Tag Archives: website innovation

Understanding customer intention translates to more sales

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Intention is key to understanding your customer's journey

There’s a marketing strategy called Jobs to be Done that goes beyond personas. A quick understanding of Jobs to be Done is that the same person may have different needs depending on what job they are trying to get done. An example is a person who chooses a fancy pizza restaurant for a date night with a spouse but chooses a quick-serve pizza restaurant when they need to get a meal for their kid’s team. Though in both instances they chose pizza, they didn’t buy it from the same place. 

Personas are a general idea of the person most likely to buy your product. Usually, the more niche your product is, the better personas will work. Except… yeah, all those exceptions. Starting with personas is just good marketing, but understanding your customers’ intentions will get you much closer to creating an experience they will return for. 

Why did they come to your site?

It’s easy to fall into the mindset of “I sell shirts. They wanted a shirt. That’s why they came to my site.” While true, it doesn’t get to any nuance that will reinforce branding or encourage a return visit. Why customers come to your site is a profound question. Did they experience your brand previously and are looking forward to continuing the relationship? Are they new and just taking a peek? Are they killing time, but would make a purchase if something caught their eye? Do they have something special in mind? Did a friend send them? Did an ad send them? Are they looking for a gift? Are they shopping for themselves?

Animated gif showing a laptop that displays Stylaquin's Look Book Feature

Does Your Site Do This?

It can with Stylaquin! Stylaquin is the easy to add Shopify app that transforms your website. Stylaquin makes shopping faster, more engaging, and more fun. Stylaquin shoppers stay longer, view over 85% more products, come back more often, and buy more when they do. Find us in the Shopify App Store.

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How do you determine intention?

When I first came up with the idea for Stylaquin, I saw it as a way to improve the online shopping experience, which was perfect for customers who already knew what they wanted, but not for customers who were interested in browsing and discovery. That basic structure hasn’t changed in 20 years. As I reviewed the data from shoppers engaging with Stylaquin, I realized that browsing and exploring were super helpful in unlocking intention. The insights panel in Stylaquin shows the most purchased items and the most abandoned items for all purchases, but for shoppers who use Stylaquin, it also shows the most viewed items and the most saved items. That’s where you start to see a more nuanced look at intention. Are your customers browsing or buying? Are they looking at two items, or twenty? Did they add something to the cart and keep shopping, or did they leave?

Back when I worked for L.L. Bean, the catalog started the purchase journey. Now it could also be a Facebook ad, Instagram post, TikTok challenge, YouTube video, Pinterest board, or a slew of online mentions and touch points. Online shopping has transformed from an online order-taking experience to part of a much larger ecosystem of online experiences and offerings. The question we should be asking is: if a customer sees something that they like enough to explore, why do websites focus on navigation, but never on browsing and exploration? When we see the delight and discovery social media brings to online shopping, why aren’t we working to incorporate it into the structure of our websites?

Customer journeys of discovery

How many times have you gone to a website with the intention of buying a specific item, say a gift, and ended up finding something for yourself? Happens all the time. The more items customers look at, the more likely they are to make a purchase. One of the reasons Stylaquin gets such great results is shoppers view 180% more items than non-Stylaquin shoppers. Discovery leads to sales. Engagement leads to sales. Browsing leads to sales. Companies are spending staggering amounts of money on creating fun and engaging experiences outside their websites. It’s time to start looking at the actual shopping experience as a source of engagement. A customer’s intention might be to buy a specific item when they arrive, but they’ll come back if they have a good experience. Stylaquin shoppers come back 25% more often, and buy more when they do because they had a fun experience shopping.

Why engagement solves more problems than you think

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Don't underestimate the power of engagement to get your Shopify store to the next level

You hear a lot of Shopify experts talking about SEO and marketing being what you need to focus on, but you don’t hear as much about engagement. What’s odd about that is engagement is the Big Kahuna in how Google ranks your Shopify site. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of making your site more understandable to the Google algorithm. It is, after all, just a machine. Google doesn’t actually view or engage with your Shopify site, it just indexes the site and collects data about the visitors who do visit. Sounds simple, and it is. Google doesn’t know if you have great photography, it doesn’t know if you spend hours creating deep and meaningful copy, it doesn’t know if you have the most amazing products ever. Google analyzes your site to see if it can identify what you sell; lawnmowers, perfume, sox—whatever, and then it tracks how visitors interact with your site. If you have beautiful photography, great copy, and amazing products, visitors are likely to stay longer and view more products. That’s what Google uses to determine if you are a good site to send its customers, the searchers, to when they type in a query that matches up with what Google thinks you have. Even if you advertise with Google, you are not the customer who Google serves. Google serves the searcher, because without searchers, Google doesn’t have a business.

Okay, so how does this help small Shopify stores (or large ones) who are trying to stand out in a crowded market in a way that Google can track and quantify? Increasing engagement really moves the needle. You have probably already spent time and money creating great photography, meaningful copy, and amazing products. If you haven’t tackled those, stop reading and get started. But most of you can engage and delight your customers so that they stay longer and come back more often with what you have already, just make it more fun to shop. Yes, shameless self promotion coming, Stylaquin is the easy way to make your site more fun than the rest. Stores that use Stylaquin have seen shoppers spend more time on site, view more products, and get more return visits. This all adds up to an increase in organic traffic, a better conversion rate, and more sales. Why? Because Google is just a machine that takes it’s direction from how users interact with your Shopify site. Make your site more fun to engage with and BINGO! Visitors stay longer, view more products and come back more often. Sounds simple, and it is. Check out the video and see for yourself.

Why innovation matters to online shopping

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Innovation is the spark that sets you apart

When you are trying to compete in a crowded marketplace, you need to stand out. There are several ways to do that: The lowest prices, the best service, unique products, interesting promotions, creative social media, and so on. Several of those are problematic from an ROI perspective. All require time, money and attention. The thing that is not on everyone’s list is innovation.  Innovation is easy compared to trying to discount you way to the top.

How do you become innovative?

Try new things, use new tools, be the first kid on the block to have something cool. Tech innovation does have the occasional hiccup, but the tradeoff is being at the forefront, standing out, being a leader. Is that important to your customers? If they are younger it is very important, if you want younger customers it is very important. 

Check out this video to see something that can totally transform any Shopify website in about 10 minutes. 

Stylaquin is available in the Shopify App Store and it’s FREE for the first month. Innovation doesn’t get much easier that that!

5 Ways to Increase Your Shopify Sales

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5 Ways to Increasing Shopify Sales

1) Get your site to stand out and be memorable.

Stylaquin is an engagement engine that adds the tools and experience power-shoppers love. It creates Look Book pages for each product using our algorithm. Instead of clicking through each image one by one, customers see a full page of product images. If they like something, they can save it on their Idea Board. They can collect and curate all the items they like and see them all together, change colors and sizes till they get exactly what they want. Stylaquin increases time on site by over 70%, increases items viewed by over 100% and has a 3.5% higher conversion rate when shoppers use it. Now available in the Shopify App Store.

2) Capture your visitors emails so you can market to them.

It’s easy to set up an opt-in form in Shopify has several to choose from in their marketplace. Typically they appear when a visitor lands on the site. Don’t make them annoying or disruptive, and never put them on the checkout page since they can disrupt the purchase that is in the works. You’d rather have a sale today than a email for later, right?

The cover of the Smart Shopify SEO Builder.

This easy to understand, eight page guide, will teach you how Google sees your website (hint: It’s not the way you do) and how to leverage that for more traffic and more sales. Download your copy today!

3) Develop an editorial calendar

Once you have some emails to get going, develop an editorial calendar and send them relevant and interesting emails. Resist the urge to just relentlessly offer discounts. Most small stores don’t have a wide enough selection to make targeted discounts work and if customers would buy it without a discount, you are giving out free money. Think about what you are selling and why it’s interesting and talk about that. Offer coupons and discounts from time to time especially on days like cyber-Monday and Black Friday.

4) Set up a push campaign for abandoned carts.

Many sites have abandoned cart rates of over 75%—yikes! One of the easiest ways to get customers to come back is to send them a push notification. Think of it as a gentle reminder that they left something in their cart and it is still there waiting for them. Be careful of offering discounts. While a discount may get the ball rolling it also teaches customers that they will get a deal if they don’t make a purchase right away. Shopify’s marketplace has several plugins that will make adding a push campaign easy.

5) Integrate with Facebook and Instagram

If you already have a good following on Facebook and Instagram, why not magnify their impact by connecting them to your Shopify site? Here’s a link to Shopify’s guide to integrating Facebook and Instagram with your site. [https://www.shopify.com/facebook-instagram]

Is Sugar and Spice the Next Technology Disruption?

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Is Sugar and Spice the Next Technology Disruption?

What is the biggest differentiator between your customer segments? By that I mean, when you sort your customers what are the first big buckets? Gender? Age? Geographic Region? Income? If gender is the biggest differentiator, then what I’m going to say is very, very important.

We treat all genders the same online. We shouldn’t. While life is a bell curve there is a real difference between how men and women shop. Does your website offer male and female customers the shopping experience that works for them?

The current online shopping experience was designed for the way men shop. That’s perfect if your customers are men. Men are mostly item shoppers, and they value speed and efficiency. Let’s say a guy needs a new white dress shirt, he’ll go online, choose color and size and make the purchase. He probably won’t worry about how the new shirt will work with his existing wardrobe and he probably won’t keep shopping just for fun. Women shop for fun. They usually think about how the items in their wardrobe will work together AND they have a lot more choices for fit, fabric, and fashion than men do.

There is a huge gender bias in how websites are built that favors the way men shop. Women make 87% of all purchases, so there’s a huge opportunity to make websites more appealing to women. If you want to see how to add the shopping experience women want to an existing website, without re-engineering or re-platforming, Stylaquin may be the right fit—give us a call.

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Are your customers having a “micro moment”?

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Did you know that 71% of consumers shop in “micro-moments” AKA: shopping while doing something else. More than a third say they do so at least weekly and some do it several times a day.

While what makes something worth buying is still about value, brand, and convenience, how customers get to the decision point is very different in today’s always online, always on the phone, always distracted reality.

So how do you engage with customers who aren’t paying attention?

Make it easier to shop while distracted of course!

There is a myth that we can force customers to be the customers we want, rather than who they are. Making the online experience work for the way customers really are, rather than who we want them to be, is the only choice if you want them to come back. So how do you do that? 

Why not make it faster to browse? That would let customers view more items in less time. 

Why not make it easy to collect all the things that shoppers are interested in, and be able to engage with them in a meaningful way—see items together, change colors and sizes, and just have fun?

Why not make it easy to come back and see what was interesting from a previous visit? Remember, they are so busy that they are trying to do multiple things at once.

If you are following this so far, thank you! I reject that we all have a shorter attention span than a goldfish. 

Stylaquin solves all of these problems and makes online shopping more engaging and more fun. 

Shoppers who use Stylaquin:

  • Increase conversion rates by up to 5%.
  • Increase return visits up to 10%
  • Increase average order value (AOV) by up to 10% 
  • Increase time on site by over 60%

If you are looking for innovative ways to make your site’s online shopping experience worth coming back for, give Stylaquin a try. Still not sure? Read our white paper that shares the results from three years of beta testing and the decline when Stylaquin was removed from the beta site.

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3 technology innovations that can Increase Website Sales

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3 Technology Innovations that can Increase Website Sales

1) FindMine
Findmine works as a upsell engine that drives 3-7% additional revenue. It uses AI to suggest items that go well with what customers are looking at. It adds a suggestion bar to the bottom of each page that displays additional items. There is also integration with a direct-mail programs that works in tandem with an abandoned cart program, and FindMine can be integrated into the in-store experience as well. They offer merchant intelligence features that provide onsite into customer purchasing patterns.

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2) Storeya
Storeya has several products but the most innovative is the Traffic Booster. It uses a proprietary algorithm and AI to fine-tune Google Ads so that ramp-up time to finding what works and what doesn’t is decreased. It has a dashboard that lets you see which leads are driving customers to your site and lets you expand your spend when you find the sweet spot. They are an official Google Ads reseller and have increased the effectiveness of google ad spend by over 8X for several clients. If you’re struggling to get a decent ROI from your google ad budget check Storeya out.

3) Stylaquin
Stylaquin is a solution designed for women shoppers. Stylaquin adds a bar to the side of your website that acts as a portal to both a Look Book feature and an Idea board. It creates a completely new way to experience a website, one that women prefer, without re-engineering or re-platforming. The Look Book takes the images for each product and puts them into a template so that rather than a grid where shoppers can see one image at a time, they get a full page of images. This lets them flip through a site like they flip through a magazine. When shoppers find items they are interested in they add them to the Idea Board, where they can change sizes, quantities, and colors as well as move items around to see how they look together. It even has a running total of what’s on the board and what’s in the cart. When customers are ready to buy it moves them to the checkout. If you’ve ever watched women shop online this makes perfect sense. Instead of opening 18 tabs and flipping back and forth between them, women can see everything they’re considering in one place. Customers have seen increases over 400% as well as increased time-on-site, increased conversion rates and increased customer return rates. It’s not like anything else on the market, it fact it’s so unique it’s patented.

If you’d like to learn more about how women shop, and why it’s the key to increasing your online sales. Download: Increase Your Online Sales by Understanding How Women Shop

Online shopping kind of sucks

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I’ve spent the last 30 years with a laser focus on how women shop and what we have now isn’t cutting it for women.

The web was designed by engineers and coders who value speed and efficiency. They did a brilliant job, it is fast and efficient, but if you actually like shopping, if you want a journey, and beauty, and a fluid shopping experience, it still kind of sucks.

Women make 85% of all online purchases and they shop differently than men. Why isn’t online shopping geared for them?

It can be! On the train, coming back from a NEMOA conference, I had a moment of creative clarity and after four years of work, a patent and teaming up with an MIT Ph.D., I have a way to make online shopping fun and engaging, without changing the website. It’s kind of magical. Here’s a 1-minute video that explains it. Let me know what you think! It’s currently in beta, our first tester is up over 400% and the return customer rate is over 30%. Here’s Stylaquin in action.