These are the essential tools every successful WooCommerce store already has and utilizes in full power.
WooCommerce comes with a decent amount of features and services that will benefit your business, but there are some additional tricks that require some additional tools to bring your webshop to the next level.
Please, continue reading and you will learn the well-kept secrets of running a successful web store.
Secrets behind every successful webshop
We will showcase the list of tools that are used by successful webshops around the world on daily basis. These tools and tricks will help you sell more, establish your brand, and connect with your customers.
There is no magic here, so you should not expect something ground breaking. Yet, with implementing all of these tools and tricks, you will definitely sell more and benefit your business or company.
Essential tools for running a successful webshop
These are some of the essential tools every store owner should consider. Some of the tools are simply not included inside any kind of software for building a webshop, thus we need to add them additionally.
1. Live Chat
One of the most useful things that aren’t included in e-commerce solutions like WooCommerce, Magento, X-Cart, or similar is the Live chat.
People like to ask questions and many of them would love to hear from you prior before they make any purchases. They usually ask things related to the items or products they consider purchasing.
We use tawk.to chat on Worda Themes website and it’s been serving us for years. It’s both free and powerful, highly recommended.
Live chat adds to the credibility of your business as the customers feel like there is someone who handles the sales and takes care of everything being run correctly. All these small but personal things can benefit the total number of sales as the customers feel the entire process more personal and they also tend to develop trust in your business and company.
There are a couple of professional live chat solutions that are integrating well with WordPress and WooCommerce.
Some of the advantages of Live chat are:
- Ability to chat with customers or potential customers
- Statistics, visitors IP and country data, pages visited, referral sources, and more
- Works well on mobile devices
- Faster support pre-sale questions handling
- Ability to receive messages as tickets in off-line mode
- Multiple agents
- Better insights on how visitors experience your webshop and what to improve
If your shop is missing the Live chat feature, check out our post on how to add live chat to your WordPress website.
- We could also mention that you can place a beacon from HelpScout to act as a form of live communication with your customers. This is useful for all of the current HelpScout users out there.
- There are also known chat bot services powered by A.I.
2. Social Marketing dashboard
Website marketing is a crucial thing these days. The good old days of free marketing coming just from a good SEO optimization are well over. You simply can’t rely on organic traffic when you run a webshop.
The marketing plan needs to include the strategy for social media customer acquisition.
Thus, the second tool needed for your future webshop success is the social share software like HootSuite, eClincher, or similar.
The tools like HootSuite and similar will automate the social media marketing steps. You can benefit from automated ads posted by the platform. It will save your time and energy, the software is capable of running on the autopilot mode, sharing posts, statuses, liking and even commenting the content in the name of your page or profile.
These kind of tools are used by all major web stores, most likely even by your own competitors.
Currently, there is no free open source alternative for such software, unfortunately.
Each of these social media marketing tools will give you valuable insights into your customers and marketplace potentials. It will also serve as your custom bot for posting the statuses and stories onto your pages and accounts. This will surely result in sale boosts and the acquisition of new social page fans and new customers.
3. Newsletter
One of the oldest and still working marketing tricks is good old email marketing.
You won’t believe how many returning customers a carefully crafted newsletter can bring to your shop.
You should add the newsletter sign-up on the pages of your website and collect the customer’s and visitors’ emails. Then use them to send out a periodical newsletter, but don’t spam people. Sending one newsletter per month should be enough for a start, and you can also send out newsletters on specific occasions like holidays, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc.
MailPoet will get integrated into WooCommerce
There are plenty of free newsletter plugins for WordPress. You can search the WordPress repository and find a couple of them. However, it’s highly recommended that you use MailPoet. The reason for that is that the MailPoet was acquired by Automattic last week.
It seems that Automattic plans to integrate the MailPoet into WooCommerce, which sound great, don’t you agree?
There are more newsletter plugins we can recommend for you
There is a mature and fully capable newsletter plugin for WordPress, WP Newsletter
This plugin can be useful for managing your own mail list and sending the emails using SMTP or other mail services like OctopusMail, etc.
There is also an official and free MailChimp for WooCommerce plugin, which will benefit those who already use MailChimp.
4. Abandoned cart
There’s been a debate concerning this type of action, for example, saving the abandoned cart data and trying to initiate this potential customer to return and make the final purchase. This is the common procedure for abandoned carts and some portion of respected web individuals state that this should be treated as spam. However, this is a highly used e-commerce activity.
Some usage studies based on the data harvested from various stores that average abandoned cart rate goes from 55-80% depending on the industry and niche.
Another study shows that there is a chance that the abandoned cart strategies can revert 30% of lots and abandoned cart or should we say, unfinished orders.
How it works?
Basically, you could create an event that triggers certain actions like for example, the customer decides to ditch the cart at the checkout page. You register the event and the items in the cart that are leftover. Then send an email to the customer at the email address know in the system or picked up from the un-submitted email form field (this is the mentioned unethical part) and offer him a personal discount code that is applied automatically into the call to action button or link inside the email message. The customer return, enter the code and gets discount, make the final purchase and deal get closed. It’s that simple and believe it or not, it’s also efficient.
For example, GoDaddy is a huge domain name registrar and a well-known name in the business. It’s currently holding millions of domains. They are still using the similar tactics I mentioned above with the discount and personal one-time promo codes.
There are also other methods and scenarios where this kind of proactive approach to selling pays off.
For example, there are truly legitimate strategies like the exit pop-up strategy that triggers the action when the visitor tries to leave the page. The action could trigger the modal windows with the special promo code or discount for the cart content right in place. There are many more similar actions but we can’t cover them all in this article. Let’s head to the WooCommerce and how to handle the abandoned cart there.
How to abandoned cart in WooCommerce?
There are a couple of abandoned cart solutions you could use, depending on your own store scenario.
These are the most useful and proven abandoned cart recovery plugins for WooCommerce:
Abandoned Cart Recovery – Official WooCommerce plugin
Abandoned car the official paid plugin for recovering potentials sales from abandoned carts. If you want to get deep into the abandoned carts and re-initiate the customers, this plugin will be needed.
Retainful – WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Recovery emails
Retainful is most likely the best Abandoned cart recovery plugins for WooCommerce. You can recover your abandoned carts and convert them into sales by sending a series of emails to customers, similar to the official plugin but more intuitive. The plugin is simple to use and you won’t need any prior experience of coding knowledge.
Abandoned Cart Lite for WooCommerce
The Abandoned cart Lite comes as a free solution for those of you who wish to explore the possibilities of abandoned carts. It will help you find the product that is left in the cart and the details of customers who abandoned it. This can help you personalize your emails to try recovering the potential sale.
5. Social proof and Trust badges
The other thing worth knowing about is the trust customers are placing in your company. It’s often neglected by many web shop owners until they realize that the trust in the company is crucial thing, next to a branding and companies reputation.
For each respectful and growing business there is a change or doubling the sales just by adding some sort of trusted reviews and/or badges.
TrustPilot is a great service and it’s used at many great webshops just to illustrate the customer’s trust and loyalty. People love those things and they will start trusting your company more, just by noticing the TrustPilot reviews on your website. There are also other services that can be implemented instead of TrustPilot.
Trust badges will also help up with sales as they will increase the overall trust in your brand and it’s psychologically proven. You can find over 120+ free trust badges at TrustLock. You can download them and insert into the footer area of your webshop or just by pasting the embed code.
People also tend to trust the brands, so make sure that you include the credit card icons or brand images like Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, etc. It just simply works on people and they easily correlate with the known payment brands.
Thats not all!
We highly recommend that you check out our WooCommerce guides and tutorials as we also cover how to add city and district in WooCommerce, how to change form labels, remove fields from checkout and order page, etc.
Conclusion
We presented you with the 5 easy tricks & tips that are essential parts of every successful and fully selling webshop, especially based on WooCommerce.
If you have anything to add, or if you need help with just about anything WooCommerce related, don’t hesitate to share your impressions below.
