In this information-packed Ontrapalooza keynote from ecommerce expert Ezra Firestone, you’ll learn why growth hacks are so popular right now, how you can use them in your ecommerce business, and ways to monitor their effectiveness.
Here, we’ve highlighted his top seven tips for getting the most out of your ecommerce pages:
1. Use Image Navigation
“Image navigation — this is very important. Have your top navigation, but also have navigation through your website in image format. I call this wizardification, or junction boxes. Let people choose their own adventure.”
Every time a lead visits your page, you have the opportunity to convert them. By understanding that each person consumes their content media differently and providing videos, text and pictures on each page to account for a variety of interests, you dramatically increase your chances of making a sale.
BarkBox.com is a great example of this. The dog toy subscription company uses mixed media to appeal to leads who like to read, watch and look at their content before making a purchase.
2. Use Visual Directives
“Visual directives is giving people visual cues of what you want them to do. The original one is the progress bar. It’s a visual step-by-step.”
Use visual directives, also known as visual cues, to show your webpage visitors what their next move should be. One common tactic for this is the isolation effect, where you choose a standout color for your CTA that doesn’t appear anywhere else on the page. The idea is for the CTA color to remain consistent throughout the pages on your site to make it as identifiable as possible. Doing so could not only significantly increase your click-through rate, but also boost your shopping cart additions by 10%.
3. Include Everything on Your Homepage
“People are looking for stuff from the homepage because they’re used to the homepage being a portal.”
Think of your homepage as a portal to your entire site. No matter how much information you provide on your other pages, make sure your site visitors can rely on the homepage as their go-to for finding what they need. Include social proof and brand elements such as images, testimonials and videos on a long form homepage with a unique sales proposition.
4. Include an Incentivised Video Review Request
“We have an incentivised video review request that goes out during our post-purchase automation sequence that says: ‘Hey, thanks so much for purchasing this product. We’ll give you $10 to Starbucks if you leave us a video review. Here is exactly what we want you to do.’”
According to Nielsen’s Global New Product Survey, “People are much more likely to purchase a product when they learn about it from friends and family (77%), professional experts (66%), their job or workplace (55%), and at public events (41%). Because word of mouth marketing is so effective, try incentivizing customers to leave you a testimonial on the products they’ve purchased. This serves at least two purposes: You can use their review to build trust with new customers to make more sales, and you can also deliver a $10 coupon credit upon completion to keep those existing loyal customers coming back.
5. On Retargeting
“You hit them with content, you engage them, you talk to them and then you go for a direct response plan.”
Pinpointing the most engaged members of your audience makes a notable difference in social media marketing. Ezra says that his strategy of targeting customers and prospects with Facebook ads, then retargeting those who take the time to watch, significantly boosts conversion rates. By weeding out those who skipped past your initial video ad, you can avoid marketing to a cold audience with minimal effort.
6. Use Pre-Sale Engagement Pages and Retargeting
“Send people to a pre-sale engagement page: a piece of content that relates to the problem that our product solves, that then alludes to the solution, which is our product.”
If you allow your audience to read about their problems in pre-sales content that frames your product as the solution, you’ll start to notice that leads follow the solution. Here’s how it works:
Traffic Source > Pre-Sell Engagement > Sales Page > Checkout Sequence > Follow Up
By only selling through content, once a cold prospect has engaged with you, they become much more valuable as a warm prospect with a high conversion rate. Ezra says, “We’re not spearfishing here guys. We’re planting seeds, and we’re watering those seeds, and we’re watching mango trees grow and we’re watching those trees fruit for generations. We don’t want fast money, we want slow, sustained growth.”
7. On Behavioral Response Marketing
“Behavioral response: It’s marketing to people based on the behaviors that they have. Based on what you know about them. The dynamic cross-sells on the backend based on what they purchased.”
Segmenting your customer base gives you the power to market to people based on their actions. Let’s say you want to find a way to reach your most engaged leads. You’re now able to choose a specific action and identify the exact people who completed it in your CRM. From there, you can tailor a response to a specific group, follow up, or put together a cross-sell or upsell offer for them.
About Ezra Firestone
Ezra Firestone is a partner in BOOM! by Cindy Joseph and the company’s head of Digital Marketing. He runs a private global network of ecommerce businesses and regularly consults for Fortune 500 companies across the U.S. and Canada. He is the founder and creative director of SmartMarketer, an information hub for entrepreneurs. Ezra’s ecommerce and online businesses have allowed him the freedom needed to help his community through nonprofit work. As the head of We Are Family Manhattan, an all-volunteer, no cost of administration non-profit organization, Ezra organizes the redistribution of surplus goods and food to those in need.
