Buy anytime, anywhere

Buy anytime, anywhere

Buy anytime, anywhere

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Buy anytime, anywhere; this is the Contextual Commerce motto. It's like there's a buy button at your service full-time. Consumers can buy as they scroll through unrelated content or are merely living their daily lives. For retailers, there are a few tactics that can help you fulfill your contextual commerce strategy.

1. Be everywhere.

You need to understand your public. Figure out ways to meet customers where they are. What do they do? What do they enjoy? Rather than attempting to draw them into existing transactional structures, you discover what your consumers like to suit their mood and place better.

2. Be smooth, don't be obvious

It's essential to be seamless. The purchasing process should be as invisible as possible. A good thing to have in mind is that the purchasing process has nothing to do with shopping.

Who never stood in an endless queue, cast the first stone. Or having a call dropped after being on hold forever? These situations are part of some traditional transaction methods. And they're full of pain. Contextual Commerce is not about the purchase; it's about the experience.

3. It is not just for tech's sake.

Technology can and will help you understand your customers' pains. But, like almost everything, you need to understand each purchase step carefully. Something that works for your friend will not necessarily work for you. There is a multitude of options quickly available for any category and transaction phase. But there is no point in hiring everything that exists, as you need to examine your business and understand your data to choose the one that best suits your reality.

4. Treat your visitor like the queen they are.

We all like to be treated well, obviously. When you have a pleasant experience with a retailer, the odds are that - when given a chance - you'll buy at that shop again are higher. That means people are more likely to be loyal customers if the experience is good. Of course, other things are evaluated when buying something, like price. But, if you only depend on price, you don't have a loyal audience.

"Contextual Commerce" is the buzzword of the moment but is not necessarily new. It doesn't fundamentally mean technology, but it is undoubtedly a powerful fuel. When you use technology, you can better understand something about your client before they do, and then you might be able to help without requesting it. We already see a lot of contextual Commerce, and the market is fast-evolving in implementing it seamlessly. We can already buy inside social media, and that's a great win for consumers.

If you are not there yet on your company, and what you are reading seems a little far away. Don't worry; changing the existing habits of the company is the starter for this kind of digital transformation. And it has to be a top-down culture change that includes the whole company.

An empathy exercise

An empathy exercise

An empathy exercise

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

We already know that the online market is getting stronger! And it's constantly receiving new investments, which is great for brands and consumers. The consequence is that it gets harder (and more expensive) to drive qualified traffic to your business every day due to the increasing price of ads in the auction or the intense SEO efforts required.

Google defines Quality Score as an estimate of the quality of your pages, ads, and keywords. The higher the quality of your content, the lower the prices and the more favorable the position in the ranking. And this score is quantified and measured, among other things, by how relevant you are.

But what does 'relevance' mean, and how do you scale it?

That's where it gets tricky because nobody outside of Google has that information accurately. What we do know is what we assume from experience and observing what helps in that quality index.

Three main attributes are essential for an excellent Quality Score. They are Landing Pages, Keywords, and CTR.

1. CTR

Click through impressions - is how many times your link was clicked on divided by how many times it was served. This KPI is how the search engine identifies whether your page is relevant. The more people click on it when they see it, the more Google understands that what you are displaying is good content, therefore relevant.

2. Keywords

They are crucial for adding relevance to your page. These search terms are responsible for associating a specific subject to your website and product. That's why it's important to understand what people are looking for and how they search for that content. So you can work with appropriate keywords.

A great tip is to work with long-tail keywords. They are more interesting for improving your Quality Score, as they don't have a high level of competition and can help you reach a specific audience interested in what you have to say/sell.

3. Landing Page

It is the place to which the user is redirected after clicking on a link. Therefore, it must be worked properly with SEO techniques and strategies to be understood by bots and crawlers. Within this attribute, there are many techniques we could mention. Such as internal and external links, content, friendly URL, image optimization, compatibility with mobile devices, performance and others.

Ultimately, search engines want to provide useful results for searchers and direct the right audience to the right content. As you are a search engine user, imagine what you want to find as a result of your search. This empathy exercise is excellent for helping you understand consumer behaviour. For example, you don't want to wait for a page to load; you want it to be fast. So why would your visitor want that?

You did CRO and didn't even notice

You did CRO and didn't even notice

You did CRO and didn't even notice

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Suppose you have a page that attracts 1,000 visitors a month, and that page has a conversion rate of 10%. To increase your sales, you don't need to bring in more traffic; you can improve your traffic conversion. These actions have increased your conversion rate, and you now get 200 conversions.

You didn't need to create another page or produce new material; you just improved what you already had. Congratulations, you did CRO and didn't even notice. Cool, right?

Understanding what conversion is

But before talking about conversion and how to optimize conversion rates, you should understand that a conversion, which is part of the acronym CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization), is much more extensive than just turning a visitor into a lead or a sale. It involves various actions that a visitor can take on a website.

For example, the visitor might click on a banner that takes them somewhere else or request to contact a seller, or maybe buy something on your site, or start a software evaluation. Either way, many possibilities could be a conversion.

Defining the type of conversion that makes sense for you requires knowing your results. With that, you can know which CRO techniques you should use. For example, if it's lead generation, having Forms on Landing Pages makes perfect sense. If the idea is to increase sales in your ecommerce, consider optimizations such as buttons that encourage registration.

About Conversion Rate

As we said, besides conversions, another concept to master when dealing with CRO is conversion rate. It's essential to understand this concept to know the efficiency of your pages and track overall business results.

Illustrating:

Imagine we are calculating the conversion rate of Visitors who become Leads. The aim is to capture contacts from those who have browsed the site. And with that, know who they are to nurture them later. Let's imagine that our website has 10,000 hits and, in a certain period, 500 people filled in the form. That means we had a 5% conversion rate of visitors into leads.

The positive point of the conversion rate is that it can be calculated at all stages of the sales funnel: top to middle, middle to bottom, etc. Thus, you can diagnose where the bottlenecks are and where the weaker strategy needs to be optimized. It is essential to know the metrics you want to analyze at each stage and have an overall diagnosis of your website's performance. This knowledge makes it easier to target the exemplary efforts to the suitable needs.

Make better use of your traffic

Make better use of your traffic

Make better use of your traffic

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

A CRO strategy consists of a set of practices that increase conversions. This acronym comes from Conversion Rate Optimization, a structured and systematic way of improving performance on websites. Thus, taking better advantage of the pages' traffic without necessarily attracting more visitors.

And we're not just talking about website optimization; CRO techniques also apply to landing pages, test requests, and call-to-action in general. It aims to increase the rate of website visitors who perform a specific action that you have decided as your goal. It could be submitting a form, making purchases, signing up for an assessment, etc. With proper CRO techniques, businesses can generate more leads or sales without investing more money in website traffic - which can be very expensive - increasing marketing ROI and profits.

Illustrating the ideas

Consider that you are a real estate website, for example, with a form and a contact link located at the bottom of the page. This form is your goal; you want people who click "submit" to hand over their details so your sales team can contact you and then sell homes. Your website receives an average of 2,000 visitors per month, of which 20 are converts or just 1%. You believe that number is lower than you expected. So? What can you do with this information?

Well, you can try to increase the number of visits. It can be useful, but you will need to pay to generate more traffic. Paid media is fast, but it can be costly in this competitive market. Or, and this is where we're talking about CRO, you can increase the CTR of the form's "Submit" button.

But first, you need to understand:

"because people are not pushing the button"

  • Is the form too long?
  • Where do people leave off?
  • Do people scroll down the page?

Suppose your problem is that you have too few contact points on your website, making it difficult for those who want to make a request. In this case, you can solve the problem by adding multiple contact options with attention-grabbing phrases at various points in the customer journey. But you can only know all of this by analyzing your situation.

The secret of CRO is to study the data you have and use it to run tests. Only by testing your options can you improve and optimize your conversion.

CRO is about data

CRO is about data

CRO is not about what you believe; it's about data

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Trying out new ideas on the site is extremely complex. Finding opportunities seems very easy, as we all have an area that "we know could be improved". But this can lead to a path of changes that, in the end, have no added value and bring no concrete results.

And, as we said, CRO techniques are not about what you believe is essential; CRO is about data. The process is about diagnostics, hypotheses, and tests that consider, among other things, visitor behavior. That's why you need tools that help you analyze your results and, with those tools, plan some basic actions.

The secret of CRO is to study the data you have and use it to test; only by experimenting with your options can you improve and optimize conversions. But where to start?

1. Always have an objective

If you've read our previous articles, you may have noticed that the first is to figure out what business metrics you want to impact. Is it lead generation? Increase sales opportunities? Scheduling requests? And so on. This step is crucial as it defines your entire strategy and how your results are varied, and therefore how you are measured. So, it should impact all your decisions.

2. What is your persona?

With this in mind, you must understand who the people interested in your product are. It would be best to establish a persona; this should be a crucial step in establishing a strategy. Mapping the consumer journey helps you understand why they are consuming your product.

3. Do you fully understand your sales funnel?

It would help if you intensely studied your sales funnel. With that, observe and understand which pages or sections have the highest rejection rate. With this information, you can optimize the bottlenecks.

4. Research is the key to human understanding

It is always essential to research with questionnaires, phone calls, and emails. With this, you understand human behavior better and get ideas of usability. Maybe your website is too confusing, and you didn't know it.

5. A/B test on your hypotheses

If we have a lot of hypotheses, A/B testing is key to testing them. It makes your life easier by making it simpler to understand what your audience likes best. Is it better if the button is blue or red? Should the form be at the bottom of the page or in the top right-hand corner? With the right technology, you can test these hypotheses and choose the one that performs best.

CRO is directly related to good sales. It's not about traffic; it's about doing a good job with the traffic you already have.