E-commerce: why is your site's sales activity just as important as acquisition?

Whether a web giant or a more modest merchant site, sales performance requires investment in traffic management. The reason is simple: without visitors, there is no conversion and, with minimal traffic, limited turnover! But beware, a large audience is not necessarily synonymous with an explosion of turnover ... variations in the conversion rate are correlated to many factors.

So, what about the cost-effectiveness of the digital device?

In response to the challenges of optimising sales efficiency, sales techniques make it possible to increase sales per visit and conversion rate. Among the performance accelerators, the personalisation of recommendations in real time is the winning strategy.

Netwave takes stock of the leverage effect of sales promotion on investments in traffic creation and proposes a solution that guarantees sales performance. Here's how it works. 

Acquisition: the starting point for increasing e-commerce sales

As part of the digital strategy of a merchant site, acquisition consists of generating a qualified audience through various acquisition levers: natural referencing (SEO), social media campaigns (LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.), Google AdWords sponsored links, affiliation platforms, emailing, etc. It represents the fundamental pillar of sales performance, whatever the site size.

To illustrate this, let's consider the example of an e-commerce site with an acquisition cost of 1,000 euros for 100,000 visits and a conversion rate of 1%, i.e., 1,000 sales, for an average basket of 50 euros: the turnover is 50,000 euros. It is logically necessary to increase it by 5,000 euros to generate 10,000 additional visits to make 100 more sales, which means investing an extra 100 euros.

The operation is profitable, but you must be aware of the proportionality between the increase in turnover and the amount invested in acquisition. If you neglect your conversion rate in the face of inflationary acquisition costs, you will not benefit from the full potential of your acquisition investments.

Optimising the primary investment by working on the conversion rate is essential to increase a merchant site's turnover.

Indeed, let's take our previous example and consider that the conversion rate has increased by 10%. The site will generate 1100 sales and 55,000 euros in turnover ... but for an identical acquisition cost. CQFD.

This is where sales activity takes over.

Sales activity: the complementary approach to increase conversion rate

The site's ergonomics, merchandising, and the elements of reassurance, the management of basket abandonment or the fluidity of the payment tunnel are indissociable levers for improving the conversion rate. However, their potential is limited once they have been optimised to their maximum.

On the other hand, sales promotion makes it possible to increase the number of conversions and continuously push the average basket upwards in volume and value. In this respect, and in addition to highlighting the product offer, two sales promotion techniques are used:

• Up-selling aims to redirect the intended purchase to a similar product in a higher range to increase the average basket.
• Cross-selling, which consists of an additional sales technique, is also designed to increase the average basket, but this time by offering a complementary item that may or may not be related to the primary purchase.

Sales promotion is, therefore, synonymous with an increase in turnover per visit. In this sense, it complements traffic acquisition strategies, the conversion rate acting as a multiplier of the investment in traffic.

However, these strategies only make sense today - and have real added value - if they integrate individualisation into the recommendation strategies. Let's see how it works.

Personalised recommendations: for optimal conversion rate

A vector for improving the customer experience, loyalty, satisfaction and a formidable competitive advantage, personalisation of the purchasing process makes it possible to increase the conversion rate. But the stakes are high.

Indeed, to offer a personalised recommendation worthy of the name, it is essential to master various skills:

• The identification of the situations that condition the purchase behaviour of a specific customer is determined by the analysis of the context, the psychology, and the navigation in that it is evolving.
• The ability to deduce the visitor's expectations and needs.
• Adapting the most relevant sales input.
• Analysis of its reaction to refine the following recommendations.

This exercise cannot be done manually. It requires analysing a lot of weak signals, in real-time, for each visitor to the site, as they are unique.

To automate the personalisation of their recommendations, some merchant sites have predictive tools using traditional statistical techniques, such as Machine Learning. However, this solution proposes an averaged segmentation based on limiting models determined beforehand.

The point here is not to question data mining but rather the relevance and timing of specific tools: visitors are volatile, and their behaviour varies depending on the moment's context. Conversion or bounce-back is a matter of a few seconds or even less. This is why analysing the visitor's journey as an individual, and in a real-time demand situation, is becoming essential: it is the only way to study behaviour at a given moment to adapt the suitable recommendation in real time... in other words, the one that will convert.

One condition: be well equipped.

In this respect, the Netwave platform offers individualised personalisation in real-time. The sales of merchant sites (offer/content/advertising) are delegated to an AI and are based on two agile technologies:

• On the one hand, situational analysis analyses, during navigation, weak signals linked to the psychology and behaviour of the visitor in the context of the moment to identify his expectations, obstacles, and motivations. More than 85,000 situations are thus placed in real-time, a far cry from the few dozen - at best - segments of machine learning tools.
• On the other hand, inductive algorithms reproduce what works best with visitors who are most similar to the current visitor at time t. And not apply a model defined via a machine learning tool, which is obsolete as soon as it is formulated.

Netwave's inductive AI adapts in real-time, with each click, to the visitor's needs without using a predefined model. Tailor-made, in short.

Whether an incremental improvement or a productivity enhancement, sales tasks, such as product showcasing, up-selling and cross-selling, are automated and become more relevant. Not only do e-commerce operators save time and increase their turnover per visit by an average of 12%, but customers are also more satisfied with their shopping experience.

In this sense, the sales promotion provided by Netwave allows us to capitalise on the investments made in the acquisition because it is individualised and real-time. Consumers who visit the site receive tailor-made advice that meets their current needs and expectations and buy more. Finally, Netwave is the e-commerce site that the sales consultant is to the physical shop.

Curious to see the results of Netwave with your own eyes? Ask for a demo!