5 Must-Have CRO Strategies for Your eCommerce Store

This is a guest blog post written by a team member from Hawke Media’s partner, Justuno. Justuno helps its customers convert more website traffic into customers with personalized onsite messaging at every touchpoint.

As an ecommerce store owner, there are a million different things that need to be done, all the time. It’s crucial to determine which actions can lead to the greatest improvements without wasting time. That’s why we’ve laid out the top five CRO strategies every ecommerce store owner needs to implement to improve their brand’s on-site performance. Let’s dive in. 

CRO Strategies

From lead capture to increased average order value (AOV), on-site messaging, shipping, revenue generation, customer lifetime value, reward programs, and so much more, there’s no limit to what levers can be tweaked in an ecommerce store. However, it’s important to start at the top and what strategies you can implement to see the quickest results.

1. Lead Capture

First off is lead capture. If a brand isn’t collecting information from its visitors, whether it’s email, SMS, or product preferences, then a huge treasure trove of data and opportunity is lost. 

• Email Subscription + Preferences. Elevate a standard email lead capture with some additional data points on preferences or interests. You can use this information to dynamically change the content in a welcome series, place them in different segments, etc.
  This example from a food and beverage company combines email and radio buttons for different dietary restrictions. These were fed into the brand’s ESP to dynamically dictate product imagery and recommendations based on the subscriber’s indicated diet to improve relevance and engagement.

• Two-Step Opt-In. Two-step lead captures with email and SMS opt-ins are the most popular type of lead captures right now. By collecting both channels, you reach subscribers with messaging suited to each format while also deepening the relationship. For mobile visitors, use a tap-to-text field to make SMS opt-ins a breeze – one tap to open a pre-populated message in their texting app, and one to send it–that’s all! Make sure to keep compliance rules in mind (SMS must be optional and on a different screen than email fields)–but these are a great option to have in your database building toolbox. Engagement with tap-to-text promotions averaged 7.06 percent during 2021 with an engaged conversion rate of 10.92 percent for Justuno users.
• Gamification. Gamification is a great resource for brands to create a memorable first impression and boasts an impressive 13 percent average opt-in rate, but it’s not for everybody. If this style fits with your branding, give it a go–with different incentives like a sale or percentage  off, free gifts, exclusive products, etc., and see just how effective the impact of ownership/winning can be on opt-ins!

2. Exit Intent

Exit intent is a key component in your CRO strategy–meant to keep visitors on your website longer. It’s important to note that while commonly grouped with cart abandoners–these are pop-ups triggered by visitors with nothing in their cart that exhibit exit behavior (back buttons, breaking the screen, etc.).

Depending on your brand, there are a variety of effective strategies to use here: a slightly higher discount than was shown in the welcome offer, using a timer to drive FOMO to encourage a use it or lose it mentality, or a product-finder quiz.

For brands who want to avoid discounts, sell higher-priced items, or simply have a variety of options to choose from–product finder quizzes are a great resource on exit offers. For a makeup company, it may be less about them not wanting to convert and more about not being able to find the right shade of foundation or being unsure which moisturizer is best for their skin type. For radio retailer, Midland, its varied target audience needed help finding the right price point and features for its different needs (Weekend adventurers vs. first-responders vs. construction, for instance). They implemented an exit offer + product quiz and were able to keep 20% more traffic on their site that was otherwise planning to leave.

3. Banners and Onsite Messaging

Banners and onsite messaging are another great tool to optimize conversion rates. They’re a low-profile way to get info in front of visitors, require no effort on their end, and offer a variety of personalization options to boot.

Use a threshold banner to let shoppers know how much more they need to spend to unlock free shipping, a free gift, etc. As they add items to their cart, it dynamically updates the total and when they’ve reached the limit/their offer is now available!

Alternatively, you can use a geo-targeted banner to let visitors know if there are supply chain delays, shipping deadlines for holidays, etc. for increased trust and transparency. Justuno allows you to target visitors all the way down to the zip code, so you can be sure that each visitor is getting the most up-to-date information on your site.

Finally, for those with BNPL solutions like Affirm, Sezzle, Klarna, etc. you can make sure that customers are aware of these alternatives using banners. For those selling big-ticket items, it’s important to make every visitor aware of this financing option before they have the opportunity to bounce. Out of Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) users surveyed, 31% said they would abandon their cart entirely if BNPL wasn’t an option—making it crucial to inform visitors that it’s an option.

4. Returning Cart Abandoner

For those who do abandon their cart, create reminder promotions targeting them upon their return visit. Dynamically pull in the items from their cart (image, price, and name) with a CTA directly taking them to check out. This personalization will increase relevance, streamline their return visit, and hopefully lead to a quick conversion.

This is a must-have for brands with high-abandonment rates from browsing shoppers, longer sales cycles, or those looking for quick personalization wins.

5. Product Recommendations

Intelligent product recommendations sound like something only big brands can afford or something that must be incredibly hard to implement right? Not at all. In fact, brands of any size can utilize product recommendations to incredible results, sometimes to greater effect than the bigger brands.

These are another quick CRO and personalization win–let’s check out some of the different strategies and placements you could test:

• Home Page Bestsellers. Appeal to new visitors with the items most likely to grab their attention–strategically driving traffic to your highest-converting PDPs
• In-Cart Cross-Sells. Related or complementary items shown in-cart based on what customers have added can provide a last-minute AOV boost and enhance their customer experience
• Free Gift Upon Add to Cart. When a shopper adds something to their cart, fire a pop-up with a few free gift options to choose from–this gives them ownership over it (making a conversion more likely) and provides another opportunity to collect zero-party data on your shopper’s preferences.

These are just a few of the options for product recommendations, with Justuno you can place them anywhere on your website with five algorithms and ten filters to choose from to create the ultimate personalized carousel. 

Final Thoughts

There’s a huge variety of strategies brand owners can utilize to optimize their on-site strategy, and these are just a few of them. One of the biggest advantages of today’s digital world is that there is so much – maybe even too much – data available for brand owners and marketers alike to optimize their messaging with. Simply remembering a visitor upon their return or their product preferences can be the difference between a site exit and a loyal customer for life. 

Interested in creating dynamic onsite experiences like the ones we listed above? Reach out to Justuno for a demo or start a free 14-day trial to get started converting and see why our customers see an average 135% increase in revenue during year one!