October 2017 - Leverage Marketing

Leverage Gets Tangled in EAST Austin Studio Tour

October 30, 2017/0 Comments/in Austin, News /by Leverage Marketing

One of the best parts about the Leverage office’s location in East Austin is its proximity to some great spaces for creativity. Within a two-block radius we have dance studios, co-working spaces, artist collectives, and a bakery whose cupcakes, some of us would argue, are works of art. We’re also in a part of town that sees a lot of participation during the annual EAST Austin Studio Tour, and we’re happy to announce that this year, we’re getting involved.

From 11am-6pm on November 11-12 and 18-19, Leverage will host a temporary exhibition featuring the works of Nicole Anderson and Polina Novozhenets. The two local artists have very different styles, but they’ve chosen the theme Tanglescapes to tie together their collections of abstract paintings, drawings, and mixed media art.

Nicole explained that she came up with the theme Tanglescapes because she and Polina share a meditative, reflective relationship with their art practice. “Because thought patterns can often be dense, complex, and ultimately, tangled, both our works had this same visual element in common,” she told us. Polina agreed that both their works have a meditative quality, and added that their art shares a sense of inviting the viewer to get lost inside it.

The Water Buffalo by Nicole Anderson

Green on Linen by Polina Novozhenets

What is the EAST Austin Studio Tour?

EAST Austin Studio Tour is a self-guided art event that takes place every year across two weekends in November. It’s free and open to the public, and attendees are encouraged to walk or bike to any of the 450+ participating venues that interest them. Tour stops include permanent galleries, temporary exhibitions, private artists’ studios, and even local library branches. You can check out a map and online catalog with all the tour stops here. The Leverage Marketing office is #441!

Why Should You Go?

If you live in the Austin area and have never checked out the EAST Austin Studio Tour, it’s about time you change that. This massive event gives you a chance to view the work of hundreds of local artists working in mediums including painting, photography, sculpture, collage, and more. Some tour stops offer a rare glimpse into an artist’s home workspace, while others give you the opportunity to step through the doors of local galleries and businesses you might not have discovered otherwise.

Nicole described the EAST Austin Studio Tour, which she’s attended every year since she’s lived in Austin, as having a warm, friendly atmosphere and representing artful Southern hospitality at its best. Polina told us that EAST is a true hub of artist activity in Austin, and it’s a great way for artists and non-artists alike to plug into what’s happening in the area.

Many of the tour stops include artwork and handmade gifts for sale, and there are also lots of stops hosting special live events during the tour. Our two visiting artists will be creating new paintings at our office from 2-3pm each Saturday and raffling the finished pieces off to attendees. We’ll also have snacks and wine available throughout the event, and Nicole and Polina’s artwork will be displayed throughout our office. Some of their pieces will be for sale.

We hope to see you during the tour—stop in, chat with us, and enjoy the work of our guest artists.

Check out some of Polina’s art here.

And check out Nicole’s portfolio here.

How to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

October 26, 2017/0 Comments/in Ecommerce, SEO /by Bob Kehoe

If you’re an ecommerce retailer, you likely deal with the reality of abandoned shopping carts every day. According to the latest statistics from Listrak, an industry source on abandoned cart strategy, the 6-month average abandonment rate sits at 78%. There’s up to $260 billion in lost annual revenue due to people placing items in online shopping carts and leaving them. How can your business reduce shopping cart abandonment and start bringing those customers back?

There are several strategies for cart abandonment solutions, but it’s ultimately about creating trust with the customer, so they feel comfortable using your site. While there are certainly shoppers who leave their carts, or who had no intention to buy in the first place, many are merely put off by the checkout process, and leave the site due to frustration. By removing barriers during the checkout process, you can lower cart abandonment and begin increasing revenue.

Why Do People Abandon Their Shopping Carts?

There are countless reasons why people abandon their shopping carts. It’s your job as an ecommerce retailer to ask, “How do I reduce shopping cart abandonment?” and discover new methods of appealing to customers. Some shoppers are distracted by a video, a family member or colleague, or they just leave their computer or mobile device without checking out.

Sometimes, the checkout is complicated or requires too much information. This process can be especially frustrating when checking out on mobile. Cart completion rates for desktop are higher than mobile, with 13% compared to 9% according to Listrak. By optimizing for mobile, you can try to recoup some of these lost purchases.

Ultimately, people abandon shopping carts for a multitude of reasons, and the best cart abandonment solutions are designed to make the process as seamless and secure as possible for the customer so that you can reduce shopping cart abandonment.

How Should I Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment?

Implementing cart abandonment solutions means getting creative and removing obstacles that stand in your customers’ way. With these ideas, you can lower cart abandonment, increase your revenue, and build a relationship with your customers based on trust.

Show Shipping Prices Up Front – A common cause of cart abandonment is high shipping prices, especially when they aren’t transparent throughout the checkout process. A shipping estimator can minimize this problem, while free shipping can solve it almost entirely. There will still be customers who abandon their cart due to the cost of the item, but showing the full price up front, without hidden fees, will reduce shopping cart abandonment.
Don’t Trick the Customer– Avoid making the customer add items to the cart or create an account to see the price. People don’t like jumping through hoops to make a purchase, including going through additional steps. Offer simple, transparent pricing on product pages, and don’t hide it behind any paywalls.
Don’t Require an Account to Purchase- While it’s quickly becoming the norm to offer guest-checkout and options like Amazon and PayPal sign-in, many ecommerce websites still don’t do it. By providing additional payment options, you can reduce the barrier to checkout and increase your site’s trustworthiness.
Create a Seamless Navigation Flow Between Cart and Store– Make changing items in your cart easy, so the customer can view the store, make modifications, and more. If the cart is a segregated part of your website, this can lead to frustration and abandoned carts.
Allow for Sharing and Saving Carts– Not everyone is ready to make a purchase right away. Include functionality that allows your customers to save their cart, share it with friends, or even automatically save their items, so they’re there when they come back to the site.
Use Remarketing Ads to Target Cart Abandoners– Since we know some potential buyers will inevitably abandon their carts, we can still take advantage of the fact that they’ve shown interest in a specific product or brand. Use Google AdWords or Facebook remarketing ads to capture that market share; this customer base is far more likely to buy than other Internet users.
Send Emails with Special Offers to Follow Up- Depending on the size of your company, you can send automated or personalized emails to follow up on the abandoned cart. Offer 10% off or another exclusive deal if they complete their purchase. While sending too many of these emails can turn customers off, it can also remind them of their potential purchase and help them pull the trigger.
Improve Your Mobile Checkout Process- Use a simple progress bar that tells your customer how far along they in the process. This simple solution can reduce frustration and lead to more sales. Add a quick sale option so they can go straight to check out, without wading through various forms. With any necessary forms, ensure you’re only asking for need-to-know information and that your keyboards are field-sensitive, reducing their time spent.

Implement Your Cart Abandonment Solutions

Reduce shopping cart abandonment on your ecommerce site today with these cart abandonment solutions. You can build trust with your customers, create a more seamless checkout process, and increase your revenue over time. Avoid having customers leave your site in frustration and annoyance and begin building positive customer experiences with your checkout process.

Still stuck on why people are abandoning their carts on your ecommerce site? Contact Leverage Marketing to learn more about our web design services for ecommerce businesses. We can help you design an intuitive website and checkout process that lowers cart abandonment.

What to Know About Keyword Rankings (and How to Check Them)

October 19, 2017/2 Comments/in SEO /by Bob Kehoe

Let’s face it: almost nobody looks companies up in the phone book anymore. Whether you’re a local or national business, you’re probably aware that people are largely finding your business online, be it through your own website or through third-party sites like Amazon or Yelp. Marketing channels such as word-of-mouth still play a huge part in growing a business, and old-school promotional tactics such as direct mail still have a place in the game, but if you’re looking to grow a business in 2017, you’re going to want to show up on the search results pages when people look for what you offer.

Hence, the SEO world’s interest in tracking keyword rankings. You may have heard this general phrase thrown around by your colleagues or digital marketing consultants before, but how are these mystical keyword search rankings determined, and how do you keep track of them?

What Are Keyword Rankings?

Keyword ranking positions are simple to understand. Basically, what rankings measure is where your site shows up on the search page for any given keyword.

Say you have a website for your coffee shop, and you want people to be able to find your website when they look for coffee shops in your area. The good news is, you see your website at #4 on the Google results page when you search for “coffee shops Austin TX” – yay! But when you search “restaurants Austin TX” or “cafes Austin TX”, you don’t see your site on the results page until you click into the 5^th “O” in “Gooooooogle.”

This means that your site is ranking #4 on Google for the term “coffee shops Austin TX”, and, because each search results page includes 10 search results, it is ranking 50-something for “cafes Austin TX.”

How Are Keyword Rankings Determined?

It’s pretty straightforward: your page is ranked according to how relevant it is to the searcher’s query (keyword). So, as a coffee shop in Austin, TX, your site is going to be very relevant for that particular query, and will likewise rank well as long as other SEO factors are solid. However, your website just is not as relevant for someone searching “restaurants Austin TX”, because search engines realize that your café is not the best possible match for what a searcher is looking for when they search for a restaurant.

Can you game the system and hire an SEO firm to help your coffee shop’s site rank #1 for restaurant-related searches? You can try, but fair warning: failing to fulfill a searcher’s expectations by promising the answer to their query but not delivering is a dangerous game. When visitors don’t find what they’re looking for, they will likely bounce right off your site, and your rankings will suffer. Don’t stretch the truth – focus on your rankings for search queries that you can confidently fulfill.

Why Should You Care About Checking Your Keyword Ranking Position?

As we all know, the best place to hide a dead body is on the second page of Google. Continuing with our coffee shop example, then, your business is essentially not showing up to anyone searching for “cafes Austin TX.” The websites on the first search engine results page receive almost 95% of web traffic, so not many people are going to find you on that 5^th page.

Don’t let your site be the dead body. Tracking your average keyword rankings is a straightforward way of monitoring your site performance and comparing it to that of your competitors’. So, if your site drops from a keyword search ranking of #1 to a ranking of #40, you’ll know before your revenue starts dropping, and you can take action to regain your rankings.

What Keywords Should I Care About Tracking?

You probably already have a good idea of what keywords are most important for your business – if you’re the owner of a coffee shop, you’d be missing out if you didn’t really care about ranking highly for local search keywords like “coffee shops near me”. However, there are a lot of different variants on searches about coffee shops – maybe a potential customer will search for “coffeeshops” or “a coffee shop” or “coffee shop menu” or “find coffee shops nearby” or potentially hundreds of other variants. What about someone searching for the town’s best cappuccino or the best coffee shop for studying? You want to show up for those searches, too.

This is where keyword research and SEO come in. When you’re looking to use SEO to improve your site’s search rankings, keyword research is almost always the first project to tackle – why make the effort to improve the keyword ranking position for a search term that no one is searching for? Using keyword research to identify big ranking opportunities is a topic for another day, but if you’ve got questions now, the Leverage Marketing team is always happy to lend a hand when it comes to keyword strategy – we love that stuff.

So, let’s say you’ve done your research and put together an awesome keyword list. Obviously, with all these search terms you want to show up for, manually searching each term and marking your site’s position regularly would be a miserable and futile task, especially considering that rankings can vary by your exact location and your search history. There has to be a better way to check your Google rankings, right?

How Do You Check Your Website Ranking on Google, Bing, and Yahoo?

Thankfully for every SEO and business owner’s sanity, there are a lot of ways to check your site’s search engine rankings that don’t involve a week worth’s of time spent on Google. There are so many tools that have been created specifically for this purpose that it often seems like a lot to sift through. Which tools are the real deal?

You can choose from keyword search ranking tools that are free or tools that are paid. Keep in mind that you get what you pay for – using exclusively free tools can give you spotty results that don’t always reflect your true rankings that well, though they do come in handy for some uses. Paid tools tend to make it easier to automate keyword rank reporting and usually take some of the legwork out of tracking your keyword rankings so you can sit back and watch your rankings roll in.

Google itself is a great place to go when looking for keyword rank tracking tools – you can probably find the perfect tool to fit your budget and your tracking priorities. A few of the top choices are:

SERPs: It’s usability as a free tool is limited, but it’s great for spot checking both global and local rankings to see where your site appears for some of your top keywords.
Moz: This paid tool has all the bells and whistles you could want in a rank tracking tool, and it can reveal a lot of interesting info about the movement of your site up and down the results pages.
Advanced Web Ranking: This tool automates the keyword tracking process so you can relax while thousands of keywords are tracked on regular intervals. Heck, you can even set this to track the movement of your site rankings every single day if you want to!
Google Position Checker Tool: Maybe not the most comprehensive keyword checking tool, but it is free and is a great way to get started with rank tracking and find out where your website stands.

Want to see what you can get out of keyword rank tracking, but not sure where to start? Sign up for the Leverage newsletter to get more info about maximizing your digital efforts, or get in touch with us today to chat about our SEO services – because we want people to visit your coffee shop just as much as you do.

What Makes People Bounce from Your Site?

October 17, 2017/0 Comments/in SEO /by Leverage Marketing

If you’ve spent any time exploring Google Analytics or talking with a search engine marketer, you’ve probably heard the phrase “bounce rate.” This term refers to the percentage of people who viewed one page on your site and left without clicking anything or navigating to another page.

A high bounce rate on your website isn’t always a bad thing, especially if you have a single-page site or content that can be consumed on a single page. However, if your success depends on visitors landing on your site and then taking another step (such as placing an order or filling out a contact form), you don’t want your bounce rate to be high.

Source: Kissmetrics

If you’ve spotted some high bounce rates on your website, the first thing you should do is try to figure out why visitors are leaving. The reasons for high bounce rates aren’t always obvious (Google Analytics doesn’t provide a neat explanation, unfortunately), but chances are it’s a result of one or more of the factors below.

What Causes a High Bounce Rate?

Page Loads Slowly

Time isn’t on your side when it comes to engaging web visitors. According to Kissmetrics, 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less, and 40% of people say they’ll abandon a website that takes longer than three seconds to load. If you’ve been noticing unusually high bounce rates, one of the first things you should do is test your website speed. You can do this by plugging a URL into Google’s PageSpeed tool. (Try it out—we’ll wait.)

If a page is loading slowly on desktop or mobile, PageSpeed Insights will recommend some potential fixes. One thing that may help on an image-heavy page is to compress your images so that the file is smaller and takes less time to load.

Disruptive Advertising Scares Off Visitors

Think about the last time you landed on a web page that immediately launched pop-up ads, flashing banners, or an auto-play video with the sound at full volume. You probably didn’t stay on that page too long. And guess what? Your site visitors are equally turned off by these disruptive elements. Avoid these ad formats and focus on delivering content that’s useful to your audience. If you do want to try out a pop-up ad (to get users to subscribe to a newsletter or download an eBook, for example), consider setting it to only appear when a user has scrolled down a certain percentage of the page or completed a pre-defined action on your site.

Design Looks Bad

Visitors will judge your web page by its cover. If your design elements, color choices, or fonts look outdated or garish, you’ll make visitors think your business is unprofessional.

Even worse than an outdated-looking website is one that’s hard to navigate. If it’s difficult for visitors to find their way around, either on desktop or mobile, they’re unlikely to stick around. Work with your web designer to set up navigation and search functions that are intuitive and mobile-friendly.

Content Is Hard to Read

There are lots of things that make online content hard to read, including:

Small fonts
Weird font choices (hello, Comic Sans)
Font colors that blend into the background
Big blocks of text with no images or paragraph breaks

These issues can be jarring on a small mobile screen. And if visitors have to struggle just to read what’s on your page, they’re not going to bother with it. Keep your content easy to read—and skim—if you want to keep visitors on your site.

Content Is Poorly Written

Poorly written can refer to content that’s riddled with typos and grammatical errors or content that’s bland and fails to deliver what the reader is looking for. In either situation, you’ll hurt your business’s credibility and risk driving visitors away from your site. Invest the time in developing high-quality content that delivers something your visitors can’t find anywhere else. Use a tool like Grammarly to thoroughly proofread each piece before publication.

Page Fails to Meet Visitor Expectations

If a visitor arrives at your site only to find that the landing page doesn’t align with their expectations, they’ll bounce. Consider the example of someone who is searching for tips to keep their lawn green during the winter and clicks a search result with the headline “How to Keep Your Lawn Green Year-Round.” The page, however, turns out to be a blatant promotion for Ron’s Lawn Fertilizer. The page doesn’t provide the tips the visitor was looking for, so they leave.

Avoid misleading your visitors by making sure your meta titles and descriptions line up with what’s actually on your page. This will help you reduce your bounce rate and attract more qualified visitors.

Visitor Doesn’t Know What’s Next

If you want visitors to go from one page to another on your site, you need to make that clear with a call-to-action (CTA). In many cases, this is a button that directs users to complete an action, such as Download the Guide or Start a Free Trial.

Here’s an example of a CTA from the Leverage site.

If your CTA is hard to see or buried at the bottom of the page, your visitors won’t know what they’re supposed to do next. You also risk confusing your visitors if you place multiple CTAs on the same page. Make your CTA obvious so that it’s as easy as possible for visitors to take the next step.

Value Proposition Isn’t Clear

You may want to dedicate your website to reviewing all the cool features of your product or service, but features alone don’t motivate your site visitors—they want to know about the benefits to them. It’s especially important to make your value proposition clear if you have a product that’s very similar to a competitor’s and charge a higher price. It needs to be obvious to visitors why they should choose your product or service. If you can’t articulate that, they’ll head to a competitor’s site.

You’re Asking Too Much, Too Soon

This problem may come up if you’re in an industry with a typically long buyer’s journey, such as B2B software or luxury goods. If you have expensive offerings, asking visitors to make a purchase or fill out a quote form as soon as they get to your site could be too much. To keep visitors engaged with your site and business, you may want to start with a less intimidating introductory offer like an eBook or free trial.

Visitor Got What They Wanted

Certain types of web pages, such as blog posts, are likely to have a high bounce rate simply because visitors found all the information they were looking for on that one page. For this type of content, it’s more important to pay attention to metrics like Time on Page and Average Session Duration. By checking these engagement metrics, you can get a sense of whether visitors are leaving quickly or sticking around to consume your content.

Still baffled as to why visitors are bouncing from your site? Leverage Marketing can perform a website audit to reveal potential issues and solutions. Contact us and let us know what challenges you want to address.

How to Use Visual Content in Your Marketing

October 11, 2017/0 Comments/in Content Marketing, Video Marketing /by Bob Kehoe

In the world of digital marketing, visual content is:

Images
Videos
Charts & Graphs

You use visual content in marketing by selecting and designing it to enhance the communication of your message – and we know how critical that message can be to the success of your enterprise.

Using visual content and imagery in marketing should be a practice in helping every possible customer or client understand what your business offers, how it can help him or her, and how he or she can get it.

Learn how to maximize the effectiveness of your imagery with our visual content marketing strategies.

Don’t Fear Images

Our brains process visual content and text in two contrasting ways. Though it may not seem like it, parsing the meaning of language is a work-heavy procedure, especially when compared to the brain power necessary to find meaning in an image.

We figure out images an impressive 600,000 times faster than we figure out text. They also evoke stronger emotional responses and elicit action more often than pure text. We tend to only read about 20% of the text on a webpage – but with the help of images, we can understand large concepts and remember them more easily than we would by reading about them.

Imagine the concept of the Leverage Marketing team giving you the gift of free marketing knowledge. We’ve wrapped it up in a blog and we’re handing it to you, here and now, obligation-free and with the hope that you’ll use it to better your business. How would you represent that concept?

Mouse-over below to see our version of the concept.

hands holding purple gift box for free marketing knowledge concept

The way to engage with images is by assigning a purpose to each image. Every photo or illustration you choose to use should be able to drive home a point and leave a lasting impression. Creating custom images is the best way to ensure that there is meaning behind each image, but if you don’t have the resources to do so, then don’t be afraid to invest the time necessary to search for and acquire only the most relevant images.

There are four common types of images we use in visual content marketing:

Standard Images

These are the images you see pasted into pages and blogs to enhance the consumer experience. They can range from memes to photographs and tell a part of the story that can’t be communicated through text alone.

Icons

Icons are miniaturized, simplified versions of full-sized images. An icon is a representative or symbol of something. In much the same way that an image represents an idea from text, an icon represents an idea from an image.

Screenshots

To make it easier to describe complex computer issues or processes, smart marketers use screenshots. These are still grabs from your computer screen that share with the viewer everything viewable to you on your monitor – or, with a little editing, the parts that you want the viewer to see.

Infographics

Infographics are the capstones of images. They combine the features and storytelling power of different types of images to create a fully-realized graphics and marketing experience. Often, they also include text to ensure that viewers have access to the complete body of information.

Tips for Using Images and Graphics in Your Visual Content Marketing Strategy

There’s more to beginning to use images than just including them in your next content piece. Try these tips to make sure your images are helping you reach your marketing goals:

Don’t treat images like filler content – If you start adding non-relevant images just for fun, you’ll quickly raise your page’s load time too high with content that doesn’t contribute to your message… and probably confuses your viewer.
Be careful of file size – 200 kilobytes should be your absolute maximum, with few exceptions, but you should aim to keep almost all of your images 100 kilobytes or below to keep load times rock-bottom.
Tie in image appearance – A rowdy mix of illustration styles and random photos, with and without borders, and with wildly varying color schemes and value ranges is a heavy burden on your professional credibility. Use your brand’s colors as a base for your images. Pick a category, such as photos or illustrations, along with a consistent style, such as flat design or matte painting, for reliable results.

Did you notice that most of our graphics use our brand colors? That’s how you pull your imagery together!

Start Making Videos

You can’t stop video from becoming more and more relevant. Most of what you consume on social media is now either images or video – text has taken a seat way, way behind visual media.

Generation Z youth, born between 1995 and 2012, now spend about 10 hours a day online between all of their available devices. 70% of this demographic watch over two hours of videos on YouTube alone every day.

If you want to capture their attention (and the attention of those outside the Gen Z demographic) then you have to start making and outreaching videos now. But beware – producing video is so much more than talking into a phone camera.

Record, edit, and post videos like these to start driving website visits and page views:

Weekly broadcasts
Influencer interviews
Testimonials
Customer service videos

Think of creative ways to use the videos – we’ve suggested some unique video ideas before that you might want to check out. You can:

Add videos to blogs
Post videos on your social media channels
Share videos with influencers
Use videos to enhance service & product exploration

Make and Use a YouTube Account

Google is the most widely used search engine, and they already own YouTube. It’s a win-win to create a YouTube account to host your videos, because Google has the greatest access and integration with its own service.

If you let Google-owned YouTube host your videos, you’re much more likely to rank highly for your target keywords in organic search – and that’s a smart visual content marketing strategy. Just don’t forget to embed your YouTube videos in relevant areas on your site and social media channels.

Integrate Charts & Graphs When Possible

Build ‘em in Excel, Piktochart, Canva, or Adobe Illustrator – whatever creative program you have access to, use it to create visually appealing graphs and charts.

You can embed Google Trends graphs directly into your content.

OR you can build your own Excel charts – and they actually look all right!

Seeing an astounding statistic in text is one thing, but watching bars and lines rise and fall gives you a physical sensation of the impact of statistics, a power tool in visual content marketing. In marketing, graphs and charts drive home information as well as emotion – and can sometimes call your audience to action.

Tailor Your Visual Content Marketing Strategy Directly to Your Audience

If you’re selling to millennials, push video on social media. If you’re targeting 30-50 year old professionals, employ engaging infographics and interviews with influential industry leaders. Each demographic consumes in a different way, but they all have one thing in common:

Everyone consumes visual content.

Leverage Marketing provides visual content marketing services from strategy to execution. Connect with us today and get moving on a graphics and marketing plan to increase traffic and qualified leads!

What Convinces Shoppers to Buy Online?

October 4, 2017/0 Comments/in Web Design /by Leverage Marketing

To say that everyone and their dog has shopped online isn’t too much of an exaggeration. According to a Pew Research report, 80% of Americans say they’ve shopped online, and 15% shop online every single week.

But just because most Americans are visiting online stores doesn’t mean they’re making purchases. A notable 70% of all online shopping carts are abandoned, representing an estimated $4 trillion that ecommerce companies are missing out on.

We already know that poor website design can create barriers that stop consumers from buying. So, after eliminating those barriers, what more can ecommerce businesses do to get shoppers to complete their purchases? In the infographic below, we look at some of the biggest factors that influence online shopping behavior.

Weighing the Cost

You probably won’t be too surprised to hear that price is one of the biggest factors that affects online buyer behavior. Almost 9 out of 10 shoppers compare prices between sellers, and 65% decide whether to buy online or at a brick-and-mortar store based on who has the lowest price.

Shipping costs can be a major deterrent in the online shopping journey. A little more than half (56%) of consumers have abandoned a shopping cart because they were presented with unexpected costs at checkout. Ecommerce companies can avoid this issue and give shoppers extra incentive to purchase by offering free shipping.

Feeling Informed

While competitive pricing is important, it’s not the only thing online shoppers look at. Since they aren’t able to view ecommerce products in person, online shoppers want to gather as much relevant information as they can before making a purchase. 88% of consumers say that detailed product information is extremely important to their purchase decision, and 66% want to see at least three images of an item they’re thinking about buying. Almost all shoppers (94%) say they’ll abandon a site if they can’t easily find the information they need.

The message to online retailers should be clear: don’t skimp on the product images or descriptions. Businesses that have a large product catalog should use a site search, filters, and intuitive categories so that shoppers can quickly find what they’re looking for in their digital customer journey.

Reading the Reviews

Shoppers like to know what other people think of products, especially when they’re thinking about getting an item they’ve never purchased before. More than 4 out of 5 consumers check online ratings and reviews before buying something new. Online shoppers value the information they get from reviews much more than any ads you could show them. 84% of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

Ecommerce retailers should display product reviews prominently so that shoppers can feel confident about making purchases. Businesses should respond to negative reviews but shouldn’t necessarily hide those reviews from consumers. Shoppers are less likely to trust a business that displays nothing but five-star reviews.

Enjoying the Convenience

Many shoppers appreciate the convenience of being able to buy without trekking to a brick-and-mortar store…as long as they don’t have to wait too long for their new purchase to arrive. 69% of consumers say that one-day shipping is a strong enough incentive to get them to buy online, and 31% actually expect businesses to offer an expedited shipping option.

Consumers also want to face as little friction as possible when returning an item that didn’t work out. 2 out of 3 people say that free returns and exchanges could incentivize them to shop online rather than at a traditional retail location.

Getting Personalized Recommendations

When faced with a huge selection of products in an online store, shoppers can fall victim to the paradox of choice. 4 out of 10 consumers say they have left a business’s website and made a purchase somewhere else after feeling overwhelmed by an abundance of options.

The solution to this problem isn’t necessarily cutting down on product offerings: it’s catering to individual shoppers. Providing personalized recommendations based on preferences or past purchases can significantly increase the chances that a shopper will continue down the ecommerce purchase funnel.

85% of online shoppers say they’ve been influenced by personalized promotions on an ecommerce retailer’s home page, and 92% say they’ve been influenced by personalized shopping cart recommendations. On top of that, 65% of shoppers say they’re more likely to buy from a retailer who emails them relevant and personalized promotions. Everyone loves a deal that’s tailor-made for them.

Sources:

Walker Sands Communications

Wondering how you can get more of your site visitors to buy? Contact Leverage Marketing to learn about our web design services for ecommerce businesses. We’ll review your website and make recommendations to increase sales and streamline your ecommerce purchase funnel.