Setting up a test and learn approach for your shop

So you have a shop in WordPress using WooCommerce and you’re getting some sales but you feel like you could be doing more.  I’ve set up a few shops since I started on my freelance journey and coming from a background in corporate where data driven marketers succeed, I always make sure I use a test and learn approach where I am tracking everything possible in order to create insights to optimise.  Some people like to use intuition but the data never lies….

First things first, there are a couple of things I recommend setting up so you can start getting the insights that will help you optimise your site for conversion. And by optimise I mean increase warm leads at the top of the funnel and increase conversions at the bottom:

1. Set up Google analytics – if you don’t have GA set-up already, please head there and sign up with your Google account. You just need to add a snippet of code to your header (your web designer/developer can do this for you) or download the headers and footers plugin and follow the instructions.
2. Connect WooCommerce & GA – This is a little tricky, you need to download a plugin called Enhanced E-commerce for WooCommerce store and follow the instructions in both WooCommerce and GA and Paypal.
3. Connect WooCommerce & MailChimp – MailChimp are now offering marketing automation as part of their free offering.  This is AWESOME and you should take advantage of it straight away.  In Mailchimp you have the option to connect your WooCommerce shop, just follow the instructions and your done. This means that all your email marketing will now be fully monitored right down to the sale, so you can see what emails give you the best conversion.
4. Create an abandoned cart email. To give you a bit of my background, working in corporate a few years ago the creation of an abandoned cart email took months of dealing with IT, legal, compliance, web agencies etc.  I created one for a client the other day in less than 2 hours using MailChimp and WooCommerce.  This is a no-brainer and will increase your conversion rates.  The beauty of connecting the two is that it’s all automated and you can set and forget (well not forget, you should be checking and tweaking your content to ensure you are optimising).
5. Activate coupons in WooCommerce – In WooCommerce you just need to go into settings/checkout – and click enable coupons. Once enabled, you can add a coupon code to a product, a group of products or the entire shop with expiry dates and a max number of uses.
6. Send out a campaign in MailChimp.  MailChimp is very easy to use, check out a tutorial if you need, but create a campaign (10% off with this coupon code), test it and send.

Once you have done all this, you can start to see where your website is working and where it’s letting you down.  If you need any help, give me a call.