Last updated - February 24, 2020
Generating traffic and new leads are the most important tasks that every business needs to successfully address in order to grow, and the same applies to your WooCommerce website.
However, overcoming these challenges and bringing visitors to your online store is only a job half-done. If you really want to transform your visitors into paying customers and boost your sales, you need to get them to stick around and explore your products.
And that’s the hardest part.
In order to achieve this goal, it’s crucial to improve user engagement.
Here are some tips to help you with that.
Speed Up Your WooCommerce Store
You already know that people have become increasingly impatient, which means that they won’t even think about exploring your online store if it takes ages to load.
And let’s get one thing straight – in this case, “ages” equals more than 3.21 seconds.
Maybe it sounds like an exaggeration, but if we bear in mind that, for example, every 100 milliseconds of latency cost Amazon a 1% drop in sales, it’s more than obvious that every split second counts when it comes to your conversion rates.
In order to give your load times a boost you should:
- Optimize your images. Using large image files makes your online store sluggish and subsequently affects your search engine rankings. There are WP plugins such as Smush.it that you can use to reduce the size of your images without sacrificing their quality.
- Leverage a CDN. A content delivery network uses a geographically distributed group of servers to deliver a cached version of your website to your visitors based on their location.
- Increase your WP memory limit. This is one of the best optimization tactics, and if you’re not sure how to do it yourself, get in touch with your hosting company.
Leverage Social Proof
People are more likely to make a purchasing decision when they read positive experiences and see that your online store has a lot of other visitors.
So, you should include your existing customers’ reviews, as this will both encourage your potential customers to pull out their credit cards and reduce buyer’s remorse.
Apart from that, you can use TrustPulse, a tool which will help you build trust with your visitors and generate engagement by showing them notifications of other people’s activity on your WooCommerce website.
In other words, during they’re on your website, people will be notified in real time whenever somebody registers, makes a purchase, or signs up for your newsletter. There are also so-called “on fire” notifications which keep track of how many people take action over a period of time.
This way, you’re showing your potential customers your credibility and convincing them that it’s safe to purchase from your store.
Provide Unique Product Descriptions
Some people are hesitant to make a purchase online because they prefer to see the item they like in person.
But, if your descriptions are unique and detailed, your potential customers will be more likely to decide to make a purchase.
Besides that, such a meticulous approach is good for your SEO too. Namely, Google can penalize you for duplicate content if you simply copy descriptions from your competitors or even from your own website. It’s true that coming up with meaningful copy for a number of similar products can be painstaking, but that’s the only way to do it right.
It’s essential to add relevant keywords to help your customers find your products online, as well as to create easy-to-read descriptions. Using bullet points is a good idea as it improves scannability.
Include all the relevant specs and details to make up for the lack of possibility to actually pick up, take a closer look, and physically inspect and touch a product.
Implement Chatbots
There’s no better way to engage your visitors than a pop-up message from a smart chatbot asking them whether they need any help.
It’s practically an invitation to start a conversation, especially if you and your content team come up with a catchy icebreaker to spark your customers’ interest and get them to click.
Again, time is an important factor.
Nobody likes to wait for one of your customer reps to become available and pick up the phone. Your customers want their answers and they want them right now.
So, instead of hiring more staff, which is expensive, not to mention inefficient because each one of them can serve only one customer at a time, it’s a much better idea to implement chatbots which are capable of handling multiple queries at the same time.
Besides providing 24/7 customer assistance, chatbots also collect and process customer data, which allows you to gain a detailed insight into your audience’s behavioral patterns, needs, and pain points as well as potential product bugs that they spotted.
Make Sure Your WooCommerce Store Is User-Friendly
First of all, optimize your online store for mobile.
Both Google and your customers will highly appreciate this and reward you with better rankings and more traffic respectively.
As you probably know, the search engine titan rolled out its mobile-first indexing algorithm which means that it will rely on the mobile version of your web page for indexing and ranking.
Besides that, an increasing number of people decides to browse for the products they’re interested in and make a purchase via their mobile devices, and if your online store isn’t properly optimized, they’ll simply bounce off.
Another way to improve your website user-friendliness is to add WooCommerce Currency Switcher. This useful plugin is particularly important if you sell your products internationally as it allows your customers to switch currencies. People, in general, are much more likely to make a purchase when the price is expressed in the currency of their country.
Finally, the ImageZoom plugin does just like its name says – lets your visitors zoom in and get a closer look at your products. In other words, they will be able to see the texture, fabric, and other details.
Boosting your e-commerce website engagement can be a challenging and time-consuming process. But the sooner you identify shortcomings, the better. These tips can point you in the right direction and show you where to look for and what to tweak.
