A couple of months ago we launched an Ecom store in South Africa selling supplements.
Our target audience wanted to buy, but lacked the confidence to follow through with their purchase.
This has drastically impacted our overall conversion rate over the past few months
It made it impossible to gain stability and predict what will happen from one week to the next.
Our conversion rate would jump from anywhere from 0.2% to 3% and back to under 1% without us touching the ads or the website.
Our campaigns had to run on autopilot in order to test this theory. We noticed that our CTR is really high overall compared to accounts we’ve seen.
Typically you would see well converting campaigns getting 1.5% CTR that would run stable.
With the South African market almost seems backwards, our CTR on our ads are averaging more than 3%, so how are our ads not converting?
To add a little pain during Q1, the retail market suffers a massive sales slump since families are stocking up on school supplies, paying the annual school fees and shifting their priority towards the essentials.
Through the past few months we found out through customer enquiries, emails and calling them that it just came down to about three main factors affecting our overall performance. It comes to the conversion rate; trust, knowledge and timing.
Read More: This is What We’ve Learned from Launching a Brand New E-Commerce Brand and Store in Late 2020!
Trust
In an up and coming industry building trust with your customers is the hardest thing to achieve.
Most of the feedback we received from past customers was:
- Some customers were scammed
- Packages took over a month to arrive
- Customer service was appalling since the industry hasn’t taken online shopping seriously yet
So how did we start building trust with our customers?
We made sure to have daily communication with our customers, via WhatsApp & Email. We followed up on their experience and improved on our service each day.
The customers that converted had a good experience and will always come back making the LTV a lot more valuable.
Knowledge
This is one of the hardest challenges we have been facing recently.
Since it’s customers’ first time buying online, they have no idea how to use it.
I personally had to go on a one hour call walking a customer through the online purchasing process. In the end, it was worth it, but this example sums up how serious it actually was.
This was an unexpected problem, since internationally, online shopping is a second nature. It’s the most convenient way to shop.
Our current solution is to build a very detailed “how-to” page walking the customers through each and every step.
Even how to add your banking details since we see the biggest drop off at checkout.
Timing
The timing of the month is our saving grace at the moment. There are two pay cycles throughout each month, mid month and end of the month.
Most of the country still has a set pay day at the end of the month and this is the period where we see a 3%+ conversion rate.
We scale our ads up during this period in order to catch as many customers as possible.
During the slow periods of the months where the conversion rate is too unpredictable we shift our focus on the customer journey and improve that since we know the ads do work.
This has created a big thinking shift for me since everything we do that affects the ad performance is done outside of Media Buying.
How does a quiz fit into all of this?
Quiz Campaign
The reason why I mentioned the quiz is that this was a very good method we were testing in order to generate leads.
We ended up getting conversions through the lead campaign which was a bit strange.
We decided to launch a quiz conversion campaign and actually started seeing very good results.
We were still generating cheap leads with better quality traffic and the campaign was basically paying for itself.
As the quiz campaign actually started optimizing on its own we saw a lot more stable performance from the conversion rate on the website.
I believe this was due to the interactive nature of the quiz where more “experienced” customers were pulling through to the website.
We have concluded the test for now while we run our other test.
Overall, it was positive to see during this period. We received better quality conversions and captured good data to make improvements.
It is an interesting project to be part of.
The methods that we learn from this project can be implemented with our clients strategies as well.
But this only works if you have the right agency partnered with you!
If you are spending over $500 a day and you want to scale your brand
Book a call below:
And that’s a wrap!
I’m Quintin, Media Buyer at DimNiko
