5 Little-Known Tweaks Guaranteed to Boost Your Ecommerce ROI

As an ecommerce business, it’s important to be able to maximize the ROI from your marketing efforts. And the best way to maximize this ROI isn’t necessarily by getting more traffic but by working on ensuring that your existing traffic converts better.

99 percent of customers, as data from Seewhy shows, won’t buy on the first visit to your website. Research from Eisenberg Holdings reveals that the average business spends just $1 on conversions and user experience for every $92 spent on generating traffic. This explains why many ecommerce businesses struggle with profitability.

Sometimes, all it takes to double or triple your ecommerce ROI and conversions is to make simple tweaks. Here are five little-known tweaks that will give your ecommerce business a massive ROI boost.

Use trust seals/trust marks on your website

According to a study by McCann, almost half of people don’t trust brands today. In other words, as an ecommerce business, you can assume that about half of the people interacting with your brand don’t trust it. Unfortunately, this can have a major impact on your business.

An Econsultancy study shows that a whopping 58.4 percent of people decide against buying from a website due to having concerns about payment security – so, due to a lack of trust in the website.

Naturally, they’re justified: the web is rife with hacks and security breaches. Yahoo was hacked, and data belonging to 3 billion people was compromised. eBay was hacked, and data of 145 million people was compromised. Target also was the victim of a major hack. If these high profile organizations with entire security teams can be hacked, people are expected to maintain a level of skepticism when dealing with smaller businesses.

So how do you get people to trust your brand more and transact with your ecommerce business, especially when they are on the checkout page?

By using trust seals on your website.

48 percent of people will not make a purchase from a website that doesn’t display a security trust seal.

So, not having a trust seal can cut your sales in half, and having a trust seal can very well double your sales.

If you don’t use a trust seal on your website, it might be a good idea to start now. Not only will it make you appear more credible and trustworthy, but it will allay the fears of your users and get them to transact with you with fewer concerns.

Create a cart abandonment recovery strategy

The average online cart abandonment rate is 69.23 percent, according to a study by Baymard. For most ecommerce businesses, this means more than half of potential sales is going down the drain, and nothing is being done about it. By being proactive about how you deal with cart abandonment, and having a recovery strategy, you can recover potentially lost sales and boost your ecommerce ROI.

Reasons for abandoning cart range from hidden costs to usability issues:

Here are some areas to focus on to reduce cart abandonment:

• Be upfront about all costs: The single major reason, by far, why people abandon carts is due to high extra costs. When people are suddenly hit with unexpected costs, they’re certain to balk. Try to be upfront about costs involved and completely eliminate or reduce extra costs.
• Simplify the checkout process: Avoid forcing people to create an account before they order. Also, eliminate all unnecessary checkout steps and fields.
• Develop an email follow-up sequence for cart abandoners: The first step is to automate emailing people who abandon your cart. GetResponse makes automating the perfect cart abandonment campaign easy :). Try to email them within 24 hours of abandoning the cart to encourage them to complete their order. You can also ask what prevents them from going ahead with their order.
• Incentivize people to complete their orders: You can also encourage more cart abandoners to complete their orders by giving a discount, a bonus, or adding some other special touch.

You can learn more about this and other tactics that help online stores grow in our email marketing for ecommerce guide.

Optimize your domain name

Another little-known way to boost your ecommerce ROI is by optimizing your domain name. When you have a clear, descriptive domain name, the benefits are great:

• It makes it easy to remember and tell others about your website. This is so important because word of mouth drives $6 trillion of annual consumer spending and generates 5 times more sales than a paid brand impression. People are more likely to tell others about your website if your domain name is memorable and clear.
• Your domain name can impact your search rankings. When you consider the fact that 93 percent of all online experiences begin with a search engine, this is a big deal.

Here are some suggestions for optimizing your domain name:

• Keep it short and memorable.
• Ensure that your domain name is consistent with your brand name – any inconsistency and people might think they’re on a different site, potentially costing you sales and reputation.
• Avoid hyphens, numbers, and special characters.
• Try to incorporate your keyword(s) into your domain name – it doesn’t have to be an exact match domain, but including a keyword will make a lot of difference.
• Try to pick a .com extension if possible.

Pro tip: It’s equally – if not more – important to make sure your ecommerce website loads fast and is available 24/7. To achieve that, be sure to use reliable ecommerce website hosting.

Use the rule of 7

As humans, our attention span today is shorter than at any point in history. In fact, according to a Microsoft report, our attention span has reduced from about 12 seconds in the year 2000 to about eight seconds now. Apparently, we have a shorter attention span than a goldfish with an attention span of nine seconds. A Jampp study also found that our attention span keeps declining on an annual basis.

It gets more interesting: some sources estimate that we are exposed to as many as 5,000 advertisements a day.

So when you consider the fact that we have a very short attention span, and that we are exposed to as many as 5,000 ads a day, the question is how do you get people to notice what you have to offer?

By employing the rule of 7.

In marketing, the rule of 7 states that people need to be exposed to your offer at least seven times before they can take note of it. In other words, simply announcing your offer once and forgetting it isn’t going to cut it. Instead, you need to talk about it repeatedly to further intensify your message.

Some ideas:

• Use regular follow-ups across mediums to create more awareness about your offer.
• Use different content formats to promote your offer.
• Repurpose your content and distribute across channels.
• Use retargeting to repeatedly get your message across to the same leads.

Design your CTAs with an understanding of neural adaptation

Neural adaptation, or sensory adaptation, is a psychology principle that states that we tend to tune out stimulus after constant exposure to it. So, after being exposed to something for a very long time, it doesn’t stand out as much as something we are yet to be exposed to.

The neural adaptation principle explains why we feel our clothes or shoes immediately after putting them on and then they start to feel like a part of us after a while. It also explains why we might initially be very bothered when in a noisy environment but after staying in that environment for a while it doesn’t bother us as much as it did.

In more conversion-related terms: we tend to notice what stands out and ignore what blends in.

How does this affect your commerce ROI?

While some experts will argue that red, or orange are more effective colors for CTAs, the reality is that it isn’t that simple: a green CTA button on a green background will most likely perform worse than a red CTA button on the same background. This is because in this case red stands out while green blends in.

In the same way, review your CTAs to see if they stand out – both in terms of color used and other properties – compared to other elements on your page and tweak them accordingly.

Tweak and test 🙂

Sometimes, ensuring more people click your CTAs isn’t just about “green vs. red” CTA color – instead, it might be a good idea to consider the role of sensory adaptation. At other times a simple trust seal can go a long way to give you a conversion boost. Implement the above five tweaks and watch your ecommerce ROI explode.