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Hi Friends,

We are heading into the holiday season and that means - it’s the hap-hap-happiest season of all for online shopping.

This month we are taking a look at ecommerce holiday shopping trends and how you can tweak your website and marketing to increase your conversion rate and bring your business a very nice fourth quarter for the holidays.

Be Well, Nicole, Jane, Patti, Ben, and Matt

Ecommerce Holiday Trends

The 2021 Holiday season anticipates a 2.7% rise in retail sales, bringing in upwards of $1.1 Trillion, according to eMarketer. 18.9% of that is expected to be ecommerce sales, accounting for a rise of 11.3% from 2020.

What does this mean for your business? Well, that depends on a lot of factors. One factor that we will be looking at this month is your conversion rate and how you might be tapping into (or missing out on) sales in Quarter 4.

What’s your Conversion Rate? - And How To Optimize It

The term “conversion” can refer to a few things in regards to your website. If a visitor does what you want them to do on your website, that counts as a conversion.

Conversions on a website could include:

• Filling out a form

• Subscribing to a newsletter

• Sharing on social media

• Making a purchase

Your conversion rate looks at the total number of conversions (aka completed action) in relation to the number of visitors or views. So, in the case of purchases, your conversion rate is the total number of completed purchases in relation to the number of visitors to your site.

A common formula is to take your total conversions and divide by the number of visitors to your site, then multiply by 100 to get a percentage. For instance, if you made 50 sales over a set time period, and in that same time period you had 2000 visitors, your conversion rate would be 2.5%.

50 conversions / 2000 visitors = 0.025 X 100 = 2.5%

Ok, you say, you’re making me do math - but where do I find these numbers?

That’s where Google Analytics, or an alternative analytics tool, comes in to track your website and advertising data. With analytics, you can calculate your own conversion rate for any number of actions that you want to track.

Most ecommerce software will allow you to not do fifth grade math and see the conversion rate for your online store. In any case, it’s good to know what that number means and where it comes from!

If you are feeling a little discouraged that your number seems low, don’t worry. Most carts convert at under 3%, so if you’re above that, you’re doing ok.

If you’re conversion rate is low

 Shopify has some great tips, here are our highlights:

• Homepage: Avoid overwhelming your potential customers. 86% of buyers want to see product information on your homepage - so highlight a best seller or collection/promotion to not distract.

• Product Discovery: If your customers can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll go somewhere else. A clean and efficient navigational menu with a few pages and a search box will cover your browsing basics.

• Product Pages: If you have all of your product information available on the product page, they don’t need to navigate away to another website to find answers. Via Shopify - “Younger consumers are actually 85% more likely to make a purchase after watching a product video.” Studies also show that more pictures make the consumer trust you more so aim for at least three.

• Checkout Experience: Is your checkout experience as seamless and intuitive as possible? Letting customers use their login from other sites to register (and saving filling out tedious forms), make sure all the pages load fast, and other ways you can accelerate things increases the likelihood buying will happen.

• Shipping & Returns: Review shipping options and experience. Are your shipping costs a deterrent to finalizing sales? Is your return policy and process clear and easy? These factors can have a huge impact on consumer decisions to complete a purchase.

• Being Transparent: Having clear contact information available, and an open line of customer service communication, will increase customer loyalty as they feel more comfortable buying from you.

• Turn on abandoned cart emails: There’s a reason all the big companies have them.

• Website Speed & Performance: A slow loading website will turn people away faster than… well, faster than it takes for your page to load. Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool can run a speedy analysis (on mobile and desktop) and let you know where improvements can be made.

Do you need to tackle all of these things at once? Probably not. If you pick one change, do it, and see better sales, it might motivate you to do more. It’s important to experiment and look at the impact that each adjustment has on your analytics. But like the old adage goes, a little bit can make a big difference.

If you’re conversion rate is high

If your conversion rate is above 2%, that means your website and shopping experience is not necessarily an issue.

If you and your customers are happy with your store and ecommerce process, then what you want to focus on now is driving more traffic to your website and online store.

This can be done any number of ways that work for your business and brand, so we will only mention a few (if you want to take a deeper dive into this, you will find loads of content on our blog and playlists on our YouTube channel).

Here are a few suggestions to drive traffic to your store:

• Pinterest: With audience demographics that are ready to buy, and less expensive ads than Facebook, Pinterest is a great platform to engage in to get clicks to your website or store. More on this here.

• List your products on Google My Business: First, setting up a Google My Business profile if you don’t already have one will be a huge driver of traffic, especially if you update it regularly. Also, creating and maintaining a product catalog on your page will show relevant products with links to your store when people search Google.

• Facebook Catalogs: Catalogs on Facebook are a convenient way to showcase relevant products in Facebook Ads, as well as ways to link viewers to your store and Facebook Shop. (Facebook Shop/Commerce Manager lets you check out on Facebook or in your own online shopping cart software.)

• An engaged and regularly updated social media presence: A social media presence won’t do much for you if you aren’t actively engaging on your platform. Regular updates and product information with links to your store will keep your business in the eyes and minds of those whose feeds you cross regularly. Here’s an exercise to help with creating content.

• Regular Email Newsletters: Welcome emails, regular newsletters, automated email workflows - email holds a high place in the marketing landscape. Creating a personal connection with customers, and showing up in a place that customers visit regularly - their email inbox. Email marketing ROI averages around $36-$42 for every $1 spent. It runs even higher across specific industries. More stats and facts here and here.

Increasing your traffic will help to increase your conversions, if your conversion rate shows a positive customer experience from when they first click on to checkout. Different analytics tools will help you to track your traffic, showing you what works and what doesn’t - not only in driving traffic to your site and store, but also driving traffic that in turn, results in conversions.

From The BEC Blog

Five Ways To Have A Free Ecommerce Site

Part of the hesitation with making an ecommerce site is the monthly costs to license software (Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, etc.) or the costs of having a developer build an online store from scratch.

The good news is there are some free tools. Are they perfect? No. Do they have limits? Yes. If these companies are offering something for free, they are getting something from you. But as long as we go in with our eyes open and know what to look out for, we can make a good decision.

Read the BEC Blog About Free Ecommerce Builders

An Intro To Automation

Contrary to popular belief, automation doesn’t require a computer programming degree or expensive software.

This broadcast is a basic intro to the idea of IFTTT.com and Zapier.com, what is paid and what is free; and some sample marketing tasks you might enjoy automating. You can even automate fun things too because more and more of our physical objects have internet capabilities.

Read the BEC Blog about Automation

Celebrating Client Victories

University of Maine (Orono) - What happens when you have 10,000 students and everyone has set up separate Facebook pages and Instagram accounts that need to be put under one banner? Breaking Even Communications is working with the team at UMO to bring the bookstore, dining services, and other vital university services under one social media management system with custom reports, allowing these groups to grow their Facebook, Instagram, and other social media accounts over time. Untangling a big old internet ball of yarn? We’ve done it before and we’re doing it again!

Have an idea for your business that feels out of reach? Talk to us about what you’d like to do and we might be able to help!

Did You Know?

Pinterest was born from an app created as a virtual replacement for paper catalogs called “Tote”. Due to the less developed mobile payment technology of the time, Tote didn’t survive as an app. However, creator Ben Silberman noticed that people were saving photos of favorite items they wanted to buy, and sharing them.

The idea of collecting and sharing images morphed into the app we know and love to Pin today. Now Pinterest boasts over 450 million monthly active users and over 240 billion Pins (and counting)… and in-app purchasing. In the past few years, Pinterest seems to have resurrected their Tote dreams, increasing emphasis on ecommerce and visual searches.

For Your Entertainment

November is a month in which we focus on gratitude, we enjoy festivities around food and the harvest. How is most of our agricultural abundance achieved? Fertilizer. What makes the best fertilizer? Yeah, that’s right, poop does.

In the 1790s, a clever undergraduate at Oxford pulled an epic prank, and perfect marketing campaign demonstrating the power of poop. Read more about William Buckland’s grand scheme involving buckets of nutrient rich bat guano and the lawns of Oxford College.

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