Sales are the name of the game for any business. Especially eCommerce.
Today we’re going to look at the top 6 plugins I recommend to clients to help them increase the sales of their WooCommerce stores.
Email with Jilt
One of the best converting mediums you have is email. If you’re not collecting email addresses and then doing something useful with them, you’re leaving money on the table. This is where Jilt comes in.
Standout Features
While other email options for your WooCommerce site have eCommerce features, they’ve almost always been added on to an email marketing platform. This is not the case with Jilt. Jilt was built out of the gate to address the needs of eCommerce stores. Right away they planned to make it easy for store owners with little technical background to get set up and start earning more with their stores via email marketing.
To that end, Jilt has most of the email campaigns you’ll need built right in out of the gate. You don’t have to search through blog posts for links to workflows and automations, they’re ready to go within minutes of installing it on your site.
Why You Need It
You have better things to do than spend hours figuring out what email marketing works. Jilt makes it so easy to start sending lifecycle emails, deal with the segmentation of your purchasers, and have automation setup. Then you can get back to bring more marketing material to bear to increase the number of customers that know who you are.
Finally, Jilt is a product of the team at Sky Verge, which has been a well respected WooCommerce plugin provider pretty much from the beginning. You can know that Jilt is backed up by top-notch knowledgeable support and solid code.
WooCommerce Points and Rewards
How many of us have a coffee card in our pocket or on our phone? You know the type where you earn your way to a free coffee. You can provide a similar feature to your users with WooCommerce Points and Rewards.
Standout Features
WooCommerce Points and Rewards allows you to define different points levels for many different purchase types, but it’s not restricted to only purchases. You can reward customers for leaving a product review or for signing up to your email list. You can even manually adjust the points that a customer has so you could recognize them for something extra that isn’t on the usual list of rewards.
Once customers have points, you can set the discount based on a conversion rate you choose. You can configure different discounts per product, or per category and even set a maximum discount and points that someone can use for a specific purchase.
Why You Need It
Points cards will help bring customers back to your store to see if they can earn more points. I go to the same coffee shop pretty much every time because I have already got a points card and earn based on it.
According to Marketing Metrics, the probability of selling to an existing customer is up to 14 times higher than selling to a new customer. At the same time, some studies show that 60 – 80% of customers that describe themselves as satisfied don’t make a second purchase from a store even if they need a product sold there. These customers are happy to shop around again and show little loyalty to your store. You can help change this trend in your store by having a loyalty program and making it obvious to your customers.
Cart Notices
When your customers are ready to purchase they have already demonstrated that they trust you. This can be a good time to try and perform an up-sell with a custom Cart Notice. You do need to be careful you don’t make the checkout too overwhelming.
Standout Features
Cart Notices has lots of customizability so you can provide a custom message to your users based on what they have in their cart. This could take the form of a time-limited discount or an up-sell to a packaged product or better version of what they’re looking at purchasing.
Cart Notices also lets you provide a call-to-action URL for customers to click so that the desired action can be taken right away by your customers.
Why You Need It
Depending on what statistics you look at, cart abandonment can be as high as 80%. You can help customers make a decision to purchase or increase the total value of the purchase by using Cart Notices. If you choose a deadline notice, you can encourage a purchase before that sale expires. Creating urgency will help increase sales.
AffiliateWP
If you’ve decided to add an affiliate program to your WooCommerce site the next step is to choose which system to use to maintain your affiliate program. This is where I recommend AffiliateWP.
Standout Features
While we’re focused on WooCommerce here, many site owners have other projects going on. If you need affiliate programs on many sites, then AffiliateWP has you covered because it supports so many different platforms. You can have a secondary membership site, and still use the same affiliate program you are comfortable with.
AffiliateWP lets you change your referral rates between flat rate and percentage globally by the affiliate or by product. That means you can offer a lower rate for some people, but for a standout affiliate, you can reward them a bit extra for their continued support of your products.
When you’re dealing with payouts and accounting, AffiliateWP has an easy to use export feature so you can get a clean CSV file to integrate into your accounting application of choice, such as Quickbooks.
It also has integrations available for all of the popular WordPress plugins out there. That means you can hook your standard contact form into AffiliateWP with little difficulty and no custom development needed.
Why You Need It
A well-run affiliate program can give you access to markets that you usually wouldn’t have access to. Working with influencers in your industry and rewarding them for their work to promote your products will bring in more sales passively.
Holler Box to Target Customers on Site
Providing the right messaging to your customers at the right time is important, and that is where Holler Box can help you as it provides easy to use banners, pop-ups, and sale notifications for your WooCommerce site.
Standout Features
With Holler Box, you can provide timely messages to your customers while they’re viewing the site. Maybe you’re running a webinar and you want to make sure that they know about it. Holler Box will let you do this easily.
Holler Box also integrates directly with your sales so you can show when users make a purchase. This provides social validation for your products that people can see as they browse your site.
While Holler Box provides lots of templates for you to use, they’re also fully customizable so you can turn them into exactly what you want for your site and your customers.
Why You Need It
Showing great messages to your users can help provide social validation to your products, and even a bit of FOMO as they realize that they may not be able to purchase the products they want if they don’t act fast. Social validation is one of the keys cited by Robert Cialdini that will influence people to say yes to you.
Smart Offers
Where the previously mentioned Cart Notices plugin can grab your users before they purchase, Smart Offers takes it to another level by strategically offering users a product after they’ve made the purchase decision. This can be better because you’re not adding an extra decision before the purchase.
Standout Features
Smart Offers will let you add a single product or a range of products that can be offered after the customer initial purchase. You can even set Smart Offers up so that if they have already purchased Product A, they get offered an alternative upgrade after their initial purchase.
If you want to dig a bit deeper into Smart Offers, I wrote a post about increasing your average order price with Smart Offers.
Why You Need It
When I wrote about streamlining your WooCommerce checkout I mentioned to get as much out of the way of a purchase decision as possible. Smart Offers allows you to do this and still increase the sales of your store by engaging with the extra sell after the user has purchased. You’re most certainly leaving money on the table if you’re not using Smart Offers with your WooCommerce Store.
If you can use even a few of these plugins well, then you can increase the sales of your store.
If you’re not sure which one to start with, then I’d recommend Smart Offers. Using this plugin alone many of my clients have seen a significant increase in sales.
Learn More About How Customers Think To Increase Sales
See Chris Lema’s webinar on eCommerce Decision-Making: How Customers Decide What To Buy to access to a five-step framework on how customers make decisions and the design implications for your store, which can also increase sales.
