Harsh Agrawal – Cyfe

4 Tactics to Improve Your eCommerce Product Page Metrics

Harsh Agrawal — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 12:49:02 +0000

With modern consumers gravitating online for most of their shopping needs and the ease of setting up an online store, the eCommerce industry is booming at a mind-boggling pace.

In 2017, eCommerce was responsible for $2.3 trillion in sales, and this number is expected to nearly double to $4.5 trillion by 2021. And by 2040, it is estimated that 95% of purchases will be made online, according to Kinsta.

However, cashing in on this multi-trillion dollar industry isn’t as straightforward. Running an eCommerce business, you’re working hard to ensure you have an appealing and functional website that renders a great user experience (UX). You’re also toiling away to drive a steady stream of traffic to your store using various strategies like content marketing, social media advertising, and more.

Even so, at the end of the day, the success of your online venture comes down to whether or not you convert your site’s visitors into customers. Because if your hard-earned traffic doesn’t convert, then there’s essentially no return on your investment.

Now, as you’d expect, your product pages play a pivotal role in converting traffic into customers. The product page is one of the final steps towards a purchase, and the quality of your product pages can make or break your business.

And so, let’s take a look at the key ingredients that make for a high-converting product page, along with the key performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring its performance. But first, let’s start by talking about the eCommerce product page metrics.

Key eCommerce Performance Metrics

The foundation of any successful eCommerce business is the ability to track and harness performance metrics to make data-driven decisions.

While there are many metrics you can track and optimize, you only need to focus on a few key metrics that make the biggest impact on your store’s growth, such as:

Sales

The most important metric of them all that needs no introduction. All the optimizations you do on your store, including product pages, ties to boosting sales.

Average Customer Order

More commonly known as Average Order Value (AOV), it refers to the average amount of money customers spend in a single transaction. To calculate it, simply divide the total value of all sales (your revenue) with the total number of orders.

Of course, you want your customers to spend as much as they can on your online store, so the higher the AOV, the better. Tracking your AOV on a dashboard enables you to set benchmarks and work out how to get people to spend more with every purchase.

Here are a few ways to boost your AOV:

Upsell your customers by encouraging them to purchase a comparable higher-end product or cross-sell by recommending complementary products that improve the usability of their primary purchase.
Bundle related products so customers get a small discount while increasing their order value.
Offer free shipping on order values above a certain threshold to compel customers to maximize their spending.

Customer Acquisition Cost

Increasing your AOV is crucial, but it’s only half of the equation. Your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) refers to the average cost of acquiring one customer, which includes everything from the cost of running paid ad campaigns to paying your marketing team.

So if you’re spending an average of $20 to acquire each customer but your AOV is only $15, it means your business is operating at a loss.

To turn that into profit, you must optimize your acquisition channels so you only pay for quality traffic that’s more likely to convert. Assess which channels make the biggest difference for your business and double down on them.

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the total amount you earn from a customer over the length of their relationship with you.

So if a customer makes five transactions at your store over their lifetime, each averaging $50, your CLV would be $250. However, you have to minus the acquisition cost from this number.

Your CLV serves as a benchmark for the maximum amount you can spend to acquire customers and the efforts you should make to retain them. That said, it typically costs less to keep a customer than it does to acquire a new one, which means increasing the value of existing customers over their lifetime is crucial.

Boosting your CLV is all about increasing the AOV and creating loyalty programs to turn one-time customers into repeat ones.

Simply put, CLV is a critical metric as the more your customers spend — and the more often they do — the better it is for your store’s growth.

Key Ingredients of a High-Converting Product Page

With the key performance metrics clearly defined, it’s time to dive into the four key ingredients that make for a high-converting product page. Let’s go.

Optimized Product Visuals

Like it or not, customers do judge a book by its cover, especially when they can’t feel, taste, or try out your products first-hand before making a decision.

So, to give your prospects a clearer sense of your products, and to build trust and minimize cart abandonment rate, you must reassure them that they are making the right decision — by uploading high-quality product visuals.

Here are a few important visual formats you need to use:

Primary product images: High-resolution, professional photographs of your product against a white background. These images allow your shoppers to view the product without any distractions. Try to upload multiple primary images from various angles.
Lifestyle images: This involves showcasing your products as they’re being used in real-life situations by owners. Such images help your prospects visualize what it would be like to own your product.
Instructional illustrations: These are short graphics highlighting the best features of your product. It can also be a “how-to” illustration (for assembly or usage instructions) proving the product’s ease-of-use.
Videos: A short clip explaining the product or its use in real-life situations.

Source: Amazon

Furthermore, it’s absolutely critical to optimize your images for speed. High-resolution, full-sized images are often bulky and would slow down your page’s load speed, which, in turn, would negatively impact not just your shopper’s experience but also your site’s rankings on Google.

So, use any of the free image optimization tools to compress your product visuals while maintaining quality. Also, have an alt text for each image so they’re more accessible to visually-impaired users and search engine crawlers.

Don’t cut corners when it comes to product visuals by uploading so-so images taken on your smartphone. Hire a professional — it’ll pay dividends in the long run.

Crisp Product Copy

The next key ingredient of your product page is the copy, aka product description. If you’re selling something useful and exciting, why not write a crisp copy that encourages the prospect to take prompt action.

Use a clear structure and hierarchy in your product’s description — with subheadings, bullets, and keywords to make your copy scannable, enable visitors to quickly find the answers to their questions, and improve your page’s rankings on Google.

Make sure you don’t write an extremely wordy description full of minute details. Only highlight all the details, benefits, and features that matter. Leave the technical or tedious details for the product manual.

Source: Everlane

Keep the following guidelines in mind to write a strong product copy:

Explain your product’s unique value proposition, or why people should pick your product and not your competitors’.
Describe the benefits of your product and the problems that it solves.
Anticipate and address any potential doubts or concerns.
Reduce buyer hesitation and boost confidence by specifying any guarantees or warranties.
Include keywords but don’t stuff them. Readability is key.
Avoid jargon. Use bullets, keep the language simple, and sentences short.

Compelling Call to Action (CTA)

Your end goal is to make people click on the “Add to Cart” button and lead them to the checkout process. For that, the button itself should be inviting and super clickable.

Here’s how to design a compelling CTA:

Use a contrasting color that matches your brand’s theme to make it stand out from other elements on the page.
Make it big enough so it’s easily spotted within the first three seconds of landing on the product page.
Don’t clutter the area surrounding the button and have sufficient white space.

Source: Old Navy

Besides, as most shoppers are going to be indecisive or hesitant, it’s a good idea to also have a “Save for Later” or “Add to Wishlist” button to keep them in the funnel and allow them to easily complete their purchase later.

Abundant Social Proof

Social proof, in the form of product reviews and customer testimonials, is indispensable to your store’s success. Simply put, social proof plays a key role in building buyer confidence.

In fact, 66% of consumers trust online reviews as much as recommendations from family and friends. What’s more, 69% of online shoppers want more reviews from eCommerce sites, and 77% of customers read product reviews before making a purchase.

Source: J.Crew

Clearly, the number and quality of product reviews you’re able to showcase on your product page can be the deciding factor between a sale or a bounce.

A great way to garner more reviews is to reach out to your customers via email (a week after the purchase) and request them to take a moment to write an honest review.

As there’s nothing in it for them, you can also incentivize their feedback by offering them discounts and rewards on their next purchase. This way, you also increase customer retention and brand loyalty.

You’ll likely also receive negative reviews, which you can use to improve your offerings and show your customers that you value their opinions.

Framework for Measuring and Optimizing Product Page Performance

Now that you’re aware of what makes for an effective product page, let’s see what product page metrics you need to measure and how you can improve the performance of your page by tweaking various elements.

KPIs for Product Page performance

Here are five essential product page KPIs you must track on your eCommerce dashboard.

Add-to-Cart Rate

The add-to-cart rate is the percentage of product page visitors who have clicked the “Add to cart” or “Buy” button and added the product to their shopping cart.

To calculate your add-to-cart rate, divide the number of sessions that have resulted in the product being added to the customer’s cart with the total number of sessions, and then multiply it by 100.

This metric gives you an idea of whether you’re attracting the right audience and if your visitors know what they need to do once they arrive on your product page. It’s also a good indicator of how your product and its price point align with your customer’s expectations.

Conversion Rate

Your conversion rate shows how effective your product page is at converting visitors into customers. It’s a crucial metric you need to track in your Google Analytics eCommerce dashboard.

It’s calculated by dividing the number of product sales by the total number of visitors over a particular period. In essence, you’re extending the add-to-cart rate to accommodate the efficiency of your checkout process.

Cart Abandonment Rate

Cart abandonment rate is a metric that indicates the percentage of visitors that have added your product to their cart during a session and then left your store without completing their purchase.

According to Baymard Institute, the average cart eCommerce cart abandonment rate is 69.57%.

There are countless reasons why visitors ditch their carts — high shipping fees, a complicated checkout process, no returns policy, lack of desired payment method, or being forced to create a full-fledged account, to name a few.

Tracking your cart abandonment rate on a dashboard allows you to figure out potential reasons for abandonment and optimize the checkout process.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website (“bounce”) without visiting any additional pages besides the produce page where they landed.

If you have a high bounce rate on a particular product page, it signals potential issues such as slow page loading speed, difficult navigation, or lack of mobile responsiveness. So, make sure to track your bounce rate in your Analytics dashboard.

Time on Page

This metric shows how much time visitors are spending on your product page. It is calculated by dividing the total time visitors have spent on a page by the number of visitors who’ve visited the page over a specified period.

Time on page gives you an idea of how engaging your page’s content is, and how it aligns with visitors’ expectations.

While a higher time spent on page usually means your content is engaging, you don’t want it to be too high as it could mean that visitors aren’t sure what they need to do to complete the purchase or are too hesitant to make a purchase.

Tweaking Ingredients and Optimizing Performance

While all the best practices discussed above are cogent in theory, every business and target audience is unique. The only surefire way to optimize your product page for maximum conversions is to continuously test and iterate.

That is, it’s a good idea to invest efforts in continuously split testing the key ingredients outlined above. Essentially, split (also known as A/B) testing is the process of splitting your traffic into two (or more) variations of your product page to see which performs better.

The main constituents of an A/B test are variants — the two versions of the page, the champion, the original page, and the challenger, or the modified version of the page that you compare against the original.

For instance, you can split the traffic between two versions with different product descriptions for a couple of weeks, and see which one converts better. Likewise, you can test image and CTA variations (different size, color, text, etc.) to see if the challenger version performs better. If it does, replace the champion page with the “winner” and repeat the process until you reach your target conversion rate.

An important thing to note is that you must split test one element at a time, otherwise, you won’t know which element’s variation brought in the results. And while you can go about this manually, an efficient approach would be to use one of the many A/B testing tools available today.

Over to You

The product page is the gateway to final conversion, so it’s vital to make it as frictionless as possible.

Crafting a high-converting product page involves a lot of moving parts, but working on the key ingredients outlined above — product visuals, copy, CTAs, and reviews — along with a focus on measuring and improving KPIs on a custom dashboard, is a surefire way to drive more conversions.

Harsh Agrawal

Harsh Agrawal is the pioneering blogger behind ShoutMeLoud, an award-winning blog with over 832K subscribers and 1 million Pageviews/month. He is also a regular conference speaker and has spoken at events like WordCamp, IBM Business Connect, and Affiliate Summit West.

The post 4 Tactics to Improve Your eCommerce Product Page Metrics appeared first on Cyfe.

5 Key Customer Experience Metrics Your Small Business Must Track

Harsh Agrawal — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 06:17:11 +0000

Customer experience, or CX, is the broad perception customers form of your business as they progress through their buyer’s journey. CX encompasses every single interaction, positive and negative, that customers have with your business, and it greatly affects the likelihood of not just an immediate purchase, but also future purchases from them and people in their network.

Tracking your customer experience metrics is going to help you improve your reputation, customer satisfaction, and more. It’s never been more important.

Simply put, outstanding buying experiences are now an expectation from modern customers.

According to an Adobe study, companies that prioritized and effectively managed customer experience were three times more likely than their peers to have significantly exceeded their top business goals in 2019. Plus, according to Gartner, CX drives over two-thirds of customer loyalty, outperforming brand, and price combined.

So you may have the best product or service in the market, with a unique value proposition, but that alone won’t cut it. To reach the true heights of your business’s potential, you must have a strong focus on rendering top-notch customer experience.

Now, as Peter Drucker famously said, ”If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” That is, you can only improve your CX if you’re able to correctly measure and track it using the right metrics.

So, without further ado, here are the five key customer experience metrics your small business must track.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric that determines a customer’s desire to recommend a product/service or brand to others. It’s measured by asking a simple survey question, such as “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend us to your friends and colleagues?”

As shown above, the Net Promoter Scale categorizes customers into three groups: Promoters, Passives, and Detractors.

Promoters are loyal customers who would love to spread positive word of mouth. Passives are satisfied customers, susceptible to the marketing influence of your competitors. Detractors are unsatisfied customers who may even advise people against doing business with you.

After you survey your customer base, take the percentage of Promoters, and subtract the percentage of Detractors to determine your NPS. The NPS can vary from -100 (everyone is a Detractor) to 100 (everyone is a Promoter).

NPS is a simple yet strong indicator of other vital marketing KPIs like customer churn, average spend, and customer lifetime value, all of which are key to increasing revenue and overall business growth.

Get in touch with your Promoters and encourage them to spread a good word, and contact Detractors to learn where you’re falling behind and what you can do to convert them into Promoters.

Tracking NPS

To track your NPS, use a software tool like GatherUp. It helps store NPS results, track changes and fluctuations in the score, and get insightful feedback from customers on what needs to be improved.

Setting Benchmarks and Evaluating Progress

As such, an NPS greater than zero is considered good, but anything greater than +50 means your CX is sublime.

According to Retently, an average NPS ranges from 27 to 71. The chart below shows the scores for various industries.

Thus, you can set a benchmark for your business by comparing your current NPS with your industry average and also checking the average scores in your region (for instance, Europeans rate company performances very conservatively and they are less likely to give you 10 or 9s).

Use your baseline NPS as your own benchmark. Keep tracking your score for six months and if you notice a 5-10% increase in score, you’re heading in the right direction and progressing towards building a successful business.

Your goal should be to exceed your industry average. It’s a good idea to measure your NPS at least twice a year so you know how happy your customer base is.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a metric to measure the level of customer satisfaction with your business, be it related to a purchase or a support-related interaction.

This score is also calculated by asking a simple question post-purchase or interaction, such as “How would you rate your experience?”

Customers are typically asked to rate their experience on a scale of 1-5, and a CSAT score of 50% means that five out of ten customers gave you a positive score instead of a neutral or negative one. CSAT scores above 70% are deemed good, and over 85% translates to high customer loyalty levels.

CSAT is an easy way to close the loop on customer interactions and gauge whether your business was successful in producing customer satisfaction. And being nothing more than a quick question, you can use it at multiple touchpoints in the buyer’s journey to determine the level of customer satisfaction at each stage and pinpoint areas of improvement.

Tracking CSAT

To track your CSAT, you can use survey software like Wootric or Zendesk. With it, you can trigger surveys at touchpoints based on events such as case closure, feature use, and so on. You’ll get the score and rich qualitative feedback inside your app or website, via email, SMS, or Intercom chat.

It has easy-to-use analytics and you can view your rolling average metric, score distribution, and response counts over time.

Setting Benchmarks and Evaluating Progress

According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), the current overall U.S. Customer Satisfaction Score is 76.5%. However, again, CSAT varies across industries.

Here’s the complete list of the latest industry-wise CSAT benchmarks as per ACSI.

If your industry isn’t listed, comparing yourself to the overall US customer satisfaction score of 76.5% is a good starting point. Let this be your benchmark, with your goal to exceed the industry average.

As your CSAT score complements your NPS, it makes sense to send out the survey at least every six months and keep tracking it alongside NPS.

And while it helps to know where you stand relative to your competitors, the key to success is to always focus on improving your own score and customer experience. Your customers’ expectations are not necessarily being set by your industry’s numbers.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Reducing a customer’s effort in site navigation, purchase, and receiving support dramatically boosts their overall experience with your business.

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a metric that measures the amount of effort a customer exerts to buy your product, use it, get a problem resolved, or a query answered.

Source: Hotjar

Yet again, the score is obtained from a short survey wherein customers rate their experience on a scale of “Extremely difficult” to “Extremely easy.”

To calculate the CES, add the number of respondents who voted 4 or 5 and divide it by the total number of customers who participated in this survey. So, if 80 out of 100 respondents rated 4 or 5, then 80% of your customers had a relatively smooth and effortless interaction with your business.

Needless to say, customers are more loyal to an effortless experience, which means a score of 80% or higher is what you should be aiming for. You can use CES post-purchase to assess the level of customer effort and figure out how you can make the experience more seamless.

Tracking CES

To track your CES, you can use survey software like Delighted or Hotjar. With it, you can easily create customized CES surveys and trigger your surveys to send after key interactions via multiple channels, such as Web, Email, SMS, and Link.

You can measure and analyze CES survey results with a simple dashboard, and automatically calculate CES scores in real-time as new survey responses come in. You can also identify the most difficult support requests to resolve and track agent performance over time

Setting Benchmarks and Evaluating Progress

As “effort” can mean so many different things in different contexts, according to HubSpot, there’s no definitive industry standard for CES. For each survey, set your benchmark as 4 and track your average post-purchase customer support CES month-over-month.

Simply put, your goal should be to keep your CES at 80% or above to ensure your customers are having seamless interactions with your business.

Customer Churn Rate

Customer churn rate is the percentage of your customers who stop doing business with you or don’t renew their subscriptions during a given time period.

To calculate the customer churn rate, divide the number of customers you lost during a specified time period by the total number of customers you had at the starting of that time period. For example, if you start your quarter with 1000 customers and end at 800, your churn rate is 20%.

There are a variety of possible reasons for churn, from poor customer service or user experience to customers finding cheaper alternatives in the market. Keeping an eye on your monthly or quarterly churn is important to ensure consistent levels of customer experience.

Moreover, as it can cost five times more to attract a new customer than it does to retain an existing one, minimizing churn is critical. Even though some churn is inevitable, it’s crucial that you learn why customers are ditching your business so you can provide a more delightful customer experience and thus, maximize the lifetime value of each customer.

Tracking Customer Churn Rate

To track your customer churn rate, you can use a dashboard tool like Cyfe. With it, you have a centralized way to monitor all of the important KPIs that matter to your small business growth, such as customer lifetime value, churn, and retention rates.

Setting Benchmarks and Evaluating Progress

Owing to the difference in business models, customer churn rates that could be considered acceptable for one business might be disastrous for another. For SaaS businesses, monthly churn rates are typically between 5-7%.

For example, Buffer, the well-known social media management tool, reports a 5.4% monthly churn (or ~48% annual churn). Buffer is a big, established SaaS company, so the idea that they’re losing 48 out of every 100 customers each year may be hard to digest.

However, different industries have different factors that affect churn, and so, churn rates vary widely.

Source: Recurly Research

Price has a definite effect on churn. Higher-priced subscriptions experience less churn, possibly because the purchase is more considered. Subscribers both sign-up and cancel more readily in categories with lower price points.

Likewise, B2C companies experience higher churn (7.05%) than B2B (5.00%). B2B purchase processes can be complex, resulting in a more considered purchase.

You can set your benchmark based on your industry, business model, and pricing. Your best bet is to track monthly churn and aim to keep it under 7%, ideally around 5%. A steadily reducing churn rate is a great sign of business growth in terms of customer retention as well as revenue.

First Response Time (FRT)

The first response time (FRT) is the average amount of time it takes (in business hours) for your customer to get an initial response to their support issue. It is measured by taking the total of all your first response times and dividing it by the number of tickets resolved.

The modern customer simply doesn’t have the patience to wait for their issues to be resolved or queries to be answered. When customers want your support, they want it pronto.

Source: HubSpot

FRT indicates how quickly your team is addressing new support cases and helps you see whether you have enough team members to deal with the volume.

As you’d expect, keeping your average FRT as low as possible is vital to provide better CX. So, analyze the trend of your average FRT on a quarterly basis to see if it’s increasing or decreasing.

Tracking FRT

A great tool you can use to track your FRT is Freshdesk. It provides detailed reports on your customer service performance.

If your business offers support on multiple channels like email and social media, the report also provides separate first response rates for each channel.

This way, businesses can get a clear idea of how your customer service varies by channel, which ones provide the best experience, and which ones have room for improvement.

Setting Benchmarks and Evaluating Progress

The average FRT across all industries is 7.3 hours. But again, there’s a lot of variance between industries, as per Freshdesk’s Customer Happiness Benchmark Report. Some industries have an average of as low as 4 hours, while others go up to 13 hours.

Plus, FRT varies across channels as well. For email, customers usually expect a response within 24 hours. For customer service on social media, the recommended benchmark is to respond within an hour. And for phone support, the generally accepted response time is three minutes.

Based on your industry’s numbers, you can set a benchmark for your FRT. Then, work with your support team to determine a reasonable number to work toward, which can be based on the size of your customer base and number of support reps and channels to handle.

Use that number to motivate your team to deliver faster and better service to your customers. Train your customer service reps, create additional communication channels, streamline internal processes, and hire more reps if needed in order to continually reduce your FRT and thus, improve the customer experience.

Over to You

What sets apart a few renowned brands from countless mediocre businesses is the quality of customer experience. Irrespective of what your business is about and what industry you’re in, a strong focus on creating a remarkable CX is essential to surpass your competitors.

And the only foolproof way to measure and improve your CX is by tracking concrete metrics, instead of relying on hunches.

So, if you haven’t already, it’s time to start tracking these key CX metrics by using a customizable dashboard and turn one-time customers into loyal brand advocates who happily spread a good word about your business.

Harsh Agrawal

The post 5 Key Customer Experience Metrics Your Small Business Must Track appeared first on Cyfe.

Harsh Agrawal – Cyfe

4 Tactics to Improve Your eCommerce Product Page Metrics

Table of Contents

Key eCommerce Performance Metrics

Sales

Average Customer Order

Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer Lifetime Value

Key Ingredients of a High-Converting Product Page

Optimized Product Visuals

Crisp Product Copy

Compelling Call to Action (CTA)

Abundant Social Proof

Framework for Measuring and Optimizing Product Page Performance

KPIs for Product Page performance

Add-to-Cart Rate

Conversion Rate

Cart Abandonment Rate

Bounce Rate

Time on Page

Tweaking Ingredients and Optimizing Performance

Over to You

Harsh Agrawal

5 Key Customer Experience Metrics Your Small Business Must Track

Table of Contents

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Tracking NPS

Setting Benchmarks and Evaluating Progress

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Tracking CSAT

Setting Benchmarks and Evaluating Progress

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Tracking CES

Setting Benchmarks and Evaluating Progress

Customer Churn Rate

Tracking Customer Churn Rate

Setting Benchmarks and Evaluating Progress

First Response Time (FRT)

Tracking FRT

Setting Benchmarks and Evaluating Progress

Over to You

Harsh Agrawal