Parasar Sarma is the ex-VP-Growth at Wakefit. He is an amazing growth marketer who, with his level of knowledge and expertise, has been a key contributor to the success stories of many brands.
What is the first thing you want your customers to do when they come across your brand? Be it from paid ads or any other marketing strategy, as a D2C brand, your goal would always be to direct them to your website.
But, is your website strong enough to hold that much traffic? Is it appealing enough to capture the attention of your audience till they reach the checkout page? Is it fast enough to guide them through before they change their mind?
According to a recent article, “47% of customers generally expect a maximum of 2 seconds for a website page to load.” This means that your website has to tick all the above boxes so as to convert your potential customers to lifelong buyers.
Getting your customers to the website is a struggle but making them stay is what resembles the real challenge.
This week, we had the opportunity to listen to Mr. Parasar Sarma, ex- VP – Growth at Wakefit, who answered the above questions, put down ways and strategies on how D2C brands can scale their websites, share valuable insights about CRO and much more.
Listed below are some of his many learnings from the session:
Key elements for website scale:
Though every website is unique in its own way, there are certain elements that are important for all. Now that you know the “WHY” of website scaling, let’s move forward to the “WHAT” part.
What are the key elements that are a must-have for every website? How many have you already implemented and how many have you missed?
- Navigation & structure – It’s very crucial that when a new user lands on your website, with or without the context of your products, he gets a very distinct structure of navigation. As a D2C brand, if you have a set of categories and sub-categories, guiding your customer throughout their website journey is very beneficial.
- Design – Nowadays, most of the products are discovered on mobile phones.
As per an article, “57% of users say that they are most likely to not recommend a brand if its website is poorly designed on mobile.”
Whenever you are creating your website, make sure it is both desktop and mobile optimized.
- SEO hygiene – SEO is an inevitable part of marketing that needs to start its course from the very beginning. It is a door to a sea of opportunities (in our case, customers) that needs its sweet little time to unlock. But when it finally does, the quality of customers that it will get you will be the best of the lot.
- Product story – What makes a customer trust you? How can you make your approach a bit personal so that it doesn’t seem like a sales pitch?
The answer to all these questions is your story. When you bare a piece of your heart to your customer, they feel connected with you. They start trusting your brand and push them to be your loyal buyers. A product story is one of the key anchors of website scaling.
- Upsell & Cross-sell – When you are buying traffic at a cost, you need to capitalize on every customer. For eg, when a customer is buying an X product, you need to show him that there is also a Y product available.
They might not need it at the moment but the combo will be beneficial for them.
- Social proof – If you have built a new site or are not present in marketplaces, then it is important for you to have some kind of social proof. You need to publish the publications you are covered by, how does your social media community work, what does your old customers talk about, etc.
These are the basic things you need to have to get an outlook of increasing your conversions.
Home & product page:
The home page is the first page your user sees when they land on your website. Always try to show all your offers and discounts on the home page. Customers are more likely to increase their stay with a list of offers in front of them.
The product pages consist of all your products and services. The key elements that every product page should have are:
- Feature image
- Gallery/product photos
- Product overview, title, price, features, CTA’s, customization (if any)
- Product description
- Reviews
- Upsell & cross-sell
- Chat & click to call
Key enablers for conversion improvisation:
Your product is obviously the main lead of your brand, but there are many other factors that a customer considers when buying a product. It is very crucial that you understand all these factors to enhance your conversion and the customer’s experience.
Some of the key enabling factors are:
- Delivery timelines based on pin code search.
- Building product or service-led benefits on the website – like 100 days free trials/custom order.
- Personalization around product selection & usability.
- Reviews/ Pricing/payment gateway flow in detail.
Make sure you keep all these points in check while designing your next product page.
Improve live traffic conversion with or without any automation tool –
You might have a lot of traffic coming in from paid ads on Google and Facebook but the conversion rates are too low compared to that.
So, how do you convert these window shoppers into real-time customers?
Some of the ways to improve these live traffic conversions are:
- Run surveys for product learnings from non-buyers without incentivization.
- Run banners to increase on-page conversion – reviews, delivery, etc.
- Touchbase bounce traffic (non-buyers) through automated flows. –
- Notification/emails/SMS
- Personalization of content based on the previous visits.
Reviews library on the website In-depth
Reviews are the most critical lever to improve your conversion rate. The first thing a user does when coming across a product is check its reviews. They want to know from real people about their customers with your product.
Present a list of the following elements on your website:
- Review library from Amazon, Flipkart, Google, etc.
- Neutral presentation of all reviews from 0 rating to 5-star rating.
- Influence only stacking of reviews for videos & images as first.
- Notify new reviews for the SKU’s to the non-buyers.
- Filters to the user in order to reach the right reviews.
Pricing/Payment Flows –
As a D2C brand, your primary focus will always be your website. You might list your products on various marketplaces but your end goal is to always drive substantial traffic to your website.
One of the most important levers of any product is Price. One of the ways you can maintain and drive more traffic to your website is by keeping your price lower there as compared to Amazon and other places.
Some of the tricks you can use are:
- Try to have the lowest pricing on the website comparing market places.
- Its imp to show multiple layers of pricing discount – MRP to special pricing.
- Multiple payment gateways health & success is the key – use aggregator layers to optimize.
- New payment platforms/modes unlock a new set of user bases – BNPL etc.
We are so thankful to our expert for conducting such a valuable session.
Want to be a part of such sessions in the future? Join our next cohort: https://www.xpert.chat/d2cmarketing.php