How to Run and Sell CRO Campaigns for WooCommerce Shops

If you’re building WooCommerce-based shops for your clients or run your own webshops, you need to understand and apply CRO – Conversion Rate Optimization. The project is not done after the shop has launched successfully. Especially when working with e-commerce clients, there is a huge opportunity to bring them onto retainers for doing CRO, PPC, and other services.

In this article, I’m going to break down presentations given on the Ecom Services Summit and show you three powerful starting points for implementing CRO in a WooCommerce shop.

Why Should You Care About CRO?

Before we dive straight into CRO though, let me take a step back and explain why you should care about and upskill yourself in conversion rate optimization. Even if you don’t consider yourself a CRO expert or a marketing agency, offering this service could yield massively positive results for your business.

The main reason for offering CRO services to your clients is that they are ongoing services and the need for them will never go away. I have yet to talk to a business owner who is not searching for ways to grow his business – because those business owners don’t exist.

If you’re not doing this already, I highly suggest you reach out to past clients you’ve built WooCommerce sites for and offer them a three-month CRO service, with the option to cancel if the results weren’t good or to continue working with you if you managed to increase their number of sales or average order volume.

During these sales conversations, you can explain to your clients that CRO campaigns are designed to not just increase the number of sales a shop creates but also yield higher average order value (AOV) and likely will also improve the customer lifetime value (CLV) and customer retention. Once your client understands that CRO is a holistic approach to improve the performance of their WooCommerce, they’ll happily jump on a retainer with you. Then it’s up to you to deliver the promised value.

Now, let’s talk about three starting points to implementing CRO campaigns in WooCommerce:

Fix Mobile UX Glitches And Loading Speed

As Linda Bustos says in her presentation on Day 1 of the Ecom Services Summit, do not start performing any CRO work before ironing out mobile UX issues and optimizing the loading speed of the WooCommerce site.

I’ve put together a short video on making WooCommerce assets load only when needed, which you can watch on my YouTube channel. There’s obviously a lot more to making sites load fast, so you might also want to look into these four plugins to improve your site’s loading time.

Linda shared a great example of a shop that was using pop-ups to capture leads. And no matter what your personal opinion on pop-ups is, they still work and people still sign up through them. The issue with that specific shop was that the pop-up took up the entire screen on mobile devices and the “X” to close the pop-up was only visible if you put the device in landscape mode.

That resulted in a 95% bounce rate on mobile devices, which obviously harms the conversion rate of the shop a lot. You can easily identify these low-hanging fruits by opening the shop on mobile and going through the customer journey yourself. Looking at metrics in Google Analytics also is a great place to start and to identify areas for improvement.

Here is a compilation of tips from Linda’s presentation that will give you quick wins in doing CRO:

Work on the Ordering Process and Checkout Flow

After optimizing the (sometimes very subtle) basics, you’ll want to look into the ordering and checkout process to increase the conversion rate. There are really just two goals you should focus on when working on the Cart and Checkout pages:

Decrease cart abandonment and thus increase the number of conversions
Increase the average cart value

You’d be surprised by how many ways you can tackle these goals. Let me give you a few ideas that would make for pretty interesting A/B testing campaigns:

One-page checkout vs. multi-step checkout.
Adding trust symbols prominently on the Cart and Checkout page.
Leveraging order bumps and cross-selling to increase the AOV.

In any case, you need to make sure that the Cart and Checkout pages load quickly (as mentioned above already). You’ll also want to ensure that the email field is the first field in the Checkout form. In this way, you will immediately get the email address and are able to retarget the customer in remarketing tools in case they leave the Checkout process without ordering.

You can also test various ways of conveying your bonuses and free shipping options on your Cart or Checkout page. This screenshot is from an A/B testing campaign that showed a 7.3% increase in conversions after making the customers feel that they achieved something, by simply rewriting how the free shipping is presented.

And lastly, you’ll want to test offering bonuses and benefits during the Checkout process. Studies have shown time and again that “it’s better to present your costs in an un-bundled fashion.”

In easy words, it means you should present your product and shipping costs separately. According to the study linked above, the phrase “$69.95 plus $12.95 shipping and handling” outperformed “$82.90 including shipping and handling” vastly. That is because buyers pay more attention to the first number they saw, which is lower in the first phrase.

Improve Product Detail Pages

To finish this starting guide on CRO campaigns in WooCommerce, let’s look at the Product Detail Pages that present everything your visitors need to know about each product your clients are selling.

Following Marcus Ohanesian’s presentation on the summit, you’ll want to keep the product detail pages simple, clean, and benefit-driven. Beautiful photography is crucial for conveying the “sexiness” and the value of the product.

In the screenshot above, you can see an example of Marcus’ presentation where he outlines what makes this product detail page stand out. Mainly, he boils it down to fantastic product images, a unique CTA (Add to Bag over Add to Cart), tappable buttons to increase the quantity, and trust-building symbols right below the CTA.

Product descriptions should be leveraged to concisely explain the benefits (not features!) of the product shown on the page. The text shouldn’t be too long because then it can get tiring for your prospects and they will start ignoring what you’ve written.

Marcus boils it down to four key elements that need to stand out on the product detail page for prospects to make the buying decision:

Product image
Product title
Price
Add to Cart button

In your CRO campaigns, you’ll want to make sure that those elements are easily identified on the page, are easy to understand and work well on mobile and desktop devices. You don’t want any distractions around these four pieces of content. The contrast to the background and the font size should allow for easy reading and the Add to Cart button should stay above the fold whenever possible.

Want to Learn More About CRO and Working With E-Commerce Brands?

I’ve partnered up with the fantastic team at WP Mayor and arranged that we can stream all the sessions as they go live from May 25th to 29th right here on WP Mayor.

Every day, starting on Monday, May 25th, you’ll find new sessions going live with industry leaders like Dennis Yu, Linda Bustos, Kristen LaFrance, Rhonda Swan, or Clifford Almedia. You’ll learn more about CRO but also about literally any other aspect of working with e-commerce brands.

Simply bookmark this page or use the button below to grab your free ticket and get notified as the sessions are published.

About Jan Koch

Jan is the host of the WP Agency Summit and Ecom Services Summit. Being a WordPress developer since 2012, he pivoted into organizing virtual events to bring communities from all across the globe together and help industry leaders share their knowledge with new audiences.