In today’s eCommerce Growth Hack Of The Week (yes, I’m still playing with the name), we have something special for you! But, before I go into the details, I’m going to give you a short introduction to this growth hack.
One of the best marketing blogs out there is the Hubspot blog. The blog is a massive source of new ideas and information for many B2B marketers. More importantly, for Hubspot, the blog is their biggest source of new leads.
Apart from the awesome content they produce, one of the main reasons why the blog generates so many leads are the personalized CTAs. At the end of each post, Hubspot displays a Call-To-Action related to that post asking readers to download a piece of content, sign up for a webinar, or subscribe to something else. What’s interesting is that these CTAs show up based on your previous interactions with Hubspot.
So, for example, if you’ve already downloaded a certain ebook, the CTA you see will be different from someone who hasn’t downloaded the ebook. These personalized CTAs are far more effective because, instead of showing readers the same old static CTA, they’re showing them a CTA that they’re more likely to be interested in, and more likely to take action on. In fact, these personalized CTAs have a 42% higher conversion rate than regular CTAs.
Ok, so what does this have to do with eCommerce, you ask? Well, the underlying concept is the same. Studies show that 74% of online consumers get frustrated with websites when content (like offers or promotions) appears that has nothing to do with their interests. That means those discount offers you show your customers are actually more likely to turn them off if they aren’t personalized!
74% of people get frustrated with websites when content appears that has nothing to do with their…
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That bring us to this growth hack. There’s enough evidence to show that personalizing your CTAs, like discounts and promotions, will result in higher conversion rates and more sales. The point is to show your shoppers the right offers at the right times, so that they are more likely to buy into it. Imagine being able to increase your conversion rates by 42% like Hubspot. How much is that worth to you?
In this post we’ll go through some case studies of other eCommerce stores achieving high growth by implementing personalized CTAs, and then we’ll show you the exact steps you need to take to do this on your store.
To make this post more valuable to you, we’ve partnered up with OptKit, a magical app that allows you to create highly personalized CTAs on your store. OptKit have very generously offered to give away 6 months for free to 3 lucky winners, so head over here to enter yourself into the contest!
Get 6 months of OptKit for Free!
Case Study #1: BedBathStore
BedBathStore is an online retailer of, unsurprisingly, bed and bath products. Like many online retailers, BedBathStore used to focus on generating more traffic and ignored their conversion rates. However, these days generating traffic with ads is a costly endeavour, and if conversion rates are low, your profitability goes down too.
BedbathStore soon realised that, given how much traffic they were seeing, even a small increase in conversion rates would result in a large increase in revenue. They decided to shift their strategy from an ad-dependant one to conversion rate optimization.
One of the strategies they implemented was creating personalized CTAs on every page. They tracked visitors based on pages they visited, keyword searches, visit frequency, and geographic location, and used this information to display appropriate banners across the site.
For example, if someone searched for bedding, they display offers on their bedding category pages like ‘Shop Our Luxury Bedding And Save 10%’ or ‘Free Shipping On Bedding Orders Over $75′. They created numerous campaigns like this and that helped them increase conversion rates by 10%!
Case Study #2: Build.com
Build.com is the number 2 online retailer of home improvement products in North America. That ranking is even more impressive when you take into account that some of their competitors have ten times more traffic than they do. That’s because, unlike their competitors, Build.com focusses on improving conversion rates.
One of Build’s largest traffic sources is via affiliate coupon sites. What Build noticed was that people would see their ‘coupon code’ box in the checkout and then leave to go search for one. When they found one on these affiliate sites, they’d click on it and be redirected to Build’s homepage. This would confuse them because there was no indication that a coupon code was applied.
To counter this, Build created personalized CTAs based on referral site. They tracked which affiliate site sent a visitor, and showed that visitor a personalized banner. For example, customers from Coupon Album would see this message pop up –
Build also created personalized CTAs in the form of banners that appeared throughout the site for that visitor, reminding him or her about the coupon code. Thus, when the visitor reached the checkout, there wouldn’t be any need to leave in search of a coupon. This strategy helped them increase conversion rates by 6%!
How It’s Done
This growth hack sounds complicated but thankfully apps like OptKit have made it extremely easy. Here’s what you need to do to set up your own personalized CTAs without much coding.
Step 1 – Get OptKit
OptKit has a forever free plan that you can sign up for without requiring a credit card. Head to www.optkit.com and sign up for it. The forever free plan is very limited, of course, but it’s great if you want to try out the software and see how it works. When you’re ready, I suggest you upgrade to the Specialist Plan and access more customizations and personalizations.
As I mentioned before, the Specialist Plan is $20/month but you can get 6 months of it for free with our giveaway. Just head to our giveaway page and enter for your chance to win it. If you’ve already signed up for the free account and you win the Specialist Plan, we’ll automatically upgrade you.
Step 2 – Install The Script
After you sign up, click ‘New Website’ and enter your website name and URL. You will then be given a line of javascript code.
This javascript needs to go into every page that you want to use OptKit on. You’ll need to access your website’s code for this. If you have a custom built store you’ll need to get your developers to do it.
If you’re using an eCommerce platform, then you need to check whether you have access to the code. Many platforms don’t give you full access to the code. Some don’t give you access to the checkout at all, which is shocking considering it’s the most important part of your conversion funnel. If you’re on any of these, consider moving to a more flexible platform if you’re interested in growing sales and increasing conversions.
If you’re on LemonStand, it’s pretty simple. In your LemonStand backend, go to Editor and then Partials. In the list that shows up, find layout-head and click on it to edit it. This is where all thecode for your store is, including the checkout. Simply drop the script anywhere in there and save the partial. This is literally all the coding you need to do!
Step 3 – Start Creating Personalized CTAs
After you’ve added the script to your store, you just need to visit your homepage once and OptKit will register it. Then, in your OptKit dashboard, you can start creating some CTAs, or ‘Kits’ as they’re known in OptKit.
Now, the type of CTAs you create will depend on your business and target market. The case studies we discussed earlier should give you some ideas, but OptKit has so many options that to cover them all would take at least two more blog posts.
You can create CTAs to redirect customers to certain pages, or to collect email addresses. You can create them based on actions they take on your site, like landing on or leaving from a page, clicking something, hovering on something, and many more. You can target them by referrer, geographic location, visit frequency, device, and even time of day. The permutations and combinations are immense, so the best thing you can do is give it a try yourself.
If you’re still not sure what you can do on your site, try this one. An eCommerce site that used OptKit noticed people were staying a long time on their cart, but not converting through. So they targeted that segment of traffic to help push them over the edge with 3 ‘kits’ on the cart page:
- The first Kit was fired at the 15 second mark, which just had a small push to click through to the Purchase page.
- Another Kit fired on the 30-40 second mark, and this one offered a new coupon code, which was automatically applied if they clicked the link to the purchase page.
- And finally, if they were still lingering around at the 80-90 second mark, then show them one last final Kit, this one has an even larger incentive coupon attached to it.
They were able to recover $200 within the first two weeks of trying this technique out.
Time To Growth Hack
5 minutes. That’s how long it takes to install OptKit on LemonStand and create your first CTA. I actually tried it out and timed it myself. There’s no better time to do it than right now, so get started!
And before you go, don’t forget to enter yourself in the giveaway. If you get results like the eCommerce store that used OptKit, that’s $2400 in extra revenue without any cost to you. What are you waiting for?
Hack Your Growth With Personalized CTAs!
