Disclaimer: there are emotions in this post. Gasp!
I'm currently participating in a month long blogging challenge and to be honest it's a bit draining. I love challenges. They could be anything from running a marathon to writing a book but I have to feel like I'm growing or contributing to the world. I have written a few useful posts (1 & 2) that I've been meaning to write for a while but sometimes I feel like I'm posting just to post and that really bugs me.
Normally I say great things about WooCommerce, not because I have to but because it's really awesome. Today though I found something that wasn't very awesome. Actually that's too nice – it sucks. Have you ever tried to create a membership site with WooCommerce? It doesn't seem like it would be that hard right?
Some people think that support is this giant black hole where you throw money to make sure customers don't hate you. That belief is why so many companies have such crappy support. They do the bare minimum to make sure their customers don't leave. I guess I understand this line of thinking but it rubs me the wrong way. While you can put in the bare minimum you could invest in your support and build resources and useful assets for future projects. With our upcoming WooCommerce 2.3 release we did just that.
At various points in my life I've felt like I'm on a conveyor belt.
And I think I've felt this because my life has been so… easy. It's weird to say that. It kind of makes it sound like I haven't done anything with my life. For most of your life you're in school. College is a thing people are doing now-a-days so I might as well go do that, and then after college I applied for a job and the manager graduated from the exact program several years earlier. Boom – first adult job just like that. It almost happened automatically. It feels like all I had to do was keep my arms and legs on the conveyor belt and I would have eventually wound up there.
A few years later I'm the product manager for WooCommerce, the most prolific e-commerce platform, holy shit – how did that happen!?
In the past year WooThemes has grown significantly. We've scaled up to the point where team members can focus on one aspect of the business and not have to pay attention to everything else going on. This brings some pretty huge advantages with a dedicated person pushing through projects that someone who's spread out on multiple projects could never do. But with it comes hyper-focus where someone will focus on their aspect of the business without knowing (or caring) how it affects other aspects of the business.
If you've been reading my blog for a while you might remember the Blogging for Benjamin challenge. It was a month long blogging competition organized by Daniel Espinoza to get you out of your comfort zone and I loved it. It was just challenging enough to post every day for an entire month and while it was a lot of work it was totally worth it. This year I'm participating in something slightly different. Our very own Bryce Adams set up Blogging for Hippo where we'll be blogging for an entire month leading up to the release of WooCommerce 2.3 – Handsome Hippo.
I've had a lot of fun going over some of the most important features you should look for in an e-commerce platform this past week. Content marketing gets users to your site, newsletters sell them, intelligent recommendations increase order volume, and reports will help you refine and optimize your catalog. All of those are really important but they don't feel that e-commerce-y do they? That's why I want to talk about a topic that every e-commerce store manager can relate to – setting up shipping costs.
The past couple days I've been talking about getting more people to your site with epic content, keeping people interested with newsletters, and using intelligent recommendations to increase order size and volume. All of those help you get more orders which is what you need when you're just getting started. Once you've had your store up and running for a while it's time to take a look through your catalog and refine it. Are any products doing very well or very poorly? Which ones are just bad products and which need a marketing push to make them successful products? You can do all of this with reports.
On Monday I told you how to write content that will bring traffic to your site. Yesterday I told you how to use newsletter marketing to keep in touch with your customers and to turn on-the-fence visitors into customers. Both of those are pretty easy to do with a content management system like WordPress. Today I want to tell you about a piece of functionality that's much harder to implement but is so incredibly vital to e-commerce that all of the top 10 e-commerce sites on the Internet use it. I'm going to talk to you about intelligent product recommendations, the kind you see all over Amazon.com.
Yesterday I talked about how your e-commerce platform needs to have a blog because it will bring thousands of visitors to your site organically (without paying for ads). When you start making sales that's a huge win. Give yourself a big pat on the back and reward yourself (watch a TV show, go shopping, or – if you're like me – pledge way too much money on Kickstarter projects). After rewarding yourself let's talk about how you can do even better.
To get more sales you'll either have to get more traffic (which you should be working on every month by writing new content), or you can increase your conversation rate. One of the best ways to increase your conversion rate is to earn the users' trust. People want to make sure that after they give you their money you'll give them a positive return on investment. This is hard to do via 140 character tweets. It's actually best done through the medium that everyone uses and is often underestimated. I'm talking about email newsletters.