. From Google to hosting, I’ve explained why site speed matters and how to make your website load faster.

Recommended reading: Increase Traffic Using Reviews

Google says page speed is important

Page speed has been an important ranking factor for years. In 2009 Google published a blog post titled Speed Matters where it discussed the importance of web page speed. It explains that slowing SERPS down by half a second means people make 0.6% searches. Since then, speed has only increased in importance.

Google measures the speed of your website and compares it to competing sites. If you want to rank well your site needs an above average load time:

Excellent: load time of less than 1 second
Good: load time of 1-3 seconds
Average: load time of 3-5 seconds
Poor: load time of 5-7 seconds
Awful: load time of over 7 seconds

A delay of just one second has a huge knock-on effect, not only on your e-commerce site but on your business too. These stats show how important speed is, with a one second delay leading to:

16% decline in customer satisfaction
11% fewer page views
7% reduction in conversions

Mobile searchers demand fast pages

Mobile became the top ranking search device in 2015. The following year Google began to favor websites using Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) tech. Three years later Google confirmed it was now making page speed part of its mobile search ranking.

Be mobile-first if you want your website to rank well, with plenty of fast-loading mobile landing pages.

The average mobile page takes 15 seconds to load, but mobile searchers only wait around three seconds for a page to load on their phone. That means there’s a lot of websites are losing customers because of page speed. WebPageTest is a great free tool for finding the mobile page speed of your website:

Credit: WebPageTest

It gives you a detailed breakdown of the content on your web pages, so you can review them and establish what’s causing them to load slowly:

Credit: WebPageTest

As you can see from the screenshot above, even the biggest websites on the planet can have slow load times. Sites like CNN can get away with some slowness because their size and USP gives them some leeway – but not a lot. If you’re a smaller website (for example, a scrappy e-commerce startup) your searchers won’t hang around.

Use proper hosting to keep your website fast

The host you choose for your e-commerce site plays a big role in how quickly its pages load. Your web host allows your site to be viewed on the internet – page speed is defined as:

“The length of time at which web pages or media content is downloaded from website hosting servers and displayed onto the requesting web browser.”

A good hosting provider has minimal downtime and optimal bandwidth. A bad one leaves you with sluggish pages and a low ranking website. Here are two ways to ensure to your hosting provider is working to improve your site ranking:

Pick the best hosting type: You can choose shared, VPS, or dedicated server hosting for your website. The size and traffic of your website dictate which one you need, so a smaller site can get away with shared hosting. However, if you demand the fastest site possible you should pick a dedicated server
Select a CMS with in-house hosting: When comparing big content management systems with their own dedicated hosting, such as BigCommerce and Shopify, there’s often little to choose between your options – most have very little downtime. What’s important to note is that a hosted CMS gives you hosting that’s faster and with less downtime, while a self-hosted, like WordPress, option gives you freedom of choice

Optimize images to increase page speed

Images can really slow down your website. The larger your images are the more data they occupy and the longer they take to load. But the size of your images isn’t the only reason they’re making your website load slower. From using the right dimensions to adding caching details, there’s a lot you can do to optimize your images.

Enable image caching: Caching means that repeat visitors to your site can use saved (cached) versions of your website when they return. This cuts down the search time their devices need, increasing the loading speed of your website. You can optimize your image caching by using a tool like imgix. It caches your full image library, giving you faster web pages and a quicker website
Use the correct dimensions: If you save an image that’s 1200 x 1200 then scale it down to 120 x120, your browser may load it at the original size. To make sure your browser doesn’t work harder than it has to, use images that are the size you need them to be
Shrink your thumbnails: Carousel features are a great way to display your most popular articles, or products. The problem is that the thumbnails displayed on your carousel are pulled from the source image. This draws the thumbnail from a large image, making your browser work to resize it. Using a CMS with built-in image size parameters means the smallest image is downloaded, keeping your browsers workload down
Some file formats are bigger than others: Your website can cope fine with images saved as PNG, GIF, and JPG. File formats like TIFF and BMP are much bigger and will take your website longer to load

The Key Takeaway

Page speed is crucial to your website and your business. Google ranks pages based on how quickly they load, both on mobile and desktop. Your audience won’t hang around waiting for your website to load. So optimize your images and sort out your hosting, otherwise, your rankings will drop…and with it your revenue too.

We also recommend using tools like “abandon cart” to help follow-up with users if they leave your site early before finishing their purchase.

E-commerce Customer Retention Strategies

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February 5, 2019