As an ecommerce agency, we see a lot of merchants asking for help and advice on how to maximize their store’s potential and grow. While there are a lot of factors in play when it comes to running a successful and efficient online business, there are three recommendations that we find ourselves making the most. These are: focusing on conversion rate optimization (CRO), web performance optimization, and leveraging automation and AI tools in customer service.
In this blog, we’ll break down these tips and recommend some tools you can add to your business’s tech stack to boost your efficiency, reach your target audience, and create more happy customers.
Automate Away Repetitive Customer Service Inquiries ...And Let AI Take Care of the Easy Stuff!
While there is still much room for improvement when it comes to large language models (LLMs) and AI tools, leveraging AI for your business doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing decision. Pair your AI bot with some automation flows, and you have a customer service match made in heaven.
One place where we see AI working very well for ecommerce businesses in their customer experience (CX), specifically as a “member” of their customer service team. While many companies would be understandably wary of replacing their teams with AI, giving these AI-based tools the reins when it comes to handling their easy and repetitive requests can shave off hours that your customer service teams would otherwise be spending responding to chats and emails themselves.
Using AI bots that can be trained on your company’s help desk articles, marketing materials, and brand guidelines can turn them into veritable “employees” who can handle customer inquiries at any time, day or night, in your brand voice. This takes the load off of your human team, who will no longer have to start their work days by answering the pile of emails and chats that came in while they were off for the day.
You can further enhance efficiency by taking a self-serve approach to customer service through automation flows built to send your customers and potential customers through a series of prompts, ultimately getting them the answers they need without contacting you via phone or email. These flows work great for basic questions like “Do you offer free returns?” or “Where is my order?”.
Enabling customers to quickly get answers to their questions any time they shop, rather than having to wait for an answer, can reduce cart abandonments and create happier customers in the long run.
Tool Recommendation:
Gorgias
Gorgias offers both AI and automation features to easily handle up to 60% (30% from automation flows, 30% from AI conversations) of your customer service inquiries so your team can focus on more complex issues. Monitor your AI bot’s conversations to make changes and improve its accuracy and tone over time.
Click here to learn more about leveraging AI and automation in your customer service.
Improve CRO with Proactive Visibility and a Suite of Tracking/Testing Tools.
Leveraging proactive visibility is one of the best yet least spoken-about ways to optimize your ecommerce site and prioritize improvements and bug fixes, ultimately improving CRO.
When we discuss “proactive visibility” here, we’re talking about having the ability to spot bugs that affect your ecommerce store before they become a larger issue for your customers. Every website has bugs, regardless of how skilled your developers and quality assurance (QA) testers are, but not everything needs to be fixed immediately or even at all.
As stores grow and become more complex, with multiple integrations and connections to other applications, it’s very easy for issues to arise that you would have had no way to prevent or prepare for. Even something as simple as a web browser like Chrome pushing an update can potentially break something at no fault of your own!
By using tools that help you detect and monitor the bugs and issues lurking in your website’s code, you can gain the upper hand and prioritize the ones that might break critical integrations and systems, while leaving the others alone or logging them as lower priority to be dealt with later.
Additionally, when aiming to improve CRO and ensure that everyone who wants to shop with you can check out without any blockers, it's important to gather event data regularly that can show you any concerning trends that you may wish to investigate further. Build A/B tests to test different checkout configurations/layouts and options to ensure your checkout process is smooth and matches user behaviours.
Finally, use tools to accurately display all your data and help you pinpoint drop-off areas in your checkout flow so you can easily visualize your data and detect anything concerning in real time.
Tool Recommendations:
Noibu
Perfect for proactive visibility and monitoring, Noibu detects errors on your site and assigns a monetary value in terms of lost revenue to each issue. This way, you can quickly pinpoint which fixes will make the biggest financial impact, a major key to consistent ecommerce growth.
Growthbook
If you’re looking to set up easy A/B tests, Growthbook is the tool for you. Easily set up experiments, pull data from your other sources, and manage linked feature flags without engaging your development/IT team.
BigQuery
Bring in all your data from your tools like Google Analytics, Google Drive, your CRM, or wherever you run your marketing campaigns so that everything lives in one singular location with BigQuery. Gain a comprehensive view of all customer interactions and journeys across various channels in one place.
Click here for a full list of our favourite CRO tools to improve ecommerce sales.
Optimize your Website’s Performance for Faster Shopping and Happier Customers.
The speed at which your website loads and how well it performs on a wide variety of devices and internet connections can make or break online sales if website visitors can’t easily navigate your store.
This is why regularly auditing and optimizing your site performance, especially before key shopping times like Black Friday/Cyber Monday or the holidays, can dramatically improve your bottom line.
Focus on optimizing your site for mobile devices to nab those impulse buys. Keep large images and page effects to a minimum to account for slow internet speeds, and optimize for scalability to ensure that you can handle higher traffic than usual.
You never know when one of your products might go viral or a marketing campaign might really take off, and your site should be able to handle more visitors than usual, all shopping and checking out simultaneously.
Tool Recommendations:
Google PageSpeed Insights
Input any URL here to get a full breakdown of your website’s Core Web Vitals for both desktop and mobile. This tool will score you on all the important metrics you need to keep an eye on if you want a smooth browsing experience for your visitors, like Speed Index, First Contentful Paint, and Total Blocking Time. It will also give you tailored tips on how to improve each score, like reducing unused JavaScript or reducing the impact of third-party code.
Google Lighthouse
Lighthouse will provide you with all the same information available through the PageSpeed Insights page, but it can be run elsewhere besides visiting a URL. You can add the Lighthouse extension to Chrome, access it directly from Chrome’s DevTools, through the command line, or as a Node module, so you can run it via shell scripts or integrate it into your continuous integration systems.
Click here for a full list of actionable steps you can take to optimize your website’s performance.
Conclusion
By implementing these growth-focused strategies, ecommerce merchants can streamline operations, improve customer satisfaction, and boost overall performance. Whether through AI-driven customer service, proactive visibility in CRO, or optimizing site speed and scalability, these approaches provide sustainable growth solutions.
Looking to get started with the right tools and tactics to set your business on the path to long-term success? At Blue Badger, we have everything you need to get started implementing this advice. From running performance audits, testing and implementing optimizations, building custom apps, and more. Contact us today to get started.
