More and more people are shopping for their clothing online, and the COVID-19 pandemic has made the trend even stronger. But how can your website stand out in the abundance of different clothing websites, including big and established brands like Macy’s and Amazon?
If you own a Clothing Website and are not getting the sales you want, this article may help you achieve your goals and Increase Sales easily. As I love building modern stores with WordPress and WooCommerce, I follow everything I say with my favorite non-technical method of implementing it in WooCommerce.
- Offer a Unique Shopping Experience
- Reduce Buyers Uncertainties
- Engage with Your Customers
- Increase Your Conversion Rates
- Encourage Customers to Spend More
Offer a Unique Shopping Experience
Before getting to the actual bells and whistles of increasing your online sales, I want to review the basis of all further optimizations and the user experience. Any other thing would be pointless without offering a decent and unique user experience.
✅ Optimize the Overall Experience
I consider user experience a hanging fruit for increasing online sales. The result that you can get can be just magical.
The time it takes to load your website, the visual aesthetics, the checkout process, and many other factors all make the user experience. As website owners are usually not consumers of their websites, they overlook many aspects of user experience, resulting in a not-so-joyful user experience.
You buy the best premium theme on the market. You also activate the best marketing plugins on your WooCommerce website. That’s good, but not enough. Theme and plugin developers are often busy adding features and fixing bugs that rarely pay attention to the user experience.
Your job is to take care of the user experience, and then the only way to find problems is to put yourself in the shoes of an actual shopper. You have to perform everyday tasks such as adding a product to the cart, checking out, writing a review, and navigating to make sure all of them are easy to use on different devices, especially mobiles.
✅ Make it Matches Your Brand
After optimizing the user experience, you definitely want to make it matches your brand. You want your online store to look professional and distinct. Many WooCommerce stores are using boring defaults.
You should optimize every part of your theme, from fonts and colors to how purchase buttons look, and make them match your brand. This will differentiate you from the crowd and is crucial to your customers’ long-term relationships.
✅ Build a fantastic front page
Your front page is where you showcase your identity. It’s usually the most visited webpage on your website and the first touchpoint for many users. You want it to be as eye-catching as you can.
Here is a checklist of things you need to pay attention to while creating your front page:
- Everything should be designed with the mobile user in mind
- Your home page should be dynamic enough that it encourages users to check it regularly
- It should announce different sales
🔸Make navigation easy
Let’s say a female user wants to buy a sports hat. Of course, she should be able to enter caps in your search bar and filter the result into women’s hats. But she should also be able to locate women’s hats via the primary navigation quickly.
For example, she might select women, accessories, and finally, hats. She should then filter out the results to only get sports hats. That’s why mega menus are so popular among eCommerce websites. They are an easy-to-use navigational means, but of course, it’s your job to structure your hierarchy of products.
Your primary navigation can’t and should not hold every option. You want to focus on the most ordered product groups. One essential thing to consider is that there are generally two types of users:
- Those specifically looking for a product
- Those who want to turn around and see different products
Your navigation menu should fulfill both of these needs.
Let’s take a look at how Nike is achieving both of these. The primary navigation is divided into six sections, new releases, men, women, kids, and collections. Hobby shoppers can head to sales and new releases.
Those looking for specific products can hover over to men, women, or kids, opening the mega menu listing different categories. The menu is appealing and functional to both types of users. You should design your menu with the two types in mind.
Reduce Buyers Uncertainties
Uncertainties are the biggest hindrance to any deal, and clothing websites are no exception. Customers are usually unsure of the product’s texture, color, size, and overall feel.
You can dramatically increase your sales and beat any competitor by removing uncertainties. Here are some tips to reduce some of these uncertainties.
✅ Write better product Copies
Product copies are the description of the products. First and foremost, you should write a copy for every product you sell. An excellent eye-catching copy is very assuring on its own.
You want to point out the key advantages of your product over other brands, from quality to durability and comfort. This reduces customers’ uncertainty over your products and introduces new uncertainty over competitor products.
It would help if you kept in mind that your product copies serve two purposes: informing and persuading. Consequently, the more complex the product, the more you need to write to achieve both of these goals.
Here are some tips to consider while writing your copies:
- Write for the target user: People interested in a fancy letter jacket with a white skull on its back are different from lovers of formal black suits with a white tie.
- Keep your tone consistent with your brand, and write with the general values of your brand in mind.
- Follow features with benefits
- Be creative and use emotions
✅ Use Impressive Product Images
You want to use high-quality professional images for every product. You want at least five photos taken from different angles for each product. Having a model wearing them is also an awesome thing to do.
✅ Make It Easy to Buy the Correct Size
You should provide an easy-to-use size guide for every product category. Your sizing guide should preferably include equivalent sizing units.
✅ Answer Questions via Live Chats
There always will be questions, even if you try your best to provide every piece of needed information. That’s where a live chat can help the best.
Adding live chat functionality to your WordPress website involves installing a plugin and signing to a live chat website. Many live services are available for WordPress; my favorite one is Tawk.to. It’s very straightforward to set up and is 100% free.
You only need to buy its premium plan when your website grows and reaches a certain number of visitors. After setting up the plugin, you and anyone in your team can answer chats via Tawk.to’s mobile or desktop application or even right from the web interface.
You also want to hire operators to answer your live chats throughout the day. They should be generally available throughout the day and even on the weekends.
Offer a good refund policy
A customer-friendly refund policy helps customers shop without the stress of making mistakes, which leads to better sales.
If you look at refund policies on big and established clothing shops, you can see the same pattern, they are all very forgiving.
Back to our case study, Nike, the return policy goes like this:
“You can return your order for any reason, free of charge, within 60 days.”
And it’s clearly stated on every product page. How cool is that!
Engage with Your Customers
Customer retention is critical to the success of any business, but many online websites are so busy making new customers that they completely forget about building loyal customers.
Of course, your deliverables are a crucial factor here, but that’s not enough. The old saying, Out of sight, out of mind, is practically true here.
✅ Run loyalty programs
Loyalty programs have proven themselves one of the most effective tactics for increasing sales and building customer loyalty. 84% of consumers say they stick with a brand that offers a loyalty program.
Running a loyalty program is an excellent step in building a long-term relationship with your customers.
Luckily, it’s very easy to launch your loyalty program and customize it to your needs. There are many good options to consider, but SUMO Reward Points is my first choice if you want a feature-rich plugin.
It is a premium WordPress plugin that allows you to reward your customers for their purchases and various other actions like Writing Reviews and sharing products.
✅ Send automated emails
Sending automated emails is a fantastic way not to let your users forget about your brand. You can send targeted personalized emails to users, like offering discounts on their birthdays or sale reminders of their favorite products.
MailPoet is a plugin by the same team behind WooCommerce. It allows you to design beautiful email campaigns or newsletters and hand them to your users.
It also allows you to send emails using its servers with a paid membership fee. The premium service is also entirely free for websites with 1,000 subscribers or fewer users.
Increase Sales by Increasing Your Conversion Rates
Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that complete the desired goal. Here, of course, our goal is to sell! So the conversion rate for a product would be:
(The number of distinct purchases) / (The number of product page visits)
Here are some tips to increase your conversion rates over time.
✅ Optimize your sale funnel
Your sales funnel is a structural representation of customers’ journey with your brand. The sales funnel represents every touchpoint from the initial stage when a user learns about your business to the actual conversion, where they make a purchase.
Your typical sale funnel looks something like this:
It’s called a funnel because only a few customers make it to the next step at every stage. Our job here is to identify these leaks and fix them. Here are some tips for improving each sage.
Optimizing the default WooCommerce funnel takes some work and requires technical knowledge. You can, however, get good results by using a funnel optimization plugin like Funnel Builder.
It is a free plugin by CartFlows for optimizing the default sale funnel in WooCommerce. It includes various premade templates and customizes them with your page builders like Elementor.
However, a deep understanding of stages is required, and a plugin can’t optimize your WooCommerce website magically.
🔸Stage 1: Site visit
A user visits your website’s front page or landing page at this stage. We talked thoroughly about designing the home page. Just keep in mind that aesthetics here are very important to build trust.
In fact, 75% of consumers admit to judging a company’s credibility based on the company’s website design. Also, you want to ensure it loads in less than 3 seconds, regardless of the device.
One thing to note is that home pages are never a good option for directing traffic ads, as they are very general and full of different pieces of information. You always want to create an engaging landing page with a clear goal and message.
Landing pages are much better in conversion and move users much easier to the second stage, product pages.
🔸Stage 2: Product view
At this stage, a customer is already interested in a product. Again, your product images, copy, and specification tables are key here. We covered all of them.
Besides engaging images and copy, social proof is a significant factor here. Product testimonials are fantastic, and they improve trust to a reasonable extent. You also want to ensure there are enough customer reviews for every product.
For example, you can nicely ask users to publish a review after reviving their product. You can also reward them for reviews.
🔸Stage 3: Add to cart
Hopefully, a user becomes interested enough to hit the Add to cart button. Your add-to-cart button should be visible and at reach at this moment.
Once a customer hovers or clicks on the shopping cart icon, it should show what they are buying with a small thumbnail image and a short description. It should also show the total amount. There should also be options to either proceed to checkout or continue shopping.
Free shipping is also one of the most critical factors in completing a purchase. You should emphasize free shipping on the main page, product pages, and cart.
You should also clearly state how much they should add to the card to get free shipping.
🔸Stage 4: Enter checkout
Hopefully, your customers will hit the checkout button. This is the most challenging stage and the most crucial stage.
Friction is a significant factor here. By friction, we mean any cognitive or burden to complete the checkout.
You should make it as easy as possible to reach the payment gate. Registered users should be able to sign in and continue, and guests should be able to check out as well, providing only the necessary information.
You should also display the general information, including the complete card items, total price, shipping price, and shipping date. Return policies and points should also be restated here.
Whatever we do, the leaks are high at this stage. The average abandoned cart rate is about 70 percent. It is an enormous number, meaning roughly 7 out of 10 people from stage 4 make it to the final stage.
Card abandonment is usually the result of uncertainty and friction. We talked about both of these in depth.
Besides reducing friction and uncertainty, you can send abandonment Emails to bring some leaked users back. There are many plugins for this purpose.
WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Recovery by CartFlows is my favorite. It captures the email address of users on the checkout page and sends a series of customizable emails to users who leave their cards.
🔸Stage 5: Payment
Your job here is to make sure they turn into returning customers. Returning customers Spend 67% More Than New Customers. The best time to promote your loyalty club is right after they complete their purchase. You can also offer them discounts or free shipping for their next purchase.
✅ Run WooCommerce A/B Tests
A/B testing is a marketing method in which we set up two live webpage versions and compare the performance. A/B testing is a standard and reliable marketing technique. Almost all big brands use some form of B testing to improve conversions.
A/B Testing for WooCommerce is a premium plugin for running A/B tests in WooCommerce. It’s straightforward to set up and can give you excellent insights, resulting in better sales.
Encourage Customers to Spend More
Finally, you want to encourage customers to spend more. That means they either buy more products or buy higher-priced products. in both ways, you make more profit. Here are some tips for encouraging customers to spend more:
✅ Reward higher cart amounts
Many stores offer free shipping for cards with more total than a chosen amount. For example, you can provide gifts or free shipping to cards above $100. You can also have a reward system to reward users for their purchases.
✅ Cross-Sell & Upsell
Upselling is the practice of encouraging customers to purchase a higher-priced product than the one they’re willing to buy, and cross-selling invites customers to buy related or complementary items.
These techniques are highly used by different online stores and generally yield good results. For the upsell part, you should recommend higher-end comparable products—for example, a more expensive unique leather jacket to someone buying an average one.
You can also add supplementary products for each product category. Someone who purchased a formal coat will probably need a new tie. Using the linked products tab, you can quickly add crossable and upscale products in WooCommerce.
Final Words
Hopefully, by applying these techniques, your sales will increase over time. At least it happened for my clients who owned a small WooCommerce clothing store and followed the same steps. Remember that you can’t expect to see the results immediately; many good moves take time to show their results.
