Category Archives: Blog

Creating Lifelong Customers: Strategies for Customer Retention

When it comes to optimizing our sites, we often think in terms of optimizing our site to acquire new customers. However, customer acquisition isn’t the only thing we should focus on. As business owners, we should also keep in mind the customers we already have.

Creating Lifelong Customers: Strategies for Customer Retention

What is customer retention?

Customer retention refers to the strategies and efforts we make to retain our existing customers and encourage them to continue shopping with us. Customer retention strategies aim to create strong, ongoing relationships with our customers to encourage customer loyalty. By continuing to satisfy and meet the expectations of our existing customer base, we can reduce the number of customers who, over time, stop doing business with us.

Why is customer retention important?

Customer retention efforts can directly determine how long a customer continues to turn to our businesses for the products and services they desire. One factor that makes customer retention important is that existing customers purchase more often. Existing customers who are happy with your customer experience are also more likely to buy new or premium products and services from you because they trust your brand. The most valuable aspect of successful customer retention strategies beyond higher ROI is that loyal customers may also encourage the people they know to consider your business as well. Overall, customer retention has valuable long-term benefits for your business.

Is Customer Retention more important than Customer Acquisition?

When it comes to comparing the value of customer acquisition and customer retention, it’s important to keep in mind that your business strategies should consider both of these objectives. No matter how great your customer retention strategy is, customers do come and go. You will always want to continue bringing new customers onboard. However, just acquiring customers without any follow-up can lead to short customer lifetimes. Through customer retention strategies, we can work to make our relationships with our customers longer, improving both our conversions and our overall reputation. Balancing both of these objectives is key to long-term success and business growth.

How can I retain Customers?

Ensure excellent customer service

Having exceptional customer service is important when it comes to customer retention. When customers feel valued and well taken care of, they are more likely to remain loyal to your business and brand. One way to make sure that you are providing good customer service is to support multiple methods of contact when it comes to helping customers. On your contact page, make sure there are a handful of options to reach out, such as email, phone, physical address, live chat, and so forth. Making sure users can reach out to your business easily and receive prompt support helps create satisfied customers.

Create seamless shopping experiences

From browsing your offerings to purchase, the experience of buying from your business should be smooth and intuitive. After all, we want users to think of our websites and remember good memories rather than frustrations. Optimizing our websites is a large, continuous process, but a few notable areas we should work on are device compatibility, load times, navigation, and streamlined checkout. The less friction users run into when using your site, the better they will remember their experience.

Stay engaged on social media & email

It can be easy for customers to buy your products and services once and be left with little connection to your business and brand. In order to prevent a customer relationship from dying before it can even grow, we need to take the initiative and talk to our customers. We can send emails to them to check in on them, share offers and deals, and create personalized shopping experiences. We can also connect with them on social media and directly talk with them through posts and comments. By having an active presence in their lives, customers will be more likely to remember you when they are looking for your products and services again.

Provide post order follow-ups

Just got a new customer? One way we can encourage a growing relationship with a customer is to simply reach out to them after their order. This could simply be an email that thanks the customer for their order and checks if they are satisfied with their purchase. We can also do things like assistance, ask for reviews, or provide resources related to the item they purchased. Reaching out to customers in this manner demonstrates your commitment to quality customer experiences and builds trust.

Implement proactive re-engagement strategies

Just as it’s important to keep existing customer engaged, we should note customers who, despite our efforts, are absent. While identifying these customers will vary per business, if we notice a customer that hasn’t connected with us in a while, sending a targeted email to them can help re-kindle our relationship. These emails could contain offers, exclusive discounts, and personalized content based on their previous purchases with you. By reminding them of what you have to offer, you can remind them of your value and encourage them to continue a relationship with your business.

Take Action and Transform Your eCommerce Business

To retain customers, we need to create quality user experiences. Read our blog or listen in to our podcast for more tips and guides on making your business the best it can be! If you want more hands-on guidance for improving your website, join the waitlist for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, she will dive into a variety of important factors that aim to optimize your website.

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From Cart to Checkout: Tactics to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment in eCommerce

In the fast-paced world of eCommerce, having our customers’ undivided attention can be difficult. A customer can have products in their shopping cart, ready to complete the checkout process, but somewhere along the line it happens – they hesitate.

The uncertainty could be due to an outside distraction: the ringing of their cellphone or the realization that they are late for an appointment. However, the hesitancy could also be internal: something about your site confuses them. In either scenario, the customer may end up closing the browser tab and abandoning their cart, leaving behind the items they were so eager to purchase.

How can we reduce shopping cart abandonment? Luckily for us, there are actionable strategies you can implement to reduce shopping cart abandonment and recapture lost sales.

From Cart to Checkout: Tactics to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment in eCommerce

What is shopping cart abandonment?

An abandoned shopping cart is essentially an incomplete checkout. The user added items to their cart, but somewhere along the process, whether it be while shopping or during checkout, the customer left the page. For an eCommerce business, an abandoned cart is a lost sale. That’s why it is important to reduce the chances of a customer abandoning their cart.

How can we reduce shopping cart abandonment?

To reduce the number of potential customers abandoning their carts, we need to streamline the checkout process. From seeing the cart to paying for the items, it should be easy for users to buy your products and services. This idea doesn’t only apply to purchasing items online. Streamlining can be applied to services that are done via consultations as well. Overall, there should be a set of simple, easy steps that we can guide the user through to complete their purchase. To make checkout easy, we can incorporate some of the following strategies:

Display progress indicators

When it comes to purchasing products or services, one way to keep users going through the checkout process is to tell them what to expect.  This can be done with a visual progress indicator. For example, after the user goes to check out, you can show the steps that they need to complete as a progress line at the top of the page, or as a folded list that they see open and close as they progress through the process. Overall, the uncertainty of the checkout process is a major reason people abandoned their carts and potential purchases, so it is important to clearly state the process.  

Note: What if I don’t have a digital checkout process?

For businesses that sell services via consultations, it is important to tell your potential customer the steps they need to take to buy your services. These steps need to be short and concise. Having about three steps would be best, since it makes it feel less overwhelming for the customer. By having these steps explained to an interested customer, they are more likely to go through with the purchase since you have made the process easy to understand and imagine.   

Offer guest checkout

In many articles, we have emphasized the importance of having a guest check out option when it comes to digital storefronts. Some users may not want to make an account with our business right away, and if we force them to make an account, they may just exit out of their browser, giving up on their purchase. To capture those users who want our products but aren’t fully committed to the idea of making a full account, guest checkout lets them purchase them anyway. While their information won’t necessarily be saved for future checkouts, it gives our products and services a chance to shine, ideally creating a reoccurring customer who may eventually create a real account with our business.

Note: How do we make account creation enticing?

To encourage users to create an account, the form itself needs to be simple. When offering users the chance to make an account, show the form so that they can visually see how short the form really is. Once they see that it is easy, they will be more likely to create an account. Another strategy we can use is offering account creation at the end of checkout. They have already entered the majority of their information, so all they may need to do to create an account is to create a password. Again, the easier account creation is, the more likely users will create an account.

Simplify your checkout forms

If the forms involved in your checkout process are long, confusing, or hard to use, customers may abandon their carts out of frustration. That’s why it’s important that your checkout form is optimized for quality user experience. This means that they should be short. Only ask for information that you really need. On top of that, the forms should be easy to understand and fill out. Make sure to properly test your website, especially your forms, such as checking for working error validation messages. You can also have someone else go through your forms and note if they have any confusion involving the words you use to describe fields or the organization of the fields themselves. This process can also be applied to contracts as well.

Offer multiple payment options

As businesses, we don’t want to lose customers due to being unable to accept their payment method. That’s why having multiple payment options is a must for eCommerce business. Not every customer will have the same preferences when it comes to how they purchase items online.  Many may even be wary of giving their monetary information directly to your company. Offering payment methods such as PayPal, Square, Stripe, a variety of credit cards, debit cards, and so forth can make your checkout process easier for most customers since they don’t have to compromise on their preferred payment method to buy your products.

Be clear with your return and shipping policies

Customers don’t like surprises. When it comes to any policies you have, such as returning products or the shipping options available, being up front with those details makes it easier for customers to complete the checkout process. By knowing those details beforehand, they won’t be blindsided later on, which could cause them to abandon their cart out of frustration. Put these details where customers will see them, such as on the cart page itself. You can also remind users of your return process on the confirmation email of their purchase.

Utilize exit intent pop-ups

When it comes to digital checkout processes, one feature we can use to make users more aware of the decision they are making when exiting their cart is to give them a pop-up warning. These warnings are a way that we can ask users “are you sure you want to leave?” before exiting their browser. Afterall, some users may forget that they have items in their cart to begin with. These pop-up messages can also inform users of special deals or offers to entice them to stay on your site, increasing the odds that they will go through the checkout process.

What if a customer has already abandoned their cart?

Follow up with abandoned cart emails

When a cart is already abandoned, or a quote is never followed up on by the potential customer, we can take matters into our own hands as well! If we keep track of abandoned carts, we can set up our emails service provider to send automatic follow up emails reminding that customer of their incomplete purchase. This reminds users of the products they were interested in (since they did add them to their cart) and may encourage them to complete the checkout process. A follow email or phone call concerning an abandoned quote is essentially the same process since we are reminding users of their incomplete purchase.

Want to learn more?

To turn visitors into customers, we need to create quality user experiences. Read our blog or listen in to our podcast for more tips and guides on making your business the best it can be! If you want more hands-on guidance for improving your website, join the waitlist for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, she will dive into a variety of important factors that aim to optimize your website.

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Connecting with Users: Finding the Optimal Communication Channel for Effective Engagement

When it comes to building relationships with our customers, we may be lost on where to start. In eCommerce, we can’t simply talk to our customers at the cash register as they browse and shop for our products. Instead, we have a variety of communication channels to choose from, and knowing which one is the “right one” can be hard, especially if we don’t fully know our customers’ preferences. However, by determining what kind of relationship we want to have with our customers, we can better identify channels that we can get started with based on their capabilities and general user base.

Where should I connect with my customers?

Online customers can be found in many places. While they can be found on your own site at times, they are often scattered about the internet on different communication channels. They could be browsing their emails or reacting on social media. They could be at home on their laptop or scrolling on their phone. Defining your users’ preferences can be difficult to do without an already active community, analytics, and overall experience in your field.

One way to gain traction despite the uncertainty surrounding our customers is by taking into consideration the channels we as a business prefer. What channels do we like to use? What kind of connections do we want to build? Different channels often come with their own limitations and benefits, and our business needs can help us figure out where to get started as we grow our business and learn more about our customer base.

What communication channels are out there?

Email

Email is a well-known and trusted way of reaching your customers outside of your website. Despite the growing popularity of other channels, such as social media, email remains widely used across the world. However, one thing to keep in mind about email is that it tends to be seen as a formal, professional method of communication. Customers often expect business updates, notifications, promotions, and personalized offers when it comes to email. While email can be a back-and-forth dialogue in the case of support, email is often used to keep people informed about your business in semi-detailed, asynchronous letters. Read our blog on email marketing to learn more about the effectiveness of email as a line of communication with your customers.

Mobile/SMS

Since almost everyone has a smartphone nowadays, accessing many of these communications channels can easily be done through mobile devices. However, some businesses also use customer phone numbers to connect with users via SMS text messages. Much like email, these text messages may contain updates and reminders regarding orders or scheduled appointments, such as consultations. Time sensitive has also been sent via text message to customers who opt-in for promotions. What makes mobile communication stand out is that, unlike email, these messages are short and concise. Text messages are often not used for detailed conversations with customers.

LiveChat

LiveChat is a communication option that is often accessed through your website by customers if available. Via LiveChat, customers can type or text with a business representative directly. LiveChat is often used for business-related questions and problem solving rather than promotions or updates. Customers go to LiveChat to get support right away. Sometimes, AI is incorporated into these channels to provide automated support 24/7.

Phone/ Call Center

While not all businesses have call centers, phones calls are still a common way that’s customers may use to connect with businesses. On the business side, we may use phones calls to remind customers about an upcoming appointment, or to reach out to a customer who has shown interest in their products. On the customer side, phone calls are often utilized to make appointments and request support. Like LiveChat, phone calls may be used to troubleshoot issues with a customer. While phones calls can be employee intensive, phone calls are crucial for more complex customer support requests.

Social Media

From Facebook to LinkedIn, there are a variety of social media outlets to consider when connecting with users. However, social media is a flexible line of communication. From updating customers on business news to asking them for their opinions, social media is an informal way to engage, entertain, and educate customers. It is often a channel to share the “personality” of your company with your user base. For a deeper dive into how social media platforms can vary, read our blog on using social media to bring more customers to your site.

Forums

Forums are community driven channels that are centered around questions and answer dialogues. Like other channels, forums are often used to support and educate customers. However, forums also offer customers an area to talk with other customers, giving them a place to discuss their experiences, complaints, and successes with your products. Overall, forums are a great space to both help your customers and receive insight into their pain points, giving you information to work with when improving your business.

What channel should I choose?

Since every channel has its own unique set of benefits and limitations, it’s common to end up working with multiple channels of communications. Afterall, your own needs as a company may not filled by just one of these channels. However, note that you do not need to have all of them. Trying to do all these channels at once, or even dive too deep into one channel immediately, could result in little gain depending on what your customers end up utilizing. Choose a handful of channels to work with based on what kind of relationship you want to have with your customers. Once you have data and feedback on what your customers want in their relationship with your business, expand to suit those needs.

Want to Learn More?

To effectively communicate with your customer base, it is important to continuously collect and analyze what your customers want so you can optimize your strategy accordingly. Read our blog or listen in to our podcast for more tips and guides on making your business the best it can be! If you want more hands-on guidance for improving your website, join the waitlist for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, she will dive into a variety of important factors that aim to help you turn more visitors into customers.

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Testing Your Website: Uncovering Issues for Improved Performance

Launching a new website, new content, or new features is an exciting, yet stressful part of eCommerce. On the one hand, we eagerly anticipate the results of our hard work, hoping to see increases in user traffic, engagement, and an overall boost to our online presence. On the other hand, however, we know there is a risk of issues: broken links, sluggish loading times, frustrating usability errors, and so forth. The list could go on and on. The truth is, launching new content often doesn’t immediately deliver the seamless user experience we envision. That’s why it is important to test your website.

The importance of website testing

Performance issues upon the release of new content is a common challenge faced by website owners and developers alike. However, we can lessen the number of issues that occur on our live sites by testing our sites beforehand. To test our site, we simply need to go through it and keep an eye out for anything unexpected. By putting ourselves in the shoes of our users, we can find bugs and issues that they may run into and fix them before officially going live.

How to test your site

While testing your site may sound simple, there are a lot of aspects to consider. How you test your site and what you test your site for can vary dramatically depending on your goal, audience, content, and features. When deciding what to test on your site, you have to consider your personal goals and objectives for your content as well as consider how customers will interact with your site as a whole. However, there are six essential performance areas that all website owners and developers should test before launching new content.

1. Browser Compatibility

One easy way to catch issues with your site is to view your site through different browsers. While our site may look fine and run as expected on one browser, our site may not be fully compatible with others. Browsers such as Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Opera, and so forth all have different capabilities, requirements, and features. Due to these differences, issues such as slow load times, unapplied styling, and broken features, or even page failures can occur on different browsers.

When testing for browser compatibility, focus on the browsers that your customers prefer to use. While we could test every browser possible, going through your entire site on multiple browsers would be time consuming. On top of that, certain browsers may not meet your standards of security and application capability, making them an undesirable platform altogether.  Work with the browsers you and your customers care about to optimize your website for those platforms.

2. Responsive Design

Since our customers view our sites on a variety of devices, it is common to design your site to have a responsive design. A responsive design is a site that will adjust your page to suit the device it is being viewed on. Changing the size of text or the arrangement of images, for example, is apart of a responsive design. Now more than ever, making sure that your site experience is consistent across devices is key to creating quality user experiences.

To test the responsive design of our site, we can open our site on devices such as computers, phones, and tablets. We can also use browser tools such as Google Chrome’s Developer Tools to get an example preview of how our site would look on all sorts of devices. Beyond visual appeal, also test how easy it is to navigate and interact with your site. Buttons, sliding banners, and so forth may run into errors on different devices.

3. Site Forms

From newsletter sign ups to account creation, making sure our forms are intuitive and error resistant is important to encouraging users to fill them out. Unresponsive or misplaced fields, missing instructions, and lack of error prevention can cause users to back out of forms or turn in forms with inaccurate information. By testing our forms, we can prevent losing valuable customer interactions.

To test forms, we need to consider the look, responsiveness, and usability of the forms. Are the fields in the right place? Are they styled correctly? Are they all there? Simple questions like these can go a long way. We also want to test filling out and submitting a form. Is it easy to fill out the form? If I put in incorrect information, such as an incomplete email address in the email field, does the form accept it? Do the results of the form populate correctly on the backend? When testing your forms, also check how well your form works when tabbing through the fields since some users may not be using a mouse.

4. Searches & Filters

For many eCommerce sites, there may be a search feature available for users to use. Whether it be searching for relevant pages or through your collection of products, search bars can run into many issues. Search results may be incomplete or showing irrelevant items. They also may not recognize certain words while accepting others. Filter options may not be functioning as intended. Overall, it’s important to do extensive testing of your search bar to ensure that users can find what they are looking for.

To test your search and filter features, start with noting if they are easy to find and use. After that, put yourself in your customer’s shoes and start trying to search and filter your items. Search for your items by type, brand, price, and so forth to see what comes up. Even search for items you do not have. When filtering, check to see if your filters are showing the correct items and if multi-filtering works. Do the filters stay? Are they intuitive to use? Testing your search and filter features can take a while but are well worth it.

5. Add to Cart Functionality

When it comes time to for a user to add your product to their cart, we want to make sure that it is easy, accurate, and transparent. Issues such as missing items, buggy buttons, and missing information can cause potential customers to backout of a purchase. Since adding items to the cart is just the beginning of the checkout experience, it is important to test it thoroughly to ensure quality user experience.

To test your add to cart functionality, try adding your items to your cart. When you add items to the cart, what happens? Make sure that what you expect to happen, whether it be a message with an option to continue shopping, a number placed by a cart symbol, or so forth, happens correctly. We should also check that our add to cart page works properly by testing quantity changes, deleting items, and applying coupons. Another important aspect to keep in mind is subtotals and totals. Do they reflect the price appropriately? Do they change appropriately when things are added or deleted? Is tax and shipping included? Making sure that the shown price is as transparent as possible is important to making users comfortable enough check out.

6. Check Out Experience

Making sure check out is as smooth as possible can be a make it or break it moment for potential customers. The process needs to be simple and sweet, and when testing your checkout experience, you need to consider how you feel about it. Is it too long? Does it make sense? Is there anything confusing? Any sense of inconvenience can stop a user from becoming a customer.

Much like with other tests, you need to go through the check out process as if you are a customer. Keep track of moments where the process stops flowing smoothly so you can address them later. Other things to keep in mind when testing check out is making sure guest check out works, return customer information is retained, payment and shipping options are valid, and any confirmation texts or emails are working appropriately. On the back end, you may want to make sure that orders are being created and saved properly, and that user data is securely stored.

Want to Learn More?

Testing your website to make it as optimized as possible before launch is important to creating quality experiences for your users. Read our blog or listen in to our podcast for more tips and guides on making your site the best it can be! If you want more hands-on guidance for improving your website, join the waitlist for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, she will dive into a variety of important factors that aim to optimize your website.

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Keeping your WordPress up & running with Updates: A step-by-step guide

For many of us, WordPress is our go to content management system (CMS) to jump-start our websites. It’s user friendly, flexible, and has a large collection of themes and plugins to help us make our sites uniquely our own. However, in order to use WordPress to its fullest and create the best websites we can, we need to make sure we keep WordPress up and running with routine software updates.

The Importance of Updating WordPress

No matter what you are using to run your website, all software products need updates at times. Whether it be fixing bugs, adding new features, or patching security vulnerabilities, these software updates help your site run safely and smoothly. Using older versions of WordPress leave your site susceptible to hackers, poor performance, and compatibility issues with newer themes and plugins. Overall, keeping WordPress updated will help you keep your site running to its fullest potential!

How do to tell when WordPress needs updated

When you log into your WordPress admin panel, you may notice some numbers circled in red sitting in your navigation list. For updates, red circles may be seen next to “Updates”, “Plugins”, and our “Themes” tabs. These notifications inform us that parts of our site have updates available. For major WordPress updates, you can often find a written notification at the top of your WordPress admin panel as well.  

How to Update WordPress

In WordPress, there are multiple parts of your site that require occasional updates. Your WordPress database, media content, plugins, themes, and core files all will need updated over time. WordPress can automatically run some updates in the background without needing your input, but bigger updates may need your approval.

While updating may sound intimidating, WordPress incorporates the updating process seamlessly into the admin area of your WordPress site. In a click of a button, you will be on your way to having an updated WordPress! However, there is one step you should always take before updating.

Step 1: Backup your WordPress site

While updating WordPress is necessary to keep your site up and running, many website owners hesitate due to the risk that updates can bring. Updates, especially large ones, can at times cause parts of your site to break or stop working correctly. Due to this risk, you should always have a backup of your most current site before performing a major update.

WordPress offers plugins that automatically backup your site for you. However, WordPress documentation still encourages users to manually backup their WordPress sites before running major updates just in case the automatic backups don’t work. It’s better to be sure that you have a current, working copy of your site than to update and scramble to fix new bugs or recover your existing content with an incomplete backup. To learn how to backup your site, visit our step-by-step guide on backing up your site.

Step 2: Updating your WordPress site via the admin panel

Once you are sure you have a backup or your site, you can start the process of updating WordPress. For this guide, we will be referring to WordPress version 6.2.1. To update WordPress, follow the following steps:

  • Log into the Admin of your WordPress site. You would visit https://your-site.com/wp-admin/. To log in, you will need admin access via a username and password.
  • Once in, click the “Updates” tab. Here, we can see everything that needs updated, including themes and plugins.  

Updating WordPress

Under “WordPress Updates,” you will see a message notifying you of a new update. Click “Update Now. When updating WordPress, your site will be in Maintenance mode, so consider updating when your site has little traffic to avoid interrupting users. After updating, a page with details about the update will appear, confirming the completion of the update.

NOTE: If WordPress notices that your database needs updated during this update, a request to update your database may appear. Simply click “Update WordPress Database” to update.

Updating WordPress Plugins

Scroll down to “Plugins” in your “Updates” page. Select the plugins you want to update and click “Update Plugins.” Once done, you will arrive at a page that details the updated plugins.

NOTE: If you find that there are plugins on your list that you don’t use anymore, consider deactivating them or uninstalling them entirely. Unused plugins can pose security and performance threats to your site.

Updating WordPress Themes

Scroll down to “Themes” in your “Updates” page. Select the themes you want to update and click “Update Themes.” Once done, you will arrive at a page that details the updated themes.

NOTE: If you have themes that you may not be using now, but want to keep nonetheless, make sure to keep them up to date. If you don’t plan to use certain themes again, consider deactivating or uninstalling them just as with unused plugins.

How to have WordPress automatically update

WordPress offers automatic updates to their users. However, there are pros and cons to turning on WordPress’ auto-update feature. The benefit of auto-updates is that your site will almost always be up to date with the latest versions, security patches, and so forth. On the other hand, if you use WordPress’ auto-updates, especially for new WordPress versions, you will have less control when it comes to updates breaking your site. Manually doing version updates allows you to ensure that 1) you have a backup available, and 2) you are ready to deal with any errors or bugs that arise.

By default, most sites are set to automatically update your WordPress for minor releases such as security updates. However, you can enable automatic updates for major releases, themes, and plugins, in a few steps.

Enabling auto-updates for core WordPress updates

Log into your WordPress Admin panel and click to the “Updates” Tab. Under your current version, click “Enable Automatic updates for all new versions of WordPress” and auto updates will be set!

NOTE: If you ever want to return to just minor automatic updates, return to the “Updates” tab and click the “Switch to automatic updates for maintenance and security release only” link under the current version of your WordPress.

Enabling auto-updates for WordPress plugins

Log into your WordPress Admin panel and click the “Plugins” tab. In the tab, you will see a list of your installed plugins. For the plugins you want to automatically update, look under “Automatic Updates” and click the “Enable auto-updates” link. Automatic updates will now occur for your plugin!

NOTE: If you ever want to return to manual update for a plugin, return to the “Plugins” tab under “Automatic Updates” click the link “Disable auto-updates.”

Enabling auto-updates for WordPress themes

Log into your WordPress Admin panel and click the “Appearance” tab and click “Themes.” In your list of themes, click on your desire theme. Under the title and creator information, click the “Enable auto-updates” link. Automatic updates will now occur for your theme!

NOTE: If you ever want to return to manual update for a plugin, return to the “Appearance” tab and click “Themes”.  In the desire theme, click the link “Disable auto-updates.”

Want to learn more?

Keeping your website healthy and running is imperative to creating quality user experiences. Read our blog or listen in to our podcast for more tips and guides on making your site the best it can be! If you want more hands-on guidance for improving your website, join the waitlist for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, she will dive into a variety of important factors that aim to optimize your website.

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Protect your online asset with backups: A step-by-step guide

Unexpectedly losing our website is a nightmare for most, but an unfortunate reality for others. Server failures, hacker attempts, data corruption, and human error are all common threats that websites can encounter. That’s why it is important backup your website both routinely and often.

The importance of backups

When it comes to online businesses, our virtual storefronts mean everything. It is our way to connect with our customers and serve our communities with our products and services. While many sites may never experience a major failure, the possibility of losing our sites in any way would be devastating. In order to protect our digital assets, data, and livelihood, backing up our sites is a must-have for your website maintenance routine.

By having a backup of your site, you save yourself a starting point for recovery if something were to happen. Something as simple as deleting the wrong file in your home directory can be fixed by restoring a previous backup of your site. Losing your site to a failed server suddenly isn’t as heart wrenching since you can jump start the recovery process with the backup you saved somewhere else. Rather than relying on chance, backups ensure that our sites will be safe and swiftly running despite unexpected failures.

Note: It’s important to ask hosting providers about backups

For online business owners who need their sites hosted by a hosting provider, it is important to consider backups when choosing a provider. Asking questions such as how often they back up your site, how much of your site they back up, how long they keep backups, and how you can access those backups should come into play when deciding how reliable their services are.

Getting started with backups

Backing up a website includes two main parts: copying your files and copying your database. Your files are your actual website: pages, assets, style configurations, code, and so forth. Your database contains important data that lets your site run smoothly, such as your site’s structure, user credentials, cached configurations, and so much more.

When it comes to backing up your site, the process can look different depending on how your site is hosted. However, there are two common ways hosting providers and self-hosting sites can backup their websites: web hosting control panel software and manually through FTP servers.

Backup your site with cPanel

Web hosting control panel software is a web-based interface that allows you to manage your site with ease. Designed with user experience in mind, the software offers a graphical user interface for admins to manage their websites. From changing security settings to managing files, hosting control panel software is a popular way to edit and maintain your website.

One of the most popular web hosting control panel software is cPanel. cPanel is a paid software that many use to manage their websites. It also has built-in tools that can help you backup your website. For those who have cPanel or are hosted by vendors that use cPanel, getting your site backed up is a breeze.

To backup your website with cPanel:

  • Log into cPanel.
  • In cPanel, go to Files and click Backup
  • To download both your files and your database in one shot, go to Full Backup and press Download a Full Account Backup.
  • Next you will be asked to select a Backup Destination. This is where you decide where you want to save the backup of your site. For example, if you select Home Directory, your backup will be saved to your server.
  • Once you have decided where to store your backup, click Generate Backup.
  • Click the Go Back option to check the status backup request. It may take a few minutes. Refresh the page after awhile to see if it is completed.
  • Once it finished generating the backup, you will see links under Backups Available for Download. Select the most recent backup to get a the most up-to-date copy of your site!

Backup your site manually via FTP & the command line

For website owners’ who self-host their own site as well as some hosting providers, manually backing up a website can be easier. Manual backups are a two-step process, meaning that you have to backup your website files and your database separately. Rather than paying for web hosting control panel software, you can backup your site files using a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client. An FTP client is software that lets you communicate to your server’s FTP Server. Through the FTP client, you can download your site’s files. After that, you would then have to download your database via the command line. To backup your database, you would need to be able to access your server.

To complete this process, you will need to have remote access to your server and your database. This means that you will most likely have two sets of user credentials, a username and password, to access your server and your database.

To backup your site manually:

First, we will download your website files. Open up an FTP client. For this example, we will use FileZilla.

  • If it is your first time connecting to your server, go to File, then Site Manager, and then New Site.
  • Make sure you set the Logon Type to normal. Next, you will need to fill in information concerning the server you are connecting to. Your Host is your website domain name. Your User and Password will be your server credentials. The Port Number will depend on your server’s set up.
  • When complete, click Connect.
  • Once you successfully login, you will see your remote server on the right-hand side of the File-Zilla page while on the left-side of the FileZilla window is your local files. On the left-hand window, navigate to the directory you want to save your backup to.
  • On the right-hand side in your remote server, navigate to your websites root file. This file goes by multiple names, but it is commonly called www, public_html, wps-content, and so forth.
  • Either right click your site’s root folder and click download or drag and drop the folder to your local site to download a backup of your site files.

You have completed the first half of your backup! Next, we need to download your database. Exit FileZilla and open your command line.

  • SSH into your site’s server. This will require your server username and password.
  • Assuming your server is running MySQL, simply use the following command with your personal information:
mysqldump -p -u <database_username> <database_name> --add-drop-table > <path_to_backup_.sql_file>

Hit enter. You should be prompted to enter your database password. If successful, you should now have a backup of your database!

Want to learn more?

Backing up your site is extremely important to do for the safety of your content. We suggest backing up your site often and making a routine of it so that, if the worst came to pass, you have a recent version of your site to recover with. For more tips and tricks to optimize your website as well as other guides, read more on our BCSE Blog!

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What do eCommerce customers really want?

When it comes to identifying areas of opportunity on our websites, we have to consider our customers. What do they expect from us? Many times, meeting expectations can be key to turning visitors into customers.

When it comes to eCommerce customer expectations, there are three areas we should focus our attention on in general: Transparency, ease of use, and value.

Transparency

When it comes to both online and offline storefronts, trust is important. If a customer can’t bring themselves to trust your company or products, they most likely won’t buy from you. In a brick-and-mortar store customers may wonder where or how your products or made, or ponder about your return policies and general customer service. If such questions can’t be answered by the documentation around your store nor your employees, customers may not trust the store enough to do business with you.

Be clear with your policies and processes

Similar to retail customers, online customers share the same concerns. Instead of looking for a poster by the register or an employee to talk to, they expect documentation on your site to ease their concerns. Your return policy, shipping methods, fees, and privacy measures should all be available for customers to see. This transparency will allow customers to understand what the process, benefits and potentials risks are when dealing with your company.

Make sure your products & services are detailed and accurate

Another aspect of transparency is your products. In a physical store front, customers can physically interact with products and ask questions as they go, but for eCommerce stores, customers have less opportunity to ask questions and in general have a shorter attention span. It is important that our product descriptions, images, and stock information are accurate and detailed enough to make our products or services tangible.

Offer a way to contact your company

Even the best sites may not be able to fully answer every question a potential customer may have. The next step for an interested but confused customer would be to contact your company. How can they reach you? It is important to have contact page that is up-to-date and offers multiple avenues of communication for customer service. If your company is quite large, it may not be reasonable to talk to all customers directly. In that case, a chat bot may help answer common questions and hand-off users to someone who can answer the rest.

Ease of use

Customer’s don’t want shopping to be a hassle. The more inconvenient it is to peruse your store, find what they are looking for, and pay for your product, the more likely it is that they will never buy from your business again. The same applies for our online shops: we need to make it as easy as possible to find what they want and buy it.

Optimize your navigation from start to finish

Since shopping online isn’t new, customers may have high expectations when it comes to navigating your online shop. Your website design should be intuitive to use, meaning that the placement of your buttons, call to actions (CTAs), links, and so forth should be placed where users would expect them to be. For example, the contact us button tends to be placed in the upper right-hand corner of your navigation. Users may look to that location out of habit, and if your contact us page is not there, it may leave them confused. The same applies to other aspects of your site: customers have pre-existing ideas of what they can do and will have to do to buy your products.

Optimizing your navigation is a whole site effort. Navigating your product selection, your cart page, and your checkout process are all important to ensuring that your customer has a good experience with your site.

Make sure your site feels fast

How fast your site feels to a customer can be a make it or break it moment. Customers expect your pages to load in a timely manner. If your pages take too long to load, they may just leave your site entirely. Tracking the speed of your site with metrics such as Google’s [] is important to making sure your site is performing well. Beyond load time, the process of going through your site through feel fast as well. How many pages or steps do users have to go through before they arrive at the checkout confirmation page? Keeping things short and sweet will help users feel like its quick and easy to shop at your store.

Consider multiple devices and payment options

When designing a website, we must consider that users may be visiting our site from different locations, and thus different devices.  Phones, tablets, desktops, and so forth can easily access your site, and users will expect your site experience to work on the device of their choice. Making sure that your online shop looks good, runs well, and is easy to use across devices is important.

Another aspect to consider is that users may have different preferences on how they purchase or receive their products. Having a variety of payment methods helps you ensure that you can accommodate multiple customers’ preferred method. The same applies to shipping. Having different shipping options can make buying your product an easy decision rather than a disappointment when a customer discovers that they can’t receive your product.

Value

For a customer, the value of your business comes from your ability to solve their pain points. How will your products and services help them? What makes your company stand out? Why should a customer choose your company over another? For many customers, the answers to these questions are expected to be readily available for them as they consider your company.

Explain why customers should do business with you

When a potential customer first arrives at your page, they want to know not only what your business is about, but why they should consider buying from you. Your “why” should be obvious and visible upon landing on your page. Whether it be a CTA in your above the fold content, or descriptions later down the page, customers don’t want to search too far for why your business is valuable.

Another aspect that customers may want to see is why your business is more valuable than other competitors. What makes your business stand out? Sharing what makes your products and services unique can help answer these questions swiftly rather than leaving customers to search for those answers on their own online.

Put customer reviews where visitors will see them

Customer reviews are key to illustrating your business value to customers in a way that is believable and relatable. While we can explain and praise our own value directly to customers on our own, hearing our value shared by real customers can make our business feel real and legitimate.

Want to learn more?

There are many ways that we can better understand what our customers truly want. Check out our blog for more insight on how to optimize your website for more customers. If you want more hands-on guidance for improving your website, join the waitlist for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, she will dive into a variety of important factors that aim to optimize your website.

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To host or not to host: The pros & cons of self-hosting vs. hosting providers

To host or not to host: it’s a question that comes up often for online business owners. Is it better to host my own website or to pay a hosting provider to do it for me? The truth is both are valid answers. When it comes down to choosing how you want to host your website, you need to consider the pros and cons of both options in comparison to your expertise, time, and funds.

What is hosting?

Hosting is the process of allocating storage space and computer resources to run online services. For eCommerce business owners, their online services would include their online storefront: their website. Your website could be hosted in multiple ways: you could self-host it, or you can have a hosting provide it host it.

Self-hosting your website

Self-hosting means you are hosting your website on your own servers. Everything is locally run and maintained by you and your team when self-hosting. This set up comes with many benefits as well as drawbacks:

Pros of self-hosting

Gives you full control over your website – From the tech your website is hosted on to the installed, you have complete control to set up your hosting environment any way you please. By self-hosting, you can pick and choose how much you want to spend on each part of your hosting server, as well as what quality you want those pieces to be. Things like the amount of storage you want, or the speed you want your hosting server to have are up to you rather than limited by a hosting provider.

Allows for quick response time & full transparency – Instead of waiting for technical support on the phone or via email, if something goes wrong or if you want to adjust something in your hosting set up, you can do it yourself right in the moment. You also can set up any amount of analytics on your online service to better understand any issues it may be having as well as monitor your sites traffic more closely.

Let’s you customize your site freely – If you want to change the amount of storage your hosting server has or use a specific software in it, you can incorporate customizations without having to discuss it with a hosting provider first when self-hosting. It’s your equipment, and yours to do as you please.

Cons of self hosting

It can get expensive to run – To self-host, you will not only need the hardware, but you will also need the electricity and consumer grade internet. On top of that, you may need to hire a team of workers to maintain and protect your server depending on your teams existing expertise. Any issues that arise are paid by the company rather than handled by a hosting provider.

Zero support when issues arise – When issues such as hardware failures, data loss, outages, security breaches, and so forth arise, it is your company’s responsibility to identify the problem and fix it. Depending on your expertise and team, this could be incredibly time-consuming and costly.

Time consuming to learn & maintain – Hosting is fairly straightforward start but is a continuous process to maintain. Depending on your current workload, it could be hard to make sure that your server is up to date and running properly. While you can learn the ins and outs of server maintenance and hosting, it may require time that you don’t have.

Security and technical Risks – Lack of proper maintenance can lead to security risks and errors in your hosting server. An insecure store can put you and your customers valuable information at risk, as well as push users away if they don’t feel comfortable. Technical errors could bring your server down, making your online store unavailable to potential customers.

Using a Hosting Provider

Hosting providers will run your website on their servers. A hosting team will take care of your website’s maintenance and changes. Having a company host your online services comes with its own set of benefits and troubles.

Pros of using a hosting provider

Is Reliable and secure – Hosting providers are paid to keep your site up and running. This includes keeping track of updates, saving your data, creating a secure environment, maintaining internet connectivity, and so forth. With a quality hosting provider, downtime should be minimal, and your site should be protected.

Experts handle outages and problems – Hosting providers monitor and respond to errors and outages that impact your website. Experts in their fields, they can more easily identify and fix problems than those with little to no experience. This means quicker return times and less stress on business owners.

Little time investment on your end – For a business owner utilizing a hosting provider, there is little time investment involved. The hosting provider does all the maintenance and major changes to the hosting process, leaving the online business owner more time to work on other important parts of the eCommerce endeavors.

Cons of using a hosting provider

Upgrades & maintenance have to be done by provider – When hosting providers are managing your site, upgrades, maintenance, and changes have to go through them. Depending on the quality of your hosting provider, you may encounter hosting providers that are slow or unreliable.

Resources can be limited and monetized – When shopping for hosting providers, many providers will determine their prices based on the amount of resources you want. Storage, RAM, network traffic, and so forth can be billable items that you need to think about when getting a hosting provider, which requires you to understand your site’s needs.

Industry challenges can impact hosting providers – From mass security events to accessibility, there are industry wide laws and issues that hosting providers need to comply and react to. Finding a hosting provider that you trust in terms of keeping up with the law and potential security risks of the internet can be daunting.

Is there a right option when it comes to self-hosting or using a hosting provider?

When it comes to choosing between self-hosting your online storefront or going to a hosting provider, there is no correct answer. The decision depends on what you can manage as a business. Do you have a team who have the expertise to host a site? Do you have the money to either buy your own server or buy the resources you need from a hosting provider? Do you have the time to maintain a server? Do you have a custom environment that cannot be provided by a hosting provider? These questions and more determine which of the two options best suit your hosting needs.

Need help with your hosting needs?

At BCSE, we not only have hosting services, but we can also help manage existing hosted sites with a select group of providers. If you have questions about finding a host provider or about your current hosting environment, schedule a consultation with us! If you liked this blog and want to see more like it, check out our new eCommerce Made Easy podcast for more eCommerce tips and tricks!

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Conversion Rates: What’s a good conversion rate & how do I get there?

When it comes to measuring the success of a website, conversion rates are a great metric to track. Not only do conversion rates give us an idea of how well our site is attracting user interaction, but it also gives us a number to target when it comes to future business goals. However, what is considered a good conversion rate?

What are conversion rates?

Conversions are actions we want users to take. Whether it be buying our products or subscribing to our email lists, conversions can be any user action that we consider valuable to our business. For example, conversions we may want to measure could be:

  • User Sign ups for email, events, text message notifications, etc.
  • Account creation.
  • Social media interactions, such as follows, likes, shares, etc.
  • Downloads of freebies and promotional materials.
  • Product reviews or ratings.
  • Views or clicks on specific pages.
  • Products added to cart or schedule consultations.
  • Purchases of your products and services.

Our conversion rate is the percentage of users who convert over the total number of user interactions. For example, if we were measuring the conversion rate of users subscribing to our email list, the rate would be the number of users who submitted the subscription form over the number of users who clicked on the subscription page.

Why are conversion rates important?

Conversion rates are key to identifying how well your online business is doing. Whether it be purchases, open rates on emails, social media followers, or so forth, knowing how often users end up doing what you want can be used to identify what you need to do in the future. Pages with high views and clicks, for example, can help you understand what your users want to see. The same applies idea applies with low conversion rates. If your email subscription form’s conversion rate is low, it is a sign that it may need re-worked or edited. Overall, by having a metric that reflects the success of your desired business goals, you can approach optimizing your site with data-backed decisions.

What is a good eCommerce conversion rate?

When people talk about conversion rates, they are often talking about eCommerce conversion rates. eCommerce conversion rates are the rate of overall user purchases and orders. In the case of monetary gain, a good eCommerce conversion rate is between 2% – 5%.

How do I increase my conversion rate?

Meet the customer where they are

The first step to increasing your conversion rate is making your customers feel seen and heard. To do this, we need to know our target audience intimately. What are they struggling with? What are their obstacles? What kind of solution are they looking for? Having answers to such questions allows us to create relatable and appealing content by clearly showing them that we understand what they want and need.

Have an enticing offer

Whether it be buying a product or signing up for emails, it is important to tell users what they will gain by doing so. After all, if they don’t know the benefits of converting, it makes converting less enticing. Explain the benefits of converting. If we want them to subscribe for our email list, for example, tell them what kind of information they will gain, what potential special deals they could be sent, and so forth.

Make it easy to convert

Both physically and mentally, converting should be an easy decision to make. Meeting the customer where they are and laying out the benefits clearly already makes converting an easy decision mentally. But we also need to make sure it is easy to physically purchase our products, fill out our email forms, schedule a consultation, and so forth. It should be easy to find the add to cart button, for example. Forms are more likely going to be filled out if they only contain a few fields. Many times, making converting easy involves making the option to convert obvious and making the process short and sweet.

Want to learn more?

To boost conversion rates, we need to optimize our websites to create the best user experience we can. Check out our blog for more tips and tricks to improve your website and optimization process!  If you want more hands-on guidance for improving your website, join the waitlist for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, she will dive into a variety of important factors that aim to optimize your website.

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Increasing Conversions: Why customers don’t buy

Despite the amount of traffic we may attract to our sites, or even the amount of non-monetary conversations we acquire, we may be left wondering: Why aren’t people buying my products? It’s disheartening to see low sales and site traffic with no obvious reason as to why. In order to identify possible roadblocks for customers on our site, we need to take a step back and explore our website from the perspective of our customers.

It may sound cliché, but putting yourself into the shoes of your potential customers is key to creating a site that converts. From the language you are using to the structure of your site, keeping your target customer in mind aids in making a site that is compelling and easy to use. When concerned about low conversations and sales, take into consideration the following questions:  

Is it easy to find your products & services?

The first step towards conversions is getting users onto your site. If you were to search for terms related to your products and services on Google, what comes up? Making sure that your SEO strategy is successfully bringing users to your site is important to keep track of. Searching for your site on search engines, analyzing traffic data, and focusing on keywords that your customers use to search for the products and services you offer can help bring more traffic to your site.

Beyond users finding your business on Google, you should also consider how easy it is to find your products and services on your site. How intuitive is the structure of your website? Optimizing your navigation bar and call-to-actions for ease of use and understanding is key to successfully guide users to your sales pages. Have a friend explore your site or check out user data concerning the journey users take through your site via the GA4’s Explore options to identify possible missteps in your site’s guidance.

Another potential roadblock to getting users to see what you have to offer is the mechanical performance of your site. How does your site feel? Slow and unresponsive user experiences, page crashes, buggy interfaces, and lack of cross device optimization can make it difficult to traverse your site, pushing potential customers away. Keep a look out for broken pages and links, as well as optimize your site for mobile use and speed.

Is the “why” of your products clear and compelling?

Once a user is on your site, you only have a handful of time to pique their interest, so its important to be straight to the point. Why should they consider your products? Within your landing page, it should be clear what your selling, who your products are for, and why people should by them. Making sure that our above the fold content and sales pitches are compelling and attractive to our target audience is important to getting users to even consider buying from our businesses.

On top of illustrating why users should consider our products, the language we use to describe our offers can impact whether a user wants to become our customer. Beyond just explaining why our products are good and can help potential customers, we must also ask ourselves: Why should they buy your services now? Creating a sense of urgency pushes customers to consider your offerings more seriously. This urgency doesn’t have to aggressive, such as a time limited offer, but instead can be an attractive vision of what buying our services will be like. Through our content and through customer testimonials, we can illustrate just how well our products resolve our customers’ pain points, making our services tangible and their value clear.

Can users trust your products & services?

Even if your site is visually stunning and easy to use, another aspect of turning visitors into customers I gaining their trust. Why should new customers trust your company? For users who are new to your business, hesitancy may stop them from considering buying from you. To avoid losing hesitant customers, it’s important to make sure that your content clearly shows your credentials and success. You can share your company story or statistics that show how good your company is doing. You can also share customer testimonials and ratings so that potential customers can see that real people have found happiness in your services.

Another aspect of trust to consider is clearly sharing the “small text” of buying your products. Are there any hidden fees or policies that customers may not know? Being transparent with your users about taxes, delivery charges, privacy policies, and so forth creates a sense of professionalism and sets expectations ahead of time. Users want to know what buying your products entails ahead of time rather than being blindsided by surprise details during the buying process. Having features such as estimated taxes alongside easy access to your privacy and shipping policies can help users trust your business.

Is it easy to understand what your products & services are?

Whether you sell physical products or intangible services, selling online can make it hard for users to understand what you are offering. Are your product pages painting a complete picture? Taking a look at your individual product descriptions or service tier lists, consider what information may be missing or even confusing to users. Part of building a successful product description is using language that our customers will understand so that we can make the product tangible despite being online. With services, consider how easy it is to understand how your service works. Taking the user step by step through your service, such as through infographics, can help users get a better picture of what they are buying.

Is it easy to buy your products & services?

Once your potential customer has decided to go ahead and buy your products and services, all that’s left is to go through the checkout process. Is your checkout process easy to go through? When it’s time to buy your products, the experience should be easy and intuitive. Complex forms, excessive required information, mandatory account creation, and so forth can cause a potential customer to back out at the last minute. Keep your checkout process short and offer features such as guest check out and auto fill to make the buying process a pleasant, easy experience.

Want to learn more?

Optimizing our sites for conversions is a continuous process. Customer expectations change and technology evolves, making it important to keep tracking our successes and improving our sites. Check out our blog for more advice on making your website better.  If you want more hands-on guidance for improving your website, join the waitlist for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, she will dive into a variety of important factors that aim to optimize your website.

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