Conversational SMS marketing might prove to be the missing puzzle to the ultimate strategy you're looking for to boost conversion rates, maximize sales, and effectively handle your post-sales support. This includes cracking the cart recovery code and recovering lost sales efficiently—and effortlessly.
According to a report by Mckinsey, we hit 10 years of eCommerce growth in just 3 months in 2020. Ecommerce has replaced physical channels in just 3 months. And it shows no signs of slowing down in 2021.
So how can you stand out from the crowd and maximize your store's revenue potential this year? It begins with starting a conversation with your customers— you'll notice the results almost right away.
Let's take a deep dive into 6 hidden ways that you can take advantage of immediately to start improving your store's user experience and maximize your store's revenue potential.
What Your Brand Experience Should Look Like
According to research, brand experience is directly linked to your customer's loyalty----how likely they are to return to your store and buy from you again. Everything that makes up your store's brand identity and voice impacts customer delight, trust, and attachment to your brand and its products.
In short, a recurring customer can bring 67% more sales to your store than first-time shoppers. So delivering a solid brand experience should be on the top of your priority list.
Last year, we have already seen why customer empathy proved crucial in light of COVID-19 and how profitable it is for any business to serve up exceptional customer support.
Here are 6 key elements we think brands should zone in on this 2021:
- The crucial window between "Yes!" and "Maybe". How to recover abandoned carts at the right time.
- Going beyond stilted automation: How to keep the conversation going between you and your customer
- Taking a customer-first approach: How to take action with key insights that statistics won't show you
- How to stand out from the crowd with responsive design
- How to build trust immediately from the moment they land on your store
- Why a seamless checkout experience matters, and how to achieve it
Start implementing conversational SMS marketing and some strategic hacks for your store right away to deliver a bulletproof brand experience and boost conversions.
1. Cart Recovery Made Easy: Why Timing Matters
How much revenue have you lost in the last 30 days from the abandoned carts you didn't recover? A kitchen appliance brand found that they hit a 28x return on investment (ROI) for their store in just one month of trying out conversational SMS marketing.
Initially, they were looking for a solution to help improve the conversion rates on their cart recovery efforts. Instead, they got so much more. Here's what their 30-day success story looked like below.
They not only saw their response rates skyrocket, a boost in their conversion rates, and 13,000 new subscribers in their store's ecosystem, but they were surprised when:
- Their team didn't have to expend any additional efforts
- Within 24 hours of implementing a conversational SMS marketing app for their Shopify store, they immediately saw more sales
- The instantaneous customer support through text also gave a boost in shoppers' trust in their product resulting in more successful first-time sales
- They drove more revenue for Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) sales
By saving themselves hours and costs in customer support that would have taken to achieve the same results, they enjoyed a whopping 21% decrease in customer support tickets.
Let's take a look at one of their successful cart recovery campaigns and why it works.
What We Love About It:
- Targets the short but crucial time window when a shopper abandons a cart and a sale is lost, even more so if it's a first-time buyer
- First name personalization goes a long way
- What separates this campaign from an automated blast is how Emma introduces herself right off the bat, prompting him to respond
- The brand's personality shines through even in a text message
- Removes first-time buyer's hesitation immediately by reaching out with great support and communicating user benefit
- Nudges him to complete his purchase with a discount and a choice to opt for installments
Read the case study to know the full story of how LEVO drove 28x in ROI within one month
2. Moving Beyond Stilted Automation: How To Keep A Conversation Going
About 96% of consumers consider the quality of customer service to be the deciding factor when purchasing or completing their orders. Humanizing your customer experience doesn't have to be rocket science. It's about getting creative.
This is why 25 eCommerce experts have shared why conversational marketing could be the next big thing this 2021. Take a look at an example below of what a bulk SMS looks like versus how the conversation flows when you add that human touch with conversational SMS.
What We Love About This:
- Everybody loves a great deal. So having a conversation the same way you'd text a friend or a colleague to share a great deal you found
- Sales and support all in one, shoppers will get their answers at their fingertips— providing shipping information without missing a beat
- It ticks off multiple campaigns or conversations in one communication
- Keeping the conversation going has a compounding effect on customer trust, they're more likely to buy from you if they trust you
3. Replicate Your Success: Collecting Actionable Insights Of Your Customers
Oftentimes, we reduce buyers' intent into quantitative numbers and statistics. If the goal here is to stay relevant to your customer, you'll find that one-dimensional reports on your customer's purchase history and frequency of buying from you can be a limiting factor.
For example, we can tell when a customer placed an item in his or her cart but not why they left their cart. A key insight you can glean to better improve your cart recovery rates month on month.
It's time to get involved with your customers and tap directly into the feedback loop. So what better way than to hear it from the customers themselves?
Here's where the benefit of two-way communication using a conversational marketing channel comes in.
What These Insights Can Tell You:
- The important stuff: Total revenue, Average Order Value (AOV), Number of Orders, Conversion Rate, Number of Conversations
- The good stuff: The main reasons your shoppers are abandoning their carts, their needs, and preferences.
Don't lose out on a large portion of potential sales, start investing in how you can create actionable insights from both the quantitative **and** qualitative insights of your shoppers.
Combining sales and support in one channel only carves out a profit center for your business. Gain actionable insights directly from your customers themselves so you can continuously serve up content and value that's relevant to them.
4. Turn Browsing Intent Into A Sale With Responsive Design
A clean code and a fast loading speed can surely contribute to a delightful shopping experience for your customers.
However, purchase hesitation from shopping online comes from not knowing how whether a product will come as expected. Adding more product images and mimicking how a shopper checks out a product in-store improves your user experience by a mile.
And, the closer your products meet your customer's expectations, it's also the way you can reduce buyer's remorse and the time and cost of processing high product returns.
Your eCommerce web design should attract sales, and not distract visitors from making a purchase. You'll have to think of a way to add more product images without crowding your store's layout.
Check Out How This Theme's Feature Does It.
Why It Works:
- Front and center: Featured image sliders and a stacked thumbnail layout allow you to upload all angles and variations without crowding your product page
- Keep it consistent with synced thumbnails
- The devil's in the details— zoom on hover lets even the pickiest of shoppers see every detail
- Technical extras: a mobile-responsive web design is more crucial than ever
5. Build Trust From The Get-Go
The best way to showcase how amazing your products are is by using testimonials to communicate user benefits.
If you've already collected plenty of user-generated content (UGC) from video testimonials, ratings, and quotes from your customers, you can strategically position them right under your product pages to clinch that sale.
You'll see how much this can actually skyrocket the sales of your star products or even improve the conversions on the other products within your inventory. Check out how this Shopify theme does it:
The Psychology Behind It:
- Incites fear of missing out (FOMO)— FOMO is real when you've got multiple 5-star ratings for an awesome product you're coveting
- Instantaneously communicates user benefits at a glance with strategically placed user-generated content as a testimonial slider under a specific product's page
- Removes hesitation for first-time buyers, they're more likely to trust your store and your product
6. Craft A Seamless Checkout Experience
Keep your checkout process on your website simple and stress-free.
One advance tip is, to even allow your customers to checkout even on a guest account. This is to avoid them abandoning their carts when prompted to create an account before payment.
We love how this store's theme shows you the simple ways to improve the checkout experience in your store and effectively reduce abandoned checkouts:
What It Does:
- Keeps it clean but still gives shoppers options to navigate and compare variants with dropdowns or buttons
- Sticky scroll — enough said
- Making sure your CTA stands out with full-width Add To Cart buttons
- Dynamic checkout
We have another bonus advanced tip for improving the checkout experience. Having an in-built currency converter into your store's theme is one of those things you didn't think you needed but can't live without.
Why We Love This:
- Quick math: automatic country detection
- Allows shoppers to indirectly choose the best conversion rate with multi-currency checkout
- No awkward pauses—a loading icon while changing currency
Key Takeaways Of Using Conversational SMS And Optimizing User Experience
Combining both sales and support while having real-time and personalized conversations with your shoppers through conversational SMS is sure to deliver a unique brand experience.
While we've only covered a few simple but effective adjustments to your store's web design for a more responsive design, build trust, and improving your checkout experience, here are 20 tips you can read on to optimize an effective eCommerce web design to boost your sales.
If you haven't explored the possibilities yet, here's how you can get started with SMS Marketing the right way— by striking up a conversation:
- Always address the customer by their name to give the text a personal feel
- Don’t send robotic, automated message blasts
- Each text message is personalized according to your client’s situation
- It’s acceptable (and encouraged) to interact with your customer through emojis
- Provide real value through every single interaction
- Don’t make your shoppers call or visit your website to get support or information. Start by updating your FAQ with every possible answer a shopper might have and respond to customer needs in real time.
If you'd like to learn more about how you can recover 3x more abandoned carts easily and effortlessly, get started for free with the conversational SMS marketing your customers love today.
About The Author
Yong Jun-Li
a content person at Cartloop.io
