As the popular quote by Orvel Ray Wilson goes,

Customers buy for their reasons, not yours.

You should try to understand your eCommerce customers well enough to gain more sales. This article discusses how to delight your customers with your WooCommerce store.

Why WooCommerce?

It powers 26% of all online stores, is open-source, and it’s easy to customize and maintain. At WebDevStudios, we build and maintain some popular WooCommerce stores.

Below os my list of recommendations. Many store owners often miss these, and that affects sales. So, let’s get started.

Target Audience

Defining your target audience is a crucial factor in your marketing efforts. As Seth Godin says, “Everyone is not your customer.” So, you have to niche down and identify your target eCommerce customers.

There is a popular marketing term called “buyer persona,” which means identifying the buyers to a deeper level. If you have buyer personas, pat yourself on your back. If you don’t, here is a simple approach in two steps.

1. Start with the demographics of your customers by including age, gender, location, occupation, income level, etc.
2. Then, proceed with psychographics, like interests, lifestyle, behavior, attitude, etc.

This gives you a better picture of your target audience. Do you need a buyer persona? The short answer is yes.

Many store owners and agencies know how the sales funnel works, but only a few of them target the right target audience and convert visitors to customers.

Whether it is social media advertisements, email campaigns, or SEO, the wrong target market won’t convert into sales. Here are some tools to help.

• HubSpot Make My Persona
• Xtensio
• Upclose and persona
• UXpressia Personas Tool

Competitor Analysis

Every business has a unique selling proposition, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have competitors. A business or person that offers the same services or products as yours to your target audience is competition. Instead of competing with them, you could learn from them.

1. Identify gaps. By curating a list of your competitors and what they offer, you can find the gaps in the market. Find the blue ocean where you can make a difference and dominate the market.
2. Find what is trending. Spy on your competitors on their social media pages, email campaigns, webinars, and other all possible outlets. Research and use the data you discover to guide you. See what is trending and add to your brand’s identity, core values, and invent your own trend.
3. Pay attention to social signals. Find out what the customers talk about your competitors’ customer service by reading testimonials, tweets, and whatnot.
4. Analyze their strategies. Observe competitors’ pricing, shipping, refund, returns, and other strategies and policies. You can learn from these and avoid their mistakes. Keep it DRY. That means, don’t repeat yourself.

These tools help with competitor analysis.

• Spyfu – Check paid traffic.
• Brand24 – Manage social media engagement, brand mentions, and voice.
• BuzzSumo – Find what content performs well and discover influencers.

Store Features

The experience of your eCommerce customers matters. From header navigation to search filters, every feature of your online store is important. These are the minimum required ones:

• Navigation – Keep your menus, categories organized. This may look so obvious, yet many sites don’t have proper navigation.
• Accessibility – Making the site more accessible is a necessity now. With Core Web Vitals on the ranking factors, you will get better SEO results and also happy customers by following accessibility standards. The trick is to choose a theme that supports this out of the box, like wd_s, storefront, and others.
• Security – Self-signed SSL certificates may throw security warnings, which in turn result in customers leaving the store and bad SEO scores. Start with a free SSL and Web Application Firewall (WAF) by Cloudflare or others. Enabling multi-factor authentication and CAPTCHAs adds another layer of security.
• Updates – Keeping your store’s plugins and themes updated is crucial. Security patches should be installed as soon as possible to avoid security issues. The latest versions of extensions will have improvements and new features. So, keep up with the updates.

Did you know that 88% of the online carts are abandoned worldwide? Understanding your eCommerce customers and providing a good user experience will help in reducing abandonment rates. The following tools help.

• Cloudflare
• Accessibility tools

Pricing

Who doesn’t want discounts? Pricing can often make or break the deal.

As we discussed earlier, analyze your competitors’ strategies, including pricing. Find inspiration in their examples and formulate a pricing strategy that works for you.

• Set up upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Create discount coupons and offers. Make them prominent throughout your online store.
• Showcase discounts. Make it obvious how much a customer will save on their purchase. This encourages people to buy while the offer lasts. Declutter the checkout page, and do not ask for unnecessary details during the checkout process.
• Rely on referrals. Having a referral or reward program boosts sales. You might be spending more on acquiring a new customer via promotions, so inspire your eCommerce customers to return with a tempting rewards program.
• Simplify pricing. Don’t leave the customers puzzled with the sale prices. Keep it simple. Consider adding the shipping cost to the product base price and make shipping free. There is no definitive guide for pricing. Try different pricing models and find out what works for you.

One tool I highly recommend is WooCommerce Points and Rewards. This product allows you to reward your customers for their purchases and referrals.

Customer Service

Others can copy your strategies, get supplies from the same supplier as yours, use the same theme and plugins, but they can’t match your customer service.

Every brand has its own core values, and it reflects in customer service. WooCommerce makes it easy to add and view order notes for both store owners and customers.

Make sure you are providing excellent eCommerce customer support before, during, and after the purchase to stay on top of the market. Adding these elements to your WooCommerce shop will help.

• Chatbots – Use a chatbot to respond to any queries quickly. This also helps you to save your manpower and time.
• Chat – You might have noticed “chat with a human” chat boxes on many websites. This helps to talk directly to customers and receive feedback in real-time. You can configure the chatbots to redirect to the support team, if necessary.
• Email – Not all questions can be answered immediately. Use a support ticket system to track the status of customer messages.

You may not be able to control the market, but you can control the way you serve your eCommerce customers. Good customer service also brings you positive feedback. Additionally, positive ratings from your customers increases brand awareness

For assistance with your customer service, keep these tools in mind.

• Facebook messenger chat – This chat box comes with basic and free automated questions. You can extend it with third-party apps.
• MailChimp for WooCommerce – Connect your WooCommerce store with MailChimp services.
• Newsletter Glue – Compose emails with Gutenberg block editor and send them directly from your WordPress dashboard.

Communities

This is a commonly known yet ignored piece of advice. Be a part of the community related to your industry and grow your own community around your eCommerce brand. Here are two ideas.

• WordPress Community – Get help from WooCommerce experts and users by participating in local WordPress and WooCommerce meetups, WordCamps, and other similar events near you.
• Social Media – Facebook groups, Subreddits, Slack, Twitter—you have ample social media choices to receive help.

Communities foster a sense of belonging. You learn more by listening to others’ experiences.

At first, you can start by becoming a member of various communities. Then, you should create a community with your customers as you grow.

As the Pareto principle advises: 80% of sales come from 20% of the customers. When you have a community of loyal eCommerce customers, marketing and sales become easy.

Need some help with building or scaling your WooCommerce store? Let the experts handle it. Contact us now.

The post Wooing Your eCommerce Customers Is Easier Than You Think appeared first on WebDevStudios.

In creative writing, that means presenting the story in a way that lets the reader infer what the characters are feeling or thinking based on context clues. Rather than simply saying, “Roland never respected Sandra,” a writer might create scenes that include pieces of information like:

• Roland never remembered how to spell Sandra’s name
• Roland always showed up late to their meetings, or outright blew them off
• Roland was distracted while Sandra spoke, checking his phone, not making eye contact, being dismissive of her concerns, or outright ignoring her requests and questions

It allows the reader to fill in the gaps using their own experiences and imagination, which makes for a far more compelling read. It engages the mind and makes the reader an active–albeit invisible–participant in the story.

The way you market yourself, including your site copy, is much the same. You can tell your customers that you’re reliable, that you’re an expert, that you’re the best in the business at whatever it is that you can do…or you can prove it.

So how do you go about using “show; don’t tell,” in your marketing strategy?

Figure out your values.

Make a list of brands and/or individuals you admire.

Break down the qualities that you like most about them (and heck, you can even break down the qualities you don’t like too!).

For me, that list would look something like:

Eat24

What are they? A food delivery company
What I like: Irreverent, funny, engaging, takes customer complaints seriously, responds quickly

CaptainAwkward

What are they? An advice column, started and primarily created by Jennifer Peepas (along with some of her amazing cohorts!)
What I like: Writing tone is often no-nonsense, but extremely compassionate and with bits of humor mixed in, often backed with research and/or will pull in useful supporting information, actionable advice that can apply to a broad series of situations, even if one isn’t specifically in the letter writer’s situation

Helpscout

What are they? An online help desk/support ticket system that also has an amazing blog
What I like: Informative, covers a broad range of subject matter, visually appealing, feels friendly and informal but professional

Takeaways

These share a few qualities:

• A sense of humor: Simply put, they make me laugh–even when covering serious subject matter. There’s a lightness to the delivery, and some levity mixed in that makes reading their content pleasant and engaging.
• Usefulness: All three of these offer either a useful service and/or useful information integrated into their content. There are actionable items that I can apply to my life mixed into their brand.
• Reader oriented: Each of these clearly takes into consideration the needs of their audience, and engages their audience extensively. It’s clear that their audience is at the forefront of their mind when creating content and they place a high priority on taking feedback seriously.

In summary, they all possess shared values: high levels of creativity and entertainment, serving as an actively functional resource to their audience, and taking a collaborative, flexible approach in how they engage with their audience and receive feedback.

If I were to start my own business, I’d integrate those three things into the work I produce; they are qualities I highly value and that I, as a consumer, appreciate.

There are two crucial elements to demonstrating your values.

Your tone

Your brand’s tone says a lot about your values. For example, humor is all about tone–and understanding how your audience will receive that tone in their particular context.

Let’s say that you have two values that could potentially clash and/or create an inconsistency, like wanting to keep your tone lighthearted and humorous and wanting your clients to know you take their feedback seriously. Knowing when to tonally switch from one to the next is crucial to demonstrating those values in a consistent way, without making it seem hypocritical or unclear.

Eat24 does this brilliantly: They use humor consistently in their copy, but they do break from that tone when responding to serious customer concerns/complaints. It demonstrates that their brand operates on the belief that, in certain situations, the value of being customer-oriented takes precedence over humor. Overall, this keeps their brand humorous while also not coming across as dismissive of their customer concerns or complaints. They effectively communicate two values by keeping the tonality flexible for different situations.

Do you want to focus on being highly corporate? Perhaps a more structured, less irreverent tone is a good fit for you. Nurturing? A soft, light touch that invites your audience in, and takes a comforting, gentle tack toward information delivery. Empowering? A tone that encourages your audience to take action, with lots of resources and options for them to make their own decisions.

Your behavior

A key element in demonstrating your brand’s values is taking action to substantiate them.

If your company value is passion–that you’re passionate about what you do–then how do you show that?

Recently, Brad was on a webinar hosted by WP Engine, sharing his advice on how digital agencies can make competitive pitches for new business. He brought up how WebDevStudios demonstrates this value through action with our extensive involvement in the WordPress community. We give a large portion of time back to supporting and contributing to the WordPress community, from what we do with Five for the Future, as well as the meetups our staff have started, spoken at, organized, and our staff wide involvement in WordCamps across the world.

Brad pointed out that by giving our time for free, we actually demonstrate just how invested we are in this work and that it isn’t merely just a paycheck for us. We’re committed to open source ideology and give back to the community that gives so much to us–which is an extremely effective way of demonstrating that value.

If you’re passionate about your business, what are ways for you to demonstrate that (outside of saying, “I’m really excited to take your money!!”)?

If one of your company values is consistency, demonstration is easy (and obvious): Answer emails and phone calls in a timely manner; keep your social media active; do what you say you are going to do.

If one of your company values is transparency, demonstration can look like: Releasing announcements when big changes happen in your company, detailing the how and why for those changes; releasing financial reports and salary information; sharing how (and why) you do specific things inside your business.

If one of your company values is about supporting your local community, demonstration involves: Getting involved with local non-profits; showing your support at local events; utilizing your services to benefit the greater needs of your city or state.

Think about the actions that are associated with the values that you want your business to embody, and then do them. Not only will this drive the message home about what your company is about, but it will build credibility and trust with your clients (and potential clients, too).

Buffer recently did this as well by publicly announcing that they decided to take a break from Snapchat after it was repeatedly taken to task for creating racist, questionable filters. They talk about how “doing the right thing” is one of their core values, and expand in the thoughtful, nuanced post why this choice makes the most sense to them:

But diversity and inclusion are not optional for us—they’re imperative. We want to align ourselves with people and companies working toward the positive change we envision social media making in our world.

We understand fully why users might delete Snapchat, and we support their decision. For those those who wish to stay, we respect your decision as well. At Buffer, we’ll be taking a leave of absence to reflect and determine the right path forward. As always, our decision is not the “right” one—our values are a guide for us but aren’t intended to be prescriptive for others.

This is an excellent example of behavior backing up the values they’ve identified as central to their brand and operation. Buffer has followed through on their proposed values with a proactive move, allowing their business and approach to maintain its integrity and remain flexible in the face of controversy.

The way you speak and what you actually do are just as important as what you say. These are the things that show what your brand’s values are–in action and delivery, not merely in vacuous content. Creating a substantial backing in your strategy and online content (from site copy to social media to content marketing) is the best way to reel your customers in and keep them coming back for more. Let them know who you are through demonstration, and reap rewards.

The post Make Your Company Values Count: Show; Don’t Tell. appeared first on WebDevStudios.