In the last issue of the FBMIU we discussed several ways to drive more traffic to your site. In this issue, we will highlight several things you can do to improve the conversion rate from site visitors to site buyers.
Make sure your site is geared to the unique needs of specialty-food gift buyers. To that end, one of the most important considerations you face is how to set up the buying and checkout process to make it easier and faster for buyers to send multiple gifts to one address, to send the same gift to many different addresses, and/or to send different gifts to different addresses all in the same ordering session. There is little you can do to drive more sales and garner a larger average order size than streamlining the way your site handles multiple ship-to’s per order!
Shop your own site and the sites of your leading competitors and pay particular attention to load times. In addition, test your site using a dial-up modem. If your site is slow to load or run, you must find the source of the problem and correct it immediately. The problem may be within your site, or it may be due to your hosting company. Make sure your ISP has enough bandwidth to support additional holiday traffic. Work with your programmers and/or site developers to make sure you are doing everything possible to speed up your site. There is a direct relationship between site load times and site abandonment. People have zero tolerance for slow loading sites.
Update your home page frequently.
Simple changes to the graphics and background colors will give the appearance there are new things for repeat visitors to see. Conversely, if the home page looks identical to the last time they were on your site, they may look no further and move on to a competitor’s site.
Feature a variety of key gifting price points on the home page (e.g. , $25, $50, $75, and $100). If you don’t have room on your home page to show an item in each price point, make it immediately clear to visitors that you have a wide range of prices for all of their gift-giving needs.
Feature your best sellers unless inventories are too low—it’s better for first-time visitors to see a best seller on your home page than a dog you are trying to unload.
Add “Best Sellers” and “Web Specials” categories to your major navigation. These sections are often the first place new prospects go to on a site. In addition, a “Best Sellers” section helps position you as a leader in your niche (e.g., gift baskets, fruit cakes, steaks, fresh fruit, etc.) of the food-by-mail market. “Shop by Price” should also be part of your major navigation
Add a gift of the day or daily special. At Overstock.com, their “Steal O’ the Day” emphasizes timeliness with the tagline “Gone Tomorrow.” Shoppers not only get a steep discount on the featured item but also have a sense of urgency about making the purchase
A “12 Days of Christmas Countdown” (starting December 1) is a great way to kick off the high season, which runs from December 1 until your shipping cut-off for Christmas delivery. Feature a different gift each day at special pricing.
At the end of the “12 Days” promo, change it to “Last-minute Gifts.” Here you feature items that are in stock and easy to pack and ship. Gift certificates, gift cards, and e-gift cards are a natural to include in this section, too. You may also want to give a discount on shipping charges for all of the items in this section. For example, each item qualifies for a free express-shipping upgrade
Go above and beyond helping gift shoppers select gifts—emphasize ease, convenience and hassle-free shopping throughout your site.
Make it easy for site visitors to find your cut-off dates and your shipping and delivery policies. According to Forrester, the top complaint of online shoppers is that their gifts did not arrive in time for Christmas. The more you emphasize and highlight your dates, the more confident shoppers will be that you will get their gifts to their intended recipients on time.
Be sure to include shipping cut-off dates in all of the e-mails you send between now and Christmas.
For each e-mail blast, print ad, and ad group in your pay-per-click program, link to a landing page (not your home page) that is specifically designed for that promotion. More times than not, if done well, targeted landing pages produce higher conversion rates than sending visitors directly to your home page.
Few things frustrate time-starved online shoppers more than not finding what they want to buy on a site. So beef up your on-site search. Make sure the search results are appropriate for the holiday season. In addition, make sure EVERY search term returns something for the customer to buy. If the search results are blank, serve up a page that shows gift cards, gift certificates, and two or three of your most popular items. Let shoppers know these are always popular gift choices.
Cross-selling and up-selling with "you may also like" suggestions on each product page is a great way to increase your average order size.
A lot of customers, especially corporate buyers, like to order early and wrap up their shopping before December. Encourage this early ordering. Emphasize throughout your site that customers can order now, and you will ship their gifts at a later date.
Many conventional retailers as well as online and catalog merchants are reporting soft sales so far this holiday season. Therefore, they may start trying to entice customers with aggressive discounts to keep or take market share. We are not recommending that you get into the discount, price-war game. However, you may want to have several strong promotions cued up and ready to load if you need them. This includes having the web pages and e-mails already designed and ready to launch, products selected and priced, and more promotional ad copy in your pay-per-click ads. You don’t want to be blindsided by retailers’ and other competitors’ deep discounts, “pre-Christmas sales” and promotions.
We hope you find these simple suggestions helpful as you fine-tune your websites and your online marketing plans for the final push of the holiday season.
Best of luck and happy holidays,
Tony Cox
President
The 5th Food Group and Catalog Solutions, LLC
ABOUT 5TH FOOD GROUP & CATALOG SOLUTIONS
5th Food Group helps specialty-food catalogers and internet marketers grow and make more money by developing, managing and implementing their mail order and online marketing programs. We are the only catalog/internet marketing firm that works exclusively in the specialty food industry. Helping smaller companies or large companies with small mail order or Internet divisions is what we do best.
5th Food Group