Link engagement to revenue: how to build ecommerce sales

Shoppers spend more and more time online, yet they give that time to fewer and fewer websites.

Some 55 percent of online shoppers use only two or three trusted sites for their content discovery and purchasing, according to research by digital agency Carat, which also found that 41 percent of people feel overwhelmed by the amount of choice available to them, making it hard for them to make purchase decisions.

Shoppers browse spontaneously while waiting for the bus, watching TV, and checking prices in-store – across an array of devices. We live in an always-on culture. Someone, somewhere, is always looking at your website and products.

Retailers need to engage shoppers where those shoppers congregate online, but in a world of glimpses and instant gratification, getting shoppers to engage is harder than it has ever been. However, much of the shopper’s journey is now done digitally, and engagement is likely to happen over several digital touchpoints.

Why should retailers try to get shoppers to engage? Because of the direct relationship between engagement and revenue. The longer a shopper spends time on a website – prolonged by the experiences provided and the messages presented – the more likely they are to enter the buying cycle and progress to the checkout.

Engagement is all about the richness of the experience – visual impact and easy completion, powerful images and intuitive design – a frictionless path that takes users where they want to go… even if they don’t know it yet.

Keeping shoppers on a site and serving up the right content that engages them and makes purchase decisions easy is critical.

Make everything ecommerce-enabled.

Five key steps to improving revenue

1. Make buying easy
   The shopper is always somewhere along the path to purchase between browse and buy. At any point on a site, the shopper should be able to simply click and buy. Images, lookbooks, catalogues, reviews – anything that has your products on it – should feature a ‘Buy Now’ option that sends the product straight to the cart or even opens a transactional quick-view immediately.
2. Make checkout simple
   The main barrier to any ecommerce sale across any device is the checkout, which is where most shoppers drop out. Even if there are items in the shopper’s shopping cart, sites lose on average 68 percent at checkout, equating to £2.8 trillion in lost revenue.To jump this hurdle, make the process of buying easy. No one wants to waste time entering lengthy card numbers and other details. In addition, commitment issues arise when the time comes to hit the ‘Pay Now’ or ‘Checkout’ buttons. Even a simple language change can help; ‘Buy Now’ or, even better, ‘I Want It!’ can decrease abandonment.
3. Work with showrooming
   Timely offers are a huge driver of conversions, and they’re something you can deliver using mobile location data and physical context. As showrooming continues to become a standard way to shop, use real-time offers, along with real-time stock updates, to make the purchase journey more of a service.
4. Inspire shoppers
   As the path to purchase becomes richer with features that help the shopper along their journey, buying becomes a service. People are busy and don’t have time to weigh multiple options and want to make snap decisions. The creation of rich digital experiences can help them do that. Enabling them to ‘shop the look’ and ‘shop the fit’ with content sliders that show a few key items and recommendations about what goes well with those items is a huge benefit to shoppers and makes them more likely to buy – and buy more than perhaps they had previously considered buying. This works not only for fashion retail but across all sectors. No matter the product there will always be complementary items. Identify what they are and make sure the shopper knows about them too.
5. Analyse and optimise
   All online businesses should use tools to measure and analyse their digital experiences.

Selecting the right metrics is crucial:

• Time spent: The first ten seconds are critical. How does that figure drop away after 20 seconds or more?
• Actions: How does shopper behaviour change on the site? The clicks, scrolls, and mouse movements that shoppers perform on or around an experience in a specified period of time should be monitored and inform constant refinement.
• Devices: What devices are your shoppers using? Are those experiences optimised on those particular devices? Is your site using responsive design?
• Reactions: To gain insight and head off any negative user reactions, use social listening tools for gauging those reactions.

Together, those four metrics, and the interplay between them, provide a way to measure and optimise your shopper’s experience and will deliver the key focus points for improvement.

Better experiences lead to better sales and richness equals more revenue. That means inspiring shoppers with great creative and guiding them to buy. Web 3.0 is upon us, this concept is going to have to be at the heart of all retailers’ and manufacturers’ ecommerce strategies.

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