Monthly ArchivesJuly 2022

Ecommerce platforms like Magento 2 empower you to build and run online stores in hours instead of weeks like you would a decade ago.

But this lower barrier to entry presents a challenge — increased competition. With hundreds of online stores launching every day, it can be difficult to stand out in the crowd. As a result, even with an attractive online store, you might struggle to generate sales.

To help you tackle this challenge, we’ve compiled a list of eight actionable Magento tips and tricks to increase online sales.

Ready to learn? Let’s get straight to it.

8 Tips To Increase Magento Sales

1. Improve your Magento store performance.

2. Optimize Magento SEO to rank organically.

3. Use Grouped and Bundle Products to increase the average order value.

4. Simplify the Magento 2 checkout process.

5. Implement strategies to recover abandoned carts.

6. Connect Magento with your social media accounts.

7. Offer targeted promotions and discounts.

8. Use analytics to track, measure, and improve store performance.

1. Improve Your Magento Store Performance

Improving site speed is a timeless Magento tip that can help you increase online sales.

In the pursuit of the “ultimate customer experience,” businesses often prioritize store functionality over performance. That leads to slow Magento storefronts with bloated themes and buggy extensions.

The obvious solution to this problem is to install bloat-free Magento 2 themes and remove unwanted Magento extensions.

However, you can also improve Magento speed in the following ways:

• Use Varnish for caching.
• Operate Magento in the production mode.
• Implement GZIP compression.
• Minify CSS files.

2. Optimize Magento SEO To Rank Organically

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an underrated Magento tip that helps you get more organic traffic to increase sales.

75% of marketers surveyed by HubSpot believe that SEO helped them achieve their marketing goals.

Adobe provides several SEO-friendly features in Magento 2. Some work out-of-the-box, like its default product template containing structured data markup for rich snippets. In contrast, others like canonical tags and product page metadata require manual configuration.

Follow this Magento SEO checklist to improve your rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs):

1. Optimize homepage and product metadata, such as meta description and title.

2. Add ALT text to product images.

3. Configure canonical meta tags to avoid duplicate content on webpages.

4. Generate an XML sitemap and add it to the Magento robots.txt file.

5. Configure automatic URL rewrites.

Additionally, you can use Magento SEO extensions to improve your search engine rankings.

3. Use Grouped and Bundle Products To Increase the Average Order Value

Grouped and Bundle products are perfect for selling pre-configured product selections. They can help you improve the shopping experience and increase sales.

You can use grouped products to create collections of products commonly purchased together. For example, you can create a grouped product in Magento consisting of a camera, memory card, and tripod.

Similarly, you can create bundle products to sell kits, such as a runners kit that consists of running shoes, joggers, and a fitness tracker. Additionally, you can allow buyers to customize their bundles to increase order values.

4. Simplify the Magento 2 Checkout Process

Data gathered by the Baymard Institute reveals that 17% of online shoppers in the U.S. abandoned their online purchases because they found the checkout process too long or too complicated.

Magento store owners don’t need to worry about long and tedious checkout processes. Magento’s Onepage Checkout simplifies the checkout process for your customers and even enables guests to checkout on your store.

We recommend using these default settings and supporting multiple payment methods to minimize checkout abandonment.

5. Implement Strategies To Recover Abandoned Carts

Abandoned carts are a serious problem for merchants worldwide. SaleCycle reports that shoppers abandoned nearly 80% of all online orders in 2021.

Magento lets you track cart abandonment using the Abandoned Carts Report. You can use that data to increase sales by retargeting cart abandoners with personalized discounts.

Additionally, you can complement this Magento tip with email marketing extensions like Mailchimp or Klaviyo to automate shopping cart abandonment emails.

6. Connect Magento With Your Social Media Accounts

People spend nearly 10% of their day (147 minutes) on social media. You can capitalize on this behavior by integrating social media with Magento using extensions from the Magento Marketplace or adding social plugins.

For example, here’s how you can add a Facebook “Like” button to your Magento ecommerce store:

1. Copy the JavaScript SDK code from Facebook’s button setup page.

2. Create a content block in the Magento backend and add the HTML code.

3. Add the content block to a CMS, category, or product page.

4. Verify the block is in the right location and works as expected on the front end.

You can also add social media share buttons so customers can share their favorite products with their friends and followers.

7. Offer Targeted Promotions and Discounts

Magento’s catalog and cart price rules are the perfect tools to use the fear of missing out (FOMO) to drive conversions.

For instance, you can create a catalog price rule based on customer attributes and offer limited-time discounts such as 15% off on the entire catalog to boost sales.

Similarly, you can use cart price rules to offer exclusive discount codes with limited validity to your top customers. That way, you can nudge customers into making repeat purchases while inspiring brand loyalty.

8. Use Analytics To Track, Measure, and Improve Store Performance

Finally, the best Magento tip to increase online sales is to use reporting and analytics tools to track customer interactions and measure conversions.

Magento’s default reporting functionality provides detailed marketing, sales, customer, and product reports. You can access those reports from the Reports menu in the admin panel sidebar.

Additionally, you can integrate a service like Google Analytics in Magento 2 to track behavior flows and optimize your ecommerce website for a seamless user experience.

Final Thoughts: Magento Tips To Increase Online Sales

Data from Statista reveals that global retail ecommerce sales reached a record high of $4.9 trillion in 2021. More importantly, that number is projected to grow by 50% and reach $7.4 trillion by 2025.

If you’re looking for ways to tap into that growth, the Magento tips and tricks listed above are a great place to start.

Are you spending most of your time optimizing and securing Magento instead of growing your ecommerce business?

Sign up for Managed Magento hosting with Hostdedi to simplify operating a Magento store.

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According to the 2022 Customer Success Collective report, 97% of businesses track customer retention rates at least once every year, but only 58% have a dedicated customer retention program to solve customer challenges.

You can stand out from the competition by focusing on customers’ pain points and increasing customer loyalty.

If you’re using WooCommerce, you can benefit from several top-tier plugins to optimize the customer retention strategy.

Read on to learn more about the benefits of customer retention and WooCommerce plugins you can use to retain more customers:

Benefits of Customer Retention to Your Store

Unlike new customers who require convincing, your existing customers are already sold on your products or services. In other words, making an effort to retain current customers reduces your expenses and creates growth opportunities.

Here are some of the benefits you get from customer retention:

• Reduced Cost of Customer Acquisition: While retargeting and other customer acquisition tactics may help meet your KPIs, they are often expensive. Customer loyalty can be more cost-effective than acquisition as it encourages word-of-mouth marketing, which is the most trusted channel among customers. Neilsen shares that 88% of people trust recommendations from friends and family.
• Improved Products and Services: New prospects are more sensitive to new products and services. Any slight change may cause customer churn. In contrast, your loyal customers help you test out new products and even share promotions in their circle. 
• Helps Strengthen Your Brand Loyalty and Image: Customer retention comes with customer satisfaction and a positive customer experience. Both of which make your brand stand out from the competition. Once your current customers associate you with quality, they’ll return for more. They’ll also leave positive testimonials and participate in your customer loyalty programs.Not to mention, loyal customers market your products by word of mouth and referrals.

4 Top Plugins To Improve Customer Retention

Customer retention requires addressing customer pain points in multiple ways. For instance, you can clear up their confusion regarding a product or service. You can suggest personalized solutions to their problems. And you can provide your services in a secure way to protect their data.

Here’re the best plugins to tick all these boxes and improve your customer retention.

Live Chat — Best Customer Engagement Plugin

LiveChat is an all-in-one live chat plugin that helps you keep in touch with the customers on your website over a given period of time.

You can use LiveChat’s dynamic chat tools to increase customer engagement and retention. It also produces ecommerce reports and analytics to track loyal customers. Not to mention, its collaborative tools let you manage multiple chat agents across your website.

LiveChat offers support for integrations, APIs and Webhooks.

Key features

• Support for over 200 third-party integrations.
• Multi-channel customer support.
• Access to metrics and analytics.
• Automation for repetitive requests.
• Customer feedback system to evaluate support services and staff members.
• Notifications and customized responses.

Best Customer Retention Plugin For: Engaging customers across different platforms, including social media.

Pricing: Premium plans start at $16 per month per agent when billed annually.

OptinMonster — Best Lead Generation Plugin

OptinMonster is a dynamic lead generation plugin to generate more subscribers, leads, and sales by targeting your existing traffic. You can also use it to personalize offers and appeal to different customer bases.

OptinMonster’s list segmentation tools reduce cart abandonment and increase revenue by helping you provide the customers with the best possible offers. You can also collect their emails and nurture them to increase the customer lifetime value (CLV).

OptinMonster also offers educational and expert courses that cover how to maximize this plugin’s potential.

Key Features

• Geolocation targeting.
• Drag and drop form builder.
• Exit-intent technology.
• Customer reports and analytics.
• A/B testing.

Best Customer Retention Plugin for: Lead generation, form building, customer relationships, and email campaigns.

Pricing: Premium plans start at $9 per month (billed annually).

Yoast WooCommerce SEO — Best SEO Plugin

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps a website rank in search engine result pages (SERPs) and builds credibility. Yoast WooCommerce SEO can help you optimize the website for search engines by using SEO techniques.

In other words, Yoast WooCommerce SEO lets you do internal linking, cut out 404 errors, and make your ecommerce products stand out in search results.

You can try out the free Yoast SEO plugin or upgrade to the premium plans. Yoast also comes as part of a package of apps, so the plugin subscription offers more plugins than just Yoast SEO WooCommerce.

Key Features

• Product-specific SEO analysis.
• Automatic XML sitemap optimization.
• 24/7 support team for premium accounts.
• Ecommerce SEO education.
• Improvement in the breadcrumb navigation.

Best Customer Retention Plugin for: Ecommerce product-specific SEO.

Pricing: Paid plans start at $79 per year.

WordFence Security — Best Security Plugin

WordFence Security is an endpoint firewall plugin with a malware scanner that protects your WooCommerce store and client information from hacking and other online threats. It protects your login information from misuse and monitors website traffic to block potential attacks.

With WordFence Security, you protect your customer data and accounts from intrusion and keep your website active and healthy.

WordFence blocks brute force attacks, phishing, data theft, and other common website attacks. It also supports two-factor authentication, a standard security requirement for modern secure logins.

Key Features

• Login security.
• Two-factor authentication functionality.
• Live traffic monitoring.
• Country blocking.
• Malware scanner.
• Web Application Firewall.

Best Customer Retention Plugin for: All-round WooCommerce website security.

Pricing: Free plan with limited features. Premium plans start at $99 per year.

Final Thoughts: Best WooCommerce Plugins To Improve Customer Retention

Customer retention calls for and comes with a better customer experience. Using different WooCommerce plugins, you can facilitate customers’ buyer journey and offer that enhanced experience.

You can further improve the customer experience by improving the WooCommerce website’s load times and security.

Try Hostdedi’s WooCommerce Managed hosting for free. Sign up today to benefit from increased speed, security, and scalability.

This blog was originally published in July 2019. It has since been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.