MyBuys Messenger - Fall 2008
10 Tips for Recession-Proofing Your Site
Based on the recent roundtable session at Shop.org conducted by Lisa Joy Rosner, MyBuys vice president of marketing, here are ten tips and tricks you can apply to your site to survive the recession and boost your website sales. We hope you find them useful!
1. Smart Merchandising #1—Promoting Low-Cost Offers: Find inexpensive, appealing items and bundle them in a creative way as a special promo that gives shoppers an incentive to fill their cart with many low-cost items. Cost Plus World Market Example:
2. Smart Merchandising #2— Instant Couponing for Multiple-Category Purchasing: Drive shoppers to buy more by offering them a reasonable discount on items from other categories if they buy immediately. Diapers.com Example:
3. Minimum Purchase Free Shipping: With the high-cost of gas, offering free shipping all the time just doesn’t make sense. Look at your margins and offer free shipping at a purchase threshold where it makes financial sense. Shoppers will fill the cart for the reward. Lancôme and Old Navy examples with a $50 minimum purchase:
4. Shopping Cart Personalized Recommendations: Personalized product recommendations (PPRs) are a recession hit: they’re important on the category page, on the product detail page, and everywhere else on the site you can afford the real estate. Putting them at the point of purchase—on the shopping cart page—is a highly strategic placement that moves shoppers to buy. PPRs are recession-proof because leading vendors like MyBuys offer them on a pay-for-performance basis.
5. Value Exchange (Gift with Purchase): Offer a small gift with a minimum price purchase to help move more product, increase customer loyalty, and motivate customers to sample other products to increase cart size. Lancôme offers this promo in-store and has extended it to the web:
6. Using Email Creatively: Use emails alerts to recommend products that shoppers want and while you are at it, remind them of abandoned shopping cart items, which have high conversion rates. Massey’s Example:
7. Ratings and Reviews: Convert more , create community and loyalty by adding ratings and reviews to your site. Shoppers trust one another and this functionality is not expensive to implement. Highly rated products tend to convert at better rates. Scentiments Example:
8. Creative Use of Widgets: Make widgets highly accessible from your web page and Facebook page, offer different size choices, and make them easy to download. Turn your raving fans into advertising affiliates by having them add these widgets to their web pages or blogs and give them points toward purchase for click-throughs or conversions. KarmaLoop Example:
9. Create Special Membership Clubs: Companies like SKECHERS, Clinique and many others have successful clubs for building loyalty and growing their lists. Get shoppers to sign up, become part of your community, and give you permission to market to them.
10. New Customer Programs: Customer retention and loyaltiy have been the focus, but getting new customers is also a challenge. Coupons or other incentives to turn people into first-time buyers aren’t expensive to create or manage, and once you bring shoppers to your site, you can employ the rest of the tactics mentioned above to bring them back for more. Mary Kay Example:
