Episode 12# 4 small changes for outsized result
===
[00:00:00] What's up Crew? Today is an exciting episode because I want to give you some really quick tips to increase your online sales. Like not the big stuff, not let's redo your site. None of those things. I want to give you some quick things that I think is gonna make a massive impact, cuz sometimes it's the details.
[00:00:17] It's these little actions that produce outsize results, and that's what I'm gonna share with you today. So we do this really cool program for brick and mortar retailers. It's our core service. Yes, I'll plug it. You can learn about [email protected], but it's called Momentum. It's 12 weeks and we're designing and developing a new site, really bottling up the in-store experience, but most importantly, making it a high converting site.
[00:00:40] And then we're putting in place a paid ad strategy to increase traffic and retention tools. And strategy to get the second and third purchase. But people are leaving our program and we wanted to know, see the effectiveness, like how's this working? Where can we improve in what we're doing? And so we started heat mapping sites for a few of our [00:01:00] clients, like a few dozen.
[00:01:01] And uh, heat mapping is where you put software on a site and you can view how customers interact with it. You can see exactly where they click, exactly how much they scroll, where are they landing, how long are they staying on certain sections. Yeah, all of, I mean, it's creepy. The amount of stuff we can get is creepy.
[00:01:20] And we did this on dozens of sites and some things we discovered, we were like, yeah, of course we knew that and that's why we do it. Other things were like, oh, like maybe we knew that was important, but we didn't realize how important. And so I wanna share with you some of the things that we discovered that I think can have a massive impact on you.
[00:01:38] So number one is focusing on what's called above the fold. So, When you walk in, like let's say you walk into a Starbucks, there's gonna be a stack of newspapers there, and they're gonna be folded for you to pick up and purchase, and they're folded in half. And on top of that section is a headline, some imagery, maybe a couple headlines for different articles.
[00:01:59] [00:02:00] But the entire goal of that section is to get you to pick up the newspaper and read the whole thing. They want to entice you enough with what is there to make you want to read, and so above the fold on your website is If I load your site on my phone or on my computer, what do I see? Without scrolling at all, here's why this is important.
[00:02:19] We found that on average across all of these sites, around 70% of your traffic is never scrolling. They load your site and they immediately come to the conclusion is your site for them? And there like the biggest pain point is the back button. The back button is stealing more sales from you than Sheen, than Amazon, than a local competitor.
[00:02:42] It's people landing on your site and saying like, this isn't for me. And so what do we do to improve that? This is the first low-hanging fruit. Change out your hero image. Use imagery and copy that makes your customer land there and say, yes, this is for me, and that's not gonna happen with [00:03:00] a picture of our store.
[00:03:01] And welcome to our store. That's gonna happen with pictures of people that they resonate with and copy around what they're thinking about. Like if it's a, you know, it could be back to school. And so they're talking back to school and style. That's what they're thinking about. They feel understood, and that's hitting a pain point that they have.
[00:03:18] But that area above the fold is so important because the majority of your traffic. It is not, they're not scrolling. They're not giving you the chance to sell yourself further down the page cuz they're not even seeing it. So that area is so important to your site. Changing out your hero image is great.
[00:03:36] Now we have some templates there on our website. Um, we'll put that in the show notes. Is it made by capital.com? If you want some free Canva templates, we have that. But ultimately, changing out your hero image is massive. So number two, along the same lines with that hero image, add a fake button. So what I mean by this is if you look at a hero image, and you [00:04:00] have a lot of times there's like buttons in the theme, but you could also just delete the button from the theme and make the entire image clickable.
[00:04:08] But then add a graphic that looks just like a button. And what's what we found is people will click there. People like clear direction. We think that we want freedom. We think we're like, I just want to go. I shop like I shop. I'm gonna click where I'm gonna click. We love clear direction. We love to anticipate what's next.
[00:04:26] And buttons is what people expect to click on. Now what we found that's so fascinating here is when we didn't have something like that, people weren't clicking on the hero image. And think about it like that hero image. If you're putting thought into that, I assume that's where you want your customers going.
[00:04:43] That's a major brand focus of yours right now. And so imagine like if you merchandise your store and you put your brand focus, the thing you really want to be selling like in your back room, that's what we're doing When we're not guiding the customer, we are telling them, Hey, you [00:05:00] are here, but we want you to go here.
[00:05:03] And so when you do your hero image, add a fake button in the graphic, just a square that says, shop the name of the collection. And look, the entire image is clickable, but that fake button is going to have a bigger impact than you think. Next, your navigation. A few things on this, and these are small tweaks that you can make.
[00:05:22] First, make sure that you have a focus on new and sale. What we found is the majority of people clicked on those two buttons, and this is across multiple industries. It didn't matter what, like home decor, toy clothing, all of that stuff. People went to new and people went to sale. And really, if you think about it, those are two different kinds of customers.
[00:05:43] You have people that want the newest, the latest, the greatest, and you have people that want to deal. And when you highlight those two, you're catching both of those. Now the next piece is like think about what is your superpower? What do you do best? Well, we saw a lot of times, like let's say you have a [00:06:00] clothing boutique and they would have clothing and a dropdown that had tops and dresses and bottoms and whatever.
[00:06:06] But we saw a lot of people were going clo tops, clothing tops. Well, we kept tops in that clothing dropdown and we moved tops to the top navigation bar and we saw so much more traffic go to that page. So add your superpower to your top bar, that collection, that thing that you do better than anyone else.
[00:06:28] And then lastly, and this is kind of repeating the one I just said, focusing on new and sale, because that is where most of your traffic is going. And, and cuz people want the latest and greatest and they want to catch a deal. Now you'll notice that everything that I recommended was above the fold. It was that top section because I really do believe that is the heaviest, like that's the heavy hitting part of your site.
[00:06:52] So this was a very tactical episode and a short one, and I hope that if you implement this, that it's going to make an impact. And if it [00:07:00] does, uh, hit me up at retail. Josh, let me know what you think. Send me your site. I'm happy to look at it and tell you what you think. Uh, but thanks for tuning in. I can't wait to see you next week.
[00:07:10] Uh,
