Top-10 Ways to Increase Customer Conversion

10 Sep 202111 Sep 2021
by Blendium Support

We all love a good top-10 list! How about one that directly impacts possible customer conversions on your eCommerce site?

We’ve compiled a list of ten action items for you and your team to prioritize against your web site. We’re betting at least one of these would increase customer conversion!

For the sake of brevity, we’ve included a few extra pointers for each of our top-10 to push you along the path.

Make a great first impression
1. Quick site load
2. Relevant content
3. Quality content
Optimize on-site search
1. Human factors
2. Language differences (US / British), spelling errors, synonyms, etc.
3. Leverage analytics to hone on-site search
4. Search predictions
Offer trusted experiences
1. Boost confidence
2. Great Privacy policy
3. Product Reviews
4. Site Reviews
5. Quality looking Site with amazing content
Foster a supportive atmosphere
1. Quick response times from customer service reps
2. Web chat (live chat / chat bot)
3. Leverage an Alexa skill
Focus on a personalized approach
1. Provide a relevant experience to customers
2. Personalized Email marketing and remarketing
Elevate your checkout experience
1. Proper design and flow
2. Reduce any friction points
3. Utilize Heatmaps to better understand customer flows
Abandoned Cart strategy
1. Abandoned carts happen for a variety of reasons
2. Email Marketing rescue campaign is important
Retarget your prospective customers
Enable connected experiences
1. Optimize digital experience across devices and channels
2. Frictionless mobile experience
Streamline the social path to purchase
1. See, Click and Pay via social channels
2. Do not need full catalog on social media

So, there it is! Our challenge to you: over the next two weeks, put a keen eye to at least one of these suggestions and let us know how it has worked out.

E-commerce

Host on YouTube or Vimeo

10 Jul 202110 Jul 2021
by Blendium Support

Both video platforms are quite different.

YouTube is more open and for the masses, while Vimeo is more professionally focused with a lot more features, at a price. Ultimately, when you are deciding which to use, it is really dependent on what your goals are and what compromises you are willing to make. The biggest site of them all is YouTube of course, but Vimeo has some great features and a community that is something to admire.

Pros of YouTube

It’s the world’s most popular video-sharing platform (1 billion+ unique views a month and with 6 billion+ hours of video watched per month)
YouTube is owned by Google so many marketers claim that it has higher chances of getting ranked in search results. And despite any claims otherwise, you will notice that most search results feature at least one YouTube video snippet on the first page. Mike Aynsely from HootSuite had written that Google favors YouTube over Vimeo for video snippets
You can interact with your audience in the comments
You can grow a following with the follow buttons
Annotations can be added within videos to lead people to act (CTA)
YouTube is completely FREE (unlimited hosting, bandwidth)
The already huge community can take your video to new heights (viral?)

Cons of YouTube

Competitors content or even ads can be displayed near yours
YouTube is all about advertising. And to compound this issue, at least for business, it is possible that your competition is placing ads on your content by targeting keywords that you are also targeting. So while your future customers are viewing your content, your competition could also be advertising to them.
Public content and not as easily controlled or policed
Lack of customer service or support
YouTube comments are rarely well moderated and can detract from your content
The network is designed to keep people on-site, so people are less likely to visit your website

Pros of Vimeo

No advertising for viewers (no pre-roll ads)
Vimeo reaffirmed their no advertising stance. They are all about paying for video hosting and premium services, and not annoying your viewers.
Vimeo favors higher quality content (ie. displays what is great, not popular)
Higher quality contributors tend to post there
Customization of the video player (logo, colors, thumbnails, etc)
Analytics is more detailed
Beautifully designed layout for watching videos
Strong customer support

Cons of Vimeo

Significantly smaller audience, so less visibility
No Free accounts for business usage (minimum $12 per month)
Restrictions on storage based on plans

Video Communities

The community on YouTube is extremely broad compared to Vimeo.
The viewers on YouTube can be a lot less forgiving and are prone to nasty comments that border on trolling and flaming. So when posting on YouTube you have to deal with the barrage of comments that may come your way, many of which are not complimentary.
The plus side is that you can build up a large following through their massive audience and have millions of people supporting your brand around the world.
Vimeo is very much a more controlled community with strong guidelines

B2B

Live from Magento Imagine 2019

10 May 201910 May 2019
by Timothy Laurent

It’s that time of the year again, where all that is Magento finds itself in motion toward the gambling mecca known as Las Vegas for the annual Magento Imagine conference.

Long gone are the days of the M or the Hard Rock hotel, now for the fifth year in a row, we’re at the Wynn.

And, like years past, the conference is stuffed with wonderful offerings from deep technical dives to business tracks to Magento announcements. And, not to forget headliners like Gary Vaynerchuk!

Here are a few things that we’re particularly excited about:

Networking Maximus! Our chance to see everyone that we talk to daily, weekly or on occasion–that we normally don’t see face to face–but at this once a year conference.
Magento 2.3.1 Features: GraphQL, PWA, PageBuilder
Experience-Driven Commerce: Deep thinking around Adobe and Magento
Continued B2B maturity
A chance to wander the marketplace and discover new offerings or technologies that may be useful for our clients.
Share stories and lessons learned (stay tuned for more Magento Imagine blog posts!).
Pickup that pile of Magento swag!
Is this the last Magento Imagine…? Will it be combined with Adobe Summit like Marketo?

We look forward to seeing everyone at Imagine over the next four days!

B2B

Three Secrets to B2B e-Commerce

7 Nov 20187 Nov 2018
by Timothy Laurent

First and foremost, thank you to Justin King for his thoughts around B2B e-commerce!

So, how do we help companies facilitate their move from legacy thinking to success with online B2B? The Internet is the great equalizer! Companies of any size are capable of competing with their National leaders (and amazon).

We’ve put together three secrets of success for B2B e-commerce.

Secret #1

How to Ethically Steal the Online methods of your National competitor’s…and use them against them?

A system (read: framework) gives one the ability to break down large issues into smaller, more manageable tasks. We’ve always advocated the idea of people, process, and tools. Remember that B2B is NOT the same as B2C.

Fallacy: If you build it, they will come… Hope is NOT a strategy! Building B2B commerce is real work. At it’s core is internal marketing (i.e., change management).

Thanks to B2X Partners for the graphic.

Secret #2

How the Big Companies get 40% of their revenue online?

Search and navigation are an incredibly important part of a B2B e-commerce presence.

The search box should be front and center–not only to encourage your site visitors to utilize… But, the analytics around the search need to be tracked and reviewed to better your site. Another tactic: interview and survey customers to better understand how they prefer to search. A few immediate ideas for bettering your site search:

Are the search engine results applicable to the search term?
Is the search term ranked #1 in the results set?
Should various search terms be pushed down in the ranks?
Should the search term become a category?
What synonyms should be employed?

Secret #3

On average, B2B companies see a 20% increase in the number of transactions?

Product content is the key to revenue generation by utilizing taxonomy and merchandising capabilities. Remember that this is a program and not a one-time task. The catalog must have quality and original content.

Feel free to borrow some of the features B2C sites bring to the table like: “Top 100 product Lists” or “Customers also bought this”.

Blendium is here to assist with your B2B needs, feel free to give us a shout!

B2B

B2B E-commerce is Growing at an Amazing Rate

25 Oct 201825 Oct 2018
by Timothy Laurent

A quick post to really highlight the growth potential of the B2B e-commerce market. This continues to be exciting for us and our early adopter B2B clients.

Key Takeaways

Overall B2B e-commerce market is roughly $900 billion, and on track to $1.1 trillion by 2021
Less than 50% of B2B companies have an e-commerce site today, but 70% of those will have one within 2 years
80% of B2B companies will increase spending on B2B e-commerce in 2018

B2B e-commerce is on the rise and Blendium is here to help you build your first online store.

B2B

Top-5 Takeaways from the Magento B2B Experience

27 Sep 20182 Nov 2018
by Timothy Laurent

Our Top-5 takeaways from Magento’s 2018 B2B Experience here in Chicago:

Millenials Driving Near Future B2B
B2B Features and Enhancements
Creating Great B2B Sites
Adobe Acquisition and Magento
Experience Driven Design

Millenials Driving Near Future B2B

An interesting and important fact provided by Forrester to take into consideration when planning your next B2B build: “Millennials will be 44% of B2B workforce by 2025” (Forrester). This matters because of the paradigm shift this new workforce presents. So, how exactly are Millennials different?

They typically research a lot more than other customer groups via online vehicles:
- Vendor websites
- Product Demos
- Peer Reviews
They are more willing to switch vendors
They seem to be more difficult to satisfy (NPS)
Millennials do not ignore Social Media

B2B Features and Enhancements

While the majority of the day was spent talking more holistically around B2B, there was one session dedicated to a few B2B features worth your consideration.

Re-order capabilities (easy and low-friction)
Fast order pages (for complex or configurable products), an example: LabSource B2B Website
Quotes (to also include requested delivery date)
Post Purchase activities
- Quick and accurate delivery tracking
- Customer Support
- Product Support
User Generated Content (UGC)

Remember: B2B customers buy experiences, not just products.

Creating Great B2B Sites

The B2B landscape is changing–minimally, customers are now expecting a B2C-type of experience, but fully expect that experience to better enable them during their shopping experiences. Asking the question of how customers want to interact with the site is fundamental–to base decisions on data. One interesting tidbit: “Today’s business buyers are increasingly self-directed: 60% prefer not to interact with a sales rep as the primary source of information; 68% prefer to research on their own, online…” (Forrester)

A few more obvious nuggets worth repeating:

Site is never complete, always need improvements
Data is King!
Engage the teams, change management is important
Be all inclusive with stakeholders
Feed the backlog based on actionable insights (to achieve KPIs)

Adobe Acquisition and Magento

Magento is now fully ingrained into Adobe–a lot of the content was more around UX than B2B Functionality. On that note, Adobe was excited to share a number of their products. But, these four seemed to continue to percolate to the top:

Experience Manager: Content Management Solution
Target: Personalization Engine and Testing tool (a la A/B testing)
Analytics: Formerly known as Omniture, Deep view into customer tracking
Audience Manager: Data Management tool to assist in building profiles / segments

As Adobe has certainly invested heavily in SaaS, expect that hosting with Magento Cloud will allow one to more easily integrate with these tools versus hosting “on Prem”. In fact, it was alluded to that some products may not even be available to those who don’t host with Magento.

The Ultimate Takeaway

The most prevalent concept of “Experience Driven Commerce” is really central to the Adobe acquisition of Magento. This was embodied in four success factors:

Extreme Ownership
Customer Obsessions
Frictionless Experiences
Innovative Models, like Augmented Reality (AR)

This should be clear enough; but, everyone has their own journey based on any number of factors. Build B2B sites as if viewing through the lens of the customer.

Wrap-up

It’s always great to catch-up with everyone that we talk to daily, weekly or infrequently–that we normally don’t see face to face.

Category: E-commerce