Running a successful online store involves more than setting up an ecommerce site. There’s a lot of work to go; the most important among them is having a high conversion rate. And to convert a visitor into your paying customer, you need to first understand your ecommerce users, their needs and demands.
As you can imagine, it is the most critical aspect of your e-retailing business. There are various tools out there to help you better understand your visitors and factors that cause conversions. These tools range from free and freemium to paid, depending on the features and insights they offer. Additionally, some offer free-trail plans to help you test the waters before investing in the premium versions.
Without further ado, here are 6 ecommerce tools that are designed to help you understand your (potential) customers.
Google Analytics
A basic tool that every webmaster uses, Google Analytics offers a host of additional features for ecommerce stores. It helps you identify conversion funnels so that you can accordingly create events, focusing on channels providing best results. Additionally, you can reconsider your strategies for channels where conversion process is struggling.
Google Analytics is relatively easy to set up and you can use this tool for on-site promotions through banners, personalized pop-ups and offers specifically created for each of your visitors. In other words, you can leverage Google Analytics to create personalized targeted marketing for enhancing your visitors’ experiences as well as generating better revenue.
This tool also allows cross reference geolocation for mobile visitors. However, this feature is available only in cities. A more practical use of this tool is for personalizing email promotions. You can even use it to create dynamic pages for providing a personalized shopping experience to your buyers.
Image via Unbxd
Unbxd
Almost 56 percent of shoppers agreed that they are more likely to purchase from an ecommerce store that offer good personalized experiences. Product recommendations is one of the best ways to provide a personalized shopping experience. Unbxd offers site search and product recommendation tools to help online retailers provide bespoke shopping experiences to their buyers and increase customer loyalty.
Unbxd’s site search tool incorporates an advanced machine-learning algorithm to provide a “context-aware” search that deeply understands user intent to show highly relevant results. Additional features include an enhanced auto complete that can understand customer intent to match search queries with exact products in real time.
The product recommendations tool, on the other hand, analyzes big data to provide an Amazon-like experience with personalized recommendations such as “also bought”, “recently viewed” and “top sellers” etc. You can integrate Unbxd Recommendations with various ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Bigcommerce and Magento.
SurveyMonkey
This is a popular survey tool used by many online retailers use for optimizing their ecommerce websites. SurveyMonkey is a web-based, easy-to-use survey tool offering real-time results. There are various visual themes and survey templates to choose from. In addition, this survey tool includes a feature for requiring or validating survey responses.
You can send the survey form in various ways using SurveyMonkey. This includes sending surveys via email, weblink or Twitter. You can additionally share the survey on Facebook, directly embed it into your online store, or deploy the same in a pop-up window. With premium accounts, you can filter and cross tabulate data, download responses, and access other useful tools.
At present, more than 20 million customers are using SurveyMonkey globally including bigger brands like Samsung, Facebook, Virgin America and SalesForce.
Hublo
This is an analytics and conversion tools to help you “send the right message to the right user through display ads.” Using Hublo, you can analyze your visitors and improve conversion rates. This tool also provides some features specially designed for this purpose.
It features a simple WYSIWYG interface, making it an apt solution for those who are new to analytics and optimizing conversion rates. All you need to do is just copy and paste the data to add a new tracker. To start tracking user behavior simply click on page elements and this ecommerce tool will take care of the rest.
Setting up your own conversion funnel was never easier! Hublo eliminates the need to delve into any code. The result is tracking metrics and conversion rates with relative ease. This tool even provide reports as and when your customers drop off so that you can improve your purchasing flow and at the same time reduce bounce rates and shopping cart abandonment. Further, you can integrate this tool with Mixpanel and Intercom.
Image via Heatmap
Heatmap
As the name suggests, this tool collects and displays your ecommerce website’s heatmap data in real time. Heatmap is not only quick to display, but also update the data constantly to help you tweak your online store accordingly and immediately see the effects of such changes.
Better yet, the interface of this tool features as “augmented reality” approach where the sidebar provides real-time data. In addition, it lets you interact with and browse inner pages of your ecommerce site even when the heatmap data is displayed on screen.
It is easy to install Heatmap. Simply insert a small and asynchronous JavaScript tag into your website’s code. You can be rest assured that this JavaScript tag won’t affect your website’s loading time. Besides, it works with all browsers, fixed elements and Ajax navigation. Better still, it supports dynamic elements and responsive designs.
ClickTale
Another analytics and conversion tool, ClickTale combines a Heatmap Suite, a Conversion Suite and a Mouse Tracking Suite together to create a powerful ecommerce tool. This is a must-have tool to maximize your ecommerce website’s potential. It supports Session Playback on both mobile and desktop versions.
The detailed heatmaps of ClickTale cater to both desktop and mobile devices. Additionally, it offers link analytics.
The conversion tools from ClickTale include Conversion Funnels and Form Analytics. Apart from these tools it offers a suite of site efficiency and analytics tools, including a JS Errors Report, a Bounce Rate Report and a Page Console. While the first suite identifies and prioritizes JavaScript errors, the Bounce Rate Report identifies various types of user bounce types and the Page Console displays the most engaged and clicked pages and elements.
In Conclusion
Each tool mentioned here helps you to understand your ecommerce users better. It is true that trends and user behavior data plays a crucial role in determining how online retailers should serve their customers best. The best option, however, is to choose several methods and analyze work ahead-of-time to gain a well-rounded perspective before you start changing your website.