The Marketer’s Guide to WooCommerce

Katie:
Hello and welcome to Do the Woo. I’m Katie Keith, co-founder and CEO at Bantu Plugins, and today I’m joined by guest Paul Halfpenny from Filter. So Paul, can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do?

Paul:
Hello, Katie. I’m Paul. I’m the CTO and Co-founder of Filter. We’re a WordPress digital agency and we’ve also created our own plugin. It’s called PersonalizedWP, so I’m running that as well.

Katie:
Excellent. And we’ve been working together a bit lately, haven’t we? Because we co-authored an ebook called the Marketers Guide to WooCommerce. So do you want to talk a bit about the ebook and why Filter came up with the idea for it?

Paul:
Yeah, we wanted to create some content for potential clients, really just to talk about how you can deliver a stable, secure and performance e-commerce platform on WordPress and obviously WooCommerce is probably the best answer for that. So we created a book that helps you to understand why to choose WooCommerce as a platform and why it’s the best platform on WordPress to do that, including some tips on best plugins to use, how to find the right hosting for it and some of the customizations you might use on WooCommerce such as things like memberships and subscriptions.

Katie:
And the book is completely free. It’s genuinely just to help people build a more successful WooCommerce store and it’s available for download on the filter agency website. And so we thought that there was a lot in the book about how to build a more successful store from a marketer’s perspective, which we thought would be relevant to the do the Woo audience. So we thought that today let’s go through some of the key areas of the book and share some of the learnings from it to help people out more. So we thought we’d skip the initial parts, which is about why choose WooCommerce because if you’re listening to do the Woo, you’re probably already in the WooCommerce space in some sense. So after those bits it starts to get into the more nuts and bolts of how to get your store From a marketing perspective, you can just install WooCommerce as it comes, can’t you Paul? But then how do you bring it to the next level?

Paul:
Well, I think you need to don’t, there’s loads of plugins and extensions that can make WooCommerce into a really great store, but I think it’s understanding which ones are going to have the most impact for and thinking about how you are going to reach your audience with your store. So obviously there’s kind of two areas to it really there. There’s optimizing your store itself, so adding in features and plugins and customizations that will make your store sell your products to people when they come, actually come and find your store. So you might be optimizing your shop pages, you might be optimizing that checkout journey. You might be offering different pricing and things like that. You might be cross-selling or upselling, but then there’s also how do you get people to come to your store and buy your products in the first place, which is actually probably the harder challenge. But I know that Katie, what you do with Bond two is you have a number of plugins that help people to optimize their stores. So perhaps it would be good to talk about how from a starting point, what are the most popular ways of optimizing your store and then perhaps we can talk about how we can then bring people to it.

Katie:
Yeah, let’s talk through the WooCommerce customer journey from start to finish in terms of how to make your store better marketing wise once people are on it. And then at the end we can go into strategies to drive traffic to your store, as you said. So typically people find the store and they might end up on your main shop page or a category page or a page which lists lots of products and in WooCommerce it always all looks the same, doesn’t it? It’s usually got three columns of products in a grid and there’s some filters that you can add to your sidebar as well where you can select attributes and things like that. So I’d say the first step is thinking about is that the best way to display the types of products that you sell? Because some shops like clothes shops I think work really well in that layout because you want a big image for each product.

You don’t want much information about it and that kind of thing. But then there’s other products like let’s say you are selling nails or something like hardware type store where people really don’t care to see a big image of it, they care what the specifications are. Then there’s other ways to do that. So for example, we have a plugin called WooCommerce Product Table, which has a more tabular structure for your shop page with different columns of information. So if you were selling nails, then you could have the different sizes and what material it’s made from and what type of wall it’s designed to go into or whatever. This is not my area. And so it’s a good way to sell products that aren’t designed for that sort of large image format. But then if there isn’t a plugin that meets your needs, there is of course the opportunity to do a bespoke layout for your shop page. Can you think of any good use cases, Paul, for when you might want to code your completely bespoke shop page?

Paul:
Yeah, so sometimes we’ve used the WooCommerce rest API to bring in products into a different layout, completely custom bespoke layout, and that’s helped us when we were doing a shop called Garage for instance, where we did it was all about jewelry and they wanted certain images or certain products to be featured in different ways to other products and have the ability to showcase those products in different ways that might be different to how it was out the box. So we’ve certainly used the rest API and then use job script on the front end and reacts or VJs to customize that experience, which has worked really well for us and allowed us to totally customize what we need to do for the client.

Katie:
Yeah, you don’t have to just do what the theme does or what WooCommerce does. You need to think what are my customers seeing? What are they expecting and what we’ll encourage them to click on the products and add them to the cart. And I think a lot of WooCommerce stores get that wrong. Another good example is that a lot of stores only have one product. Like let’s say you’ve created, this is a client website, I did years ago, a really special electronic car cover and that is your one product and they were using WooCommerce, but they were like, hang on, the store is designed for multiple products. What’s the point in a shop page and things like that. Even the layout of the product page is not designed for, if that’s your only product really, you want something much more bespoke, don’t you?

Paul:
Yeah, I think some of the beauty in WooCommerce is customizability and extendability. So you are able to do things on WooCommerce that perhaps you weren’t able to do on Shopify. You’ve got complete control over how you can do that and obviously there’s barrage of plugins that allows you to modify the experience as well, whether that’s offering different pricing options, whether you are offering new product images, whether you are able to add discounts on the page and things like that. I think that’s why WooCommerce is great for me because it gives you that flexibility.

Katie:
Yeah, definitely. So I think the challenge is encouraging people who are building a WooCommerce store to do that piece of work. You don’t just install the thing that’s a starting point and it’s an amazing starting point. It has so much built into the free plugin, but to make it successful you do need to tailor it to that type of shop.

Paul:
I think whilst there is a lot out the box actually, when we start thinking about that customer journey, there’s lots more that you can add into it or lots more that you want to add into it to drive people around your store, help them find other products, and every store is pretty bespoke and unique in terms of how you want to manage that journey. So I think there’s a lot to do on any kind of e-commerce store to really optimize that experience. WooCommerce is obviously a great start out of the box, but there’s always a lot to add.

Katie:
Yeah, you mentioned finding products. That’s another challenge for store owners because WooCommerce has a product search widget, which is a very basic keyword search and it also has some filter widgets which are basically just price rating and attributes, but they’re not particularly engaging, like they reload the page every time you perform a filter, which isn’t ideal. Instead of using Ajax and the product search, which is not particularly modern, it’s just a keyword search. So for example, if have a good plugin, I forget what it’s called now, something about WooCommerce search, which is more of a predictive search. So it adds a search bar across your list of products where it comes up with suggestions that you can click on and a much more modern searching experience. We have a plugin called WooCommerce product filters, which adds more dynamic filters which use Ajax and are more visual so that for example, you can add category filters and actually display an image for each category. So if you’re selling clothes, you can have an image of a top, an image of a bag for the accessories or whatever, and people can visually choose what they want instead of having to read a long list and things like that. Or they can click on color swatches to filter by that color that they’re looking for. So all those sorts of things, depending on what you are selling is worth considering to help people find products quickly to get them onto the product pages

Paul:
And search is such an important part of that experience and try to discover products and surface them to people, especially if you’ve got a big store. We’ve used our AI search plugin on multiple sites actually, not just on WooCommerce sites because what it does is it offers a great search experience. So it’s fast, it’s root performing, it’s Ajax based, and actually if you use AI search has got to recommend part two that where it can recommend other products within the same category or that meet those same search terms. So like keyword search, your absolute basic, but you need to be in a position where when you are allowing people to search products, you’ve got fuzzy matches, you’ve got the ability to bring in things that it thinks other people are searching for when they’re searching for those terms and quickly find them and bring them to the user.

Katie:
How do you get that on your store? Is it a plugin?

Paul:
It’s a plugin, yeah. And I suspect you can do additional things with it as you can with all the base value.

Katie:
So far we’ve talked about the product listing pages and finding products and you have a product called personalized wp, would you recommend personalizing those pages in any way?

Paul:
I think it depends on what your aim is. So I think everybody wants personalization in their store because they want to give the user exactly what they need, but you can use it in multiple ways. So one thing you might do is maybe if a customer’s been on a page or looking at product, you might pop up or add a vanity that pays or add a coupon so that they’re encouraged to buy that product and put it in their basket. Maybe they’ve been looking at it for a long period of time, you could maybe pop a coupon and say, well add it now, we’ll give you 10% off. Or you might want to use personalization to segment users as they go around the site to understand the kinds of products that they’re looking at. And once you put them into segments, so if they’re going around a store and they’re looking at women’s boots and you know that they’re looking at women’s leather boots, being able to put them into a segment or to understand that that’s the kind of products that they’re interested in, you can then show other recommended content related to those items.

So you’re obviously not going to show them recommended content for men’s shoes because they’re most likely to be a woman and they’re most likely not to be interested in men shoes.

Katie:
Where would that recommended content appear?

Paul:
So particularly with our plugin, actually, you can set up blocks in the block editor and you can choose where that block appears in your page. That might be underneath the main products itself. So you’ve got some recommended items and you could choose to show it or hide it based on different conditions or when they hit those conditions. So sometimes it might not show for some people, it might show for other people.

Katie:
That sounds good. So you might conditionally display a block above the list of products on the shop page with a special offer for that user and you’d word it in a way that makes it sound like they’re really special or something like that. Or maybe add urgency or something.

Paul:
Yeah, we all want to feel special. We, okay, this is just for me, but I think that’s the holy grail, isn’t it? Particularly in common is trying to have that one-to-one personalized shopping experience. And obviously it’s quite a challenge to get there sometimes, but you can get some of the way so you can understand maybe where they’ve come from so you can understand their intent on where they’ve come to your shop. So have they come from a social network for instance, have they come from Facebook? Have they clicked on an ad? Is there a referrer that we know about that we can understand why they’re coming to our store? Are they coming from a particular country? Are they coming from the US? Are they coming from the UK? Are they coming from France with that impact on how we might deliver products to them, would that impact on the kinds of products that they might be interested in?

Are they a new visitor? Have we seen them before? Are they a returning visitor? If they’re a returning visitor, maybe you want to show them a discount code to do that. Are they coming at a particular time of the year? Is there a seasonal sale that we can show to them? Do we know if they’re returning this to where they bought a product? If they have bought a product before, how can we show them similar products? Obviously not take them down the rabbit hole of only showing them, which happens on Amazon quite a lot. You go on Amazon and you buy a kettle and then for the next three months they’re showing you pictures of kettles and you might look bought a kettle. Actually you want a better experience than that. We want it to be a bit more rounded.

Katie:
Well, that’s largely about the setup, isn’t it? When you set up personalized wp, you need to think if they have already bought something, does it mean that’s a category they’re going to buy from regularly or is it a one-off purchase and you don’t show them another sofa for another two years or something, but instead you show them cushions or something that if you’ve just bought a sofa, you might want. So really I’d say that’s a setup issue and Amazon have got that wrong in that instance.

Paul:
We’re saying Amazon’s got it wrong there. We’re doing it for a few years. You think they would’ve fixed that by now?

Katie:
Yeah. So does it know when there’s a logged in user or even through cookies or something, does it know information from previous purchases like their name? So can it say hello Paul, welcome back, we’ve got a great offer for you today.

Paul:
Yeah, absolutely. So we have visitor profiles in the version or the pro version of plugin that allow you to track that user around the store. So you are seeing that they buyer journey and you can see which pages they’ve been to and if they purchase a product or maybe if they fill in a form on the website, then we can take that data and attach it to their visitor profile. And then as they’re going around the website and they look at particular products or they go to specific pages, you can choose to put them into different segments. So segments are basically just groupings of people that have performed a particular action or have done something on site and you want to grid them altogether. So for instance, you might set up a segment for people that come from the UK and anybody that comes from the uk, even we know that they’re in the uk, they’ll go into that segment and then you can show them some content based on the fact that they’re in the UK or if they bought a particular product, if they have bought some nails, for instance, go back to your last example and we know that they bought nails that might lead you to show them different content.

You might show them wood in a block in the future because they bought nails, so you want them to tap the nails into something. So we’re going to put them into a segment that says they bought nails and therefore we’re going to show them other products because we know that they’ve bought this product over here.

Katie:
That sounds good. And I think that most WooCommerce stores are not doing that kind of personalization at the moment. So that would be a good way to stand out a bit and stay ahead a bit like booking.com and all its clever algorithms that it’s always showing something dynamic on the page to get you to book straight away and things like that. I’d say there’s a fine line between making people feel special and welcome and creeping them out through knowing too much. Do you have any advice on getting that balance right?

Paul:
Yeah, so there is that and you’re always like, oh my god, I mentioned kettles on a podcast once and then Alexa must’ve been listening because now when I go browse around the web, I’m just seeing ads for kettles and that stuff does happen in the background. So larger enterprise clients use customer data platforms to aggregate data from multiple platforms and pull it all into a single profile. So where you are thinking about something on one platform, it can get pulled into somewhere else, they match up the data and then it comes out on another website. So some of that stuff is real, but it does freak people out. We’re doing a release of the product next week and there’s a privacy feature in there actually, so we can anonymize those profiles. So if you don’t want to capture data, then you can still track people around the website, you can still put them into segments, but we don’t take any of the personal details or store them in the plugin so that you can’t use them in the future, which I think is quite important. I think also it’s worth talking about AI in relation to these things as well because hot topic at the moment, the bubble hasn’t quite burst yet, so everybody’s talking about AI and obviously when we talk about optimizing pages on your store and optimizing its pages, there’s a lot of plugins or features out there which help you to optimize the content of your pages. So that might be optimizing the meta titles, the description, the titles, any metadata that you’ve got in that page as well can help you write that description for different audiences.

Katie:
Any plugins you recommend for that?

Paul:
I think, no, not in particular. I think they all do a much of a muchness. They’re all, a lot of ’em seem to be connecting to places like OpenAI and allow you to use your accounts to then generate that text. But I was going to say there aren’t, what we haven’t quite seen yet is too many plugins that use AI for product recommendations. So obviously if your bigger platform like Amazon, you can quite happily have the budget to do that. But AI product recommendations is actually, it can be a little bit costly because you might have a large catalog and you need to take that data and you need to go and put it into an AI platform and then you need to train that model. But it’s something that we’re going to add to personalized VIP in the near future. So we think we’ve got a simple way of doing it that allows to have AI recommendations. It should be a little bit more focused on understanding the journey that somebody’s been through and then giving them a better response rather than just here’s some other stuff in the category to be a bit more clever about what we’re doing.

Katie:
That sounds good. Yeah, because WooCommerce itself does have the ability to show, I always get ’em confused. Cross sells on the product page I think, and upsells on the cart page. I think it’s that way round, but they’re kind of quite manual. You just have to select, if I’ve got a red T-shirt, then I can select the red hoodie or something or a red cap as a cross sell on the product page or something. And they also appear kind of really low down on the page, so they’re quite easy to miss. So I’m not a huge fan of that functionality. I think there’s more clever ways to do it. Even without ai, you can display order bumps on the checker out, which is quite a nice way of doing it. Iconic, have a plugin called sales booster for WooCommerce, which does that kind of thing. Or popups that you’ve just bought one thing and it recommends something related, but I like the idea of using AI to do it more dynamically because that would still require choosing what appears in each circumstance rather than doing it based on user behavior.

Paul:
Yeah, I think a lot of personalization, some people use the term display conditions are quite manual and it means you have to go through a lot of setup and you need to have to go through a lot of thinking about what you are doing. And for smaller store owners, actually that’s quite a lot of work to be thinking about all these things and trying to make sure that you’re covering all bases. Obviously for the bigger players, they’ve got teams of people that can do that. So anything that we can provide that gives a little bit more vintage your standard. Here’s other things in the category, obviously increased revenue because it’s a little bit more focused and targeted.

Katie:
Yeah, I think that’s definitely worth doing, especially imagine a small store business wise with lots of products, that’s a big overhead to be doing the required time to decide what to upsell for every product, which you need to do for a maximum impact, but that requires a lot of data analysis and manual work. So if AI can do it for you, then that would really help you get ahead.

Paul:
Yeah, absolutely.

Katie:
So let’s move on to the individual product page because we’ve talked about finding products, how you display them in a list, and so then you click through to the product page and again, with WooCommerce, typically it always looks the same. So on the top left you’ve got an image and you might have thumbnails underneath where you can view multiple images. Then you’ve got the title price star rating, short description and add to cart stuff on the right. And then you might have more long description and reviews and things at the bottom. That’s your typical layout, which again might not work for all products. And WooCommerce has been a bit slow historically in introducing the block editor for product pages and a lot of people have been doing it using, do you know what it’s called? Jamie’s plugin, Jamie Marsland at PootlePress. They have a plugin that adds blocks to the product page, but it will be part of WooCommerce core before too long and it’s already in beta where they’ve got a block-based product page design, which will be much more flexible in terms of designing your own product page with the layout that works for your products.

You might want bigger images or small images, you might want to display the add to cart button somewhere different or all those sorts of things and create a much more fantasy layout. And there’s quite a lot of plugins that you can use to enhance your product page as well. For example, the images, there are some plugins you can get. Like there’s one called Woo Thumbs by Iconic where you can even add videos into the image gallery, which is quite cool. So if you’re thinking sometimes on a fancy clothed store, the people, you can actually see the model walking around wearing that outfit, can’t you? And so you want that in your image gallery, a more 360 view or something like that. Yeah, so there’s quite a lot you can do with the product page.

Paul:
There is, but there’s one big consideration that I think everybody needs to have top of mind and that speed. So the majority of people buy on mobile now and that’s where your focus should be. So when you are designing that page, when you are adding features to it or adding things that don’t come out of the box, you need to be thinking about performance. You need to be thinking about your core web tools. You need to be thinking about how that page is laid out on mobile and what people are going to see when they come there. Because obviously what we see on the desktop site or your laptop is probably very different to what you see on your mobile site. And if people don’t, if that page doesn’t load quickly, people are going to get bored and go away. And there’s a general rule for across your store anyway is making sure that it loads quickly.

Katie:
Yeah, that’s very true. And it’s worth knowing who your majority of users are because there’s lots of stats now that the majority of people buying retail products primarily are using mobile, like a huge majority actually. And yet most people are not designing their site mobile first. But I’d say you can’t assume that because in my case as a plugin store, the vast majority of our users are on a desktop computer because they’re at work buying plugins and they’re probably web designers or building a website or something like that. So in our case, mobile’s a bit important, but it’s not at all the majority of users. So you have to look at your analytics and figure that out.

Paul:
Understanding the new audiences is important because you need to understand the audience from a brand perspective because you want people to get in touch with, feel like the story is made for them and it’s meeting their needs. So really need to understand your audience and that’s going to drive a lot of the things that you do with your store. For instance, do you want a video of a model coming on and twirling around and showing what they’re wearing? That might be good for some people, it might not be good for others.

Katie:
And you need things like good hosting to support your store so that it loads quickly and make sure you use a good theme that’s well coded and not too bloated and we keep talking about plugins, but actually you should only install a plugin when there’s a very good business reason to do so and that because everything you add to your store, however well coded it is, we’ll weigh it down to some extent just by adding complexity. So you need to think, is this likely to increase my sales and then ideally monitor, does it increase my sales to decide whether to keep it?

Paul:
And it’s the overhead of managing the store when you’ve got those plugins. So every plugin gets updated typically and gets updated quite a lot these days and every time you do an update, there’s a chance that it might go wrong, it might have an impact. You see that even with core updates, that changes the behavior to the way that people don’t necessarily expect. If you’re running an e-commerce business and it’s your sole way or making money, then anytime that you get downtime, you are potentially losing sales and losing revenue.

Katie:
Yeah, that’s super important. One category of plugins that I’d say people tend to install without analyzing whether they actually needed that plugin is social sharing where lots of people put social sharing buttons everywhere they can on their product pages, for example, and don’t actually monitor, does anybody even use these buttons? And in my experience, generally they don’t. And if people are going to share, they’re going to share. It’s not difficult to copy and paste the link or click the share option, which is already, if you’re using mobile, there’s a share button in your browser, isn’t there? So that’s an example of a plugin, which probably isn’t increasing your sales and does add some performance damage to your site.

Paul:
Yeah, totally agree. Do you actually need it? Is this a plugin that’s going to help you? Is it going to drive revenue or is it going to make your life easier? If not, probably don’t add it and going to have a really good reason to plugin. Yeah.

Katie:
So let’s move on to pricing since we’re talking about the product page and how you price your products because quite an important consideration from a marketing perspective. At Barn two, we do quite a lot of analysis. I think it’s called elastic pricing where you change your prices regularly and then you monitor the impact to try and get that sweet spot for each product. So I think it’s really important to think very hard about what prices you charge with personalized. wp, how does that work with pricing? Is it like coupon codes that people can enter based on when the content appears for them?

Paul:
Yeah, typically you might use it to provide discount codes or coupon codes that people have met certain criteria and you want to push them, you want to nudge them into making a purchase. We haven’t looked at pricing changes. That’s quite an interesting area actually. I wonder if you could modify the price based on what you know about them, where they’re coming from, if they’re coming from a different social network. I think there’s always one of those feelings that if you browse somewhere on a Mac, you’re going to get a more expensive price than if you browse on a Windows machine. I think you’ve heard that, but a lot of people say go, oh my god, it’s more expensive because I’m on Mac. I’m not sure if that’s actually the case or not or whether maybe some unscrupulous people do that, but I think it’s important to definitely a b test what prices work for your audience because you could just be leaving money on the table. We all know that hotels have flexible pricing and dynamic pricing based on demand. It’s not quite the same with an e-commerce store, but if you only have a limited number of items in stock and they seem to be selling well, that’s a really good use case to actually increase the price if you wanted to try and make a higher margin on something.

Katie:
Yeah, that’s interesting. I haven’t seen WooCommerce plugins that do that in the way that, as you say, hotel websites like booking.com do we have a plugin called WooCommerce Discount Manager, which lets you modify the price in lots of different ways with things like buy one, get one free offers and storewide sales or specific categories only or bulk pricing like with a table showing if you buy this quantity, then you can save money. So that encourages people to buy more. They can visually see that if they increase the quantity, each unit costs less. But I’ve never seen a plugin that has that level of sophistication, which will change the prices based on things like sales volume or demand or something. So that would be interesting.

Paul:
Yeah, a really interesting area though, isn’t it, as you think about that idea of scarcity. Obviously the hotel websites do it really well because they’re like, well, we’re running out so we’ve only got so many rooms there. But maybe if you’ve got a limited amount of stock, maybe that’s something that you could consider, particularly if something’s going viral and you want to make more of it, but I know that Disney charge more money when you go to the parks depending on the day as well. So how busy is it in the parks these days? We’re going to charge you more to use Disney Genie Plus, which is how you can get on rides and go through the lightning lanes and that allows ’em to really increase their margin on the busiest days in the park.

Katie:
Yeah, it’s supply and demand, isn’t it? But with things like that, there has to be a scarcity because if everybody bought the FastPass because they get on the rides quicker, then nobody would get on the rides quicker. So I kind of hate that system. It’s far too complicated. Better not get me started on that. But the principle of they’re increasing the price in order to reduce the demand so that only a certain number of people buy it because that has to be scarce, doesn’t it?

Paul:
And I think you also look at scarcity in terms of sales as well. So when’s this sale going to end? Am I getting a discount for a period of time before the sale ends? And there’s obviously some stores maybe running constant sales. I remember back in the day when I was younger, it was a pine warehouse, a pine shop that my granddad used to live near to and they were running a constant sale. It was always a closing down sale, but you knew it wasn’t ever going to close down. It was just like standard marketing. But I think it can help to bring in that I might miss out if I don’t buy now. So I think sales are obviously a key part of any e-commerce site.

Katie:
There’s a lot of ethical considerations around this whole area, aren’t there of false scarcity is kind of dishonest if you’re saying something is going to run out when it’s not. And similarly, perpetual sales also illegal in a lot of countries. So I think it’s good to find the right balance of what will give a sense of scarcity that’s real and do sales in a way that don’t devalue your product permanently. So people will still pay full price at a normal time. A lot of people are advising, for example, only do sales on specific occasions such as Black Friday when everybody discounts and that doesn’t devalue your brand for the whole year. Whereas if you’re doing a sale every few weeks, then people just wait for the sale.

Paul:
Yeah. Do you see a massive increase in people? Do you think people wait for a sales these days and then buy at that time?

Katie:
I think so. Yeah, it’s hard to know. For example, on black, I’m a terrible, I’m my own worst customer because most of the WordPress plugins that I buy, I wait till Black Friday. And so I manually buy all these same plugins every year and then cancel the renewal, which is exactly what I don’t want my customers to do, of course. And so these are plugins I would’ve bought anyway. So actually those companies are losing money, aren’t they? And so as a plugin company owner, I’m thinking, wow, we’ve got 30% more sales in Black Friday month. But actually a lot of them probably would’ve bought at higher prices if Black Friday wasn’t a thing. So it’s hard to know, but sales definitely go up.

Paul:
Yeah, we were buying some garden furniture recently and I was like, oh, let’s just wait for the Easter holidays before we buy it. There might be an Easter sale on. And it turns out that the item we wanted wasn’t in the sale, which was frustrating. So I still bought it anyway and I was always going to buy it. But there in the UK chain called, Pizza Express, also elsewhere as well. I remember probably 10 to 15 years ago, they were discounted pretty heavily and you could get, because a number of different Italian restaurant chains in the UK. So they went down this discount off the rate, and it kind of got to the point that people started only going to Pizza Express when they got an offer. It was like, well, I’m not going to go, I know there’ll be an offer, so I’m only going to go if I get an offer. And that then becomes the default and they realize their mistake and they moved away from it. So you do have to be a little bit careful to make sure that your sales aren’t too predictable, I would say. And maybe you don’t do Black Friday every year and maybe you do flash sales instead, which people maybe aren’t expecting for them. That’s a way to drive revenue in the slow periods.

Katie:
Yeah, people do remember these things. So let’s move on to the final part of the customer journey, which is the cart and the checkout. So in WooCommerce, someone adds product to the cart, they get taken to the cart page where they can make any changes, and then they go to the checkout and add all their information. So there are some quite good ways that you can optimize that process to basically speed it up depending on what you think works for your customers. So we have a plugin called WooCommerce Fast Cart, which brings that process into basically a popup. So if you’re on the product page and you add to the cart, then you can have the cart open up on the product page in a popup or you can skip that and have the checkout immediately open in a popup. So people aren’t going through three pages to do that. And there’s other to do it multi-step checkout, there’s a plugin called Flux Checkout, which adds multi-step. So it’s like enter your details and then your shipping and a tab layout and they create a more kind of Shopify type checkout page as well, which is a bit more optimized for conversions. So I think about what experience would work for your types of products and how basically the goal should be to speed up that part of the product, the purchasing process. Do you have any advice about the final bits of the process, Paul?

Paul:
Yeah, I think it’s all about speed and optimization. I think it’s about checking out as quickly as possible because every time you introduce the option for somebody to think again, even with something like an order bump where you go, maybe you want to do this as well, you’re actually introducing an element of doubt into people’s mind about what they’re doing because they’ll see that and then they’ll go, oh, maybe do I want that? And maybe they’ll go away and then maybe they’ll come back and you’ve almost lost that moment. So having those optimized speedy checkouts are always a win for me. And I think particularly when you’re talking about new versus returning visitors, when I go back to a site and I buy for the second, third, fourth time, I just want to check out as quickly as possible. I want to make sure they’ve got my details, hopefully they’ve saved my car details or I can use Apple pretty quickly and then I can get checked out as quickly as possible. I don’t want to have to go through a lengthy checkout process and fill in loads of details. I want them to know what my delivery address is because it’s generally the same. I want them to use the same card that they’ve used before and I want to finish that process and get on with the rest of my life, to be honest.

Katie:
Yeah, definitely. There’s quite a lot of plugins you can use to improve that. One thing I like to do with WooCommerce is to use a checkout field editor plugin. There’s lots available including free ones on WordPress dot org, which remove the phone number field because I think that most e-commerce stores do not require the customer’s phone number, and yet WooCommerce adds it by default. So I try to remove as many checkout fields as I can get away with because some you need, the payment gateway does require a certain number of fields, so you can’t remove all of them. But I do try to get that down and I’d recommend not using those plugins to add additional fields, which you can do. Where did you hear about us? Word of mouth, Google, whatever. There are other ways to get that information that will not interrupt the purchasing flow. So I’d say avoid trying to use the checkout as an opportunity for that.

Paul:
Yeah, I totally agree.

Katie:
PayPal checkout’s quite good, isn’t it? Because you don’t have to enter your information at all. Have you used that

Paul:
PayPal? Yeah, it’s a bit of a love PayPal because we see it from the other where we’re developing products and commerce for some of our clients, and PayPal’s just really expensive, like the fees that they charge as astronomical, and so we’re not massive fans of PayPal, but obviously it’s remembered. I buy a lot of vinyl records, particularly special vinyl records. The link field that is on most of the checkout forms, I buy my records. Forms really help for me because that it knows who I am and it’ll quickly, quickly and easily populate my details for me.

Katie:
Yeah, that’s good. Yeah. So we’ve been through the whole customer journey on your store and talked about how to optimize your actual store with marketing in mind and to get the most sales and conversions. So let’s move on to how you get people to your store in the first place. Do you have a favorite marketing strategy or stream?

Paul:
Yes, yes I do. Well, I think I know the most successful, which is email marketing. Like guaranteed email marketing is probably the number one way of getting existing customers to return to your store and to drive more customers as well. So when we’re talking about the checkout process there, one of the fields that you should never ever get rid of, even if you don’t need it, is the email bill. Most people need it because they want to send an order confirmation or a follow up, but having that email address is probably one of the most important things you can do to build a list because email marketing allows you to do so much. You can do promotional emails, you can do welcome emails, you can do product emails, you can do sales emails, you do coupons. It’s really affected, every customer’s going to give you their email address, so they’re pretty much opting in. As long as you don’t spam people too much, as long as you maintain your email hygiene and you’ve got permission to send to them, you can make hey with your email list because you can really segment people. It’s not necessarily going to work for new customers, honestly, unless you are buying your list and try to convince people to go to your store. But I wouldn’t really recommend that. But certainly for existing customers to enable them to come back and buy again, that’s really where you should focus a lot of your effort I believe.

Katie:
And there’s plenty of plugins that integrate WooCommerce with your email platform like MailOptin for example, and various others. MailChimp for WooCommerce and ideally you want to be sending customers sales data to that mailing list platform. Obviously this needs to be in your privacy policy and all of the legislative stuff, but you want to know what customers bought, for example, in your email list so that then you can segment based on previous purchasing behavior and things like that. So that can make it even more powerful and make them more likely to buy when you send them a Black Friday email for example, you could have different Black Friday emails, but for different categories that were purchased from in the past, you know what they’re interested in.

Paul:
And you can also use emails to a slight more viral effect as well where you might use referral friend emails. So you are sending out a coupon code for one person, you say, well actually if you can introduce another person to us, we’ll give them a coupon code as well, or you’ll get an enhanced coupon code so you’re going to get a bigger discount. So that really works in stretch to you as well.

Katie:
Yeah, true. Y has some good plugins for that with point schemes and refer friend schemes and things like that where you can automate that and reward people for their customer loyalties because obviously you hope they will recommend you to their friends anyway. But an incentive’s not going to hurt, is it?

Paul:
No, not at all social proof because your friends are telling you what you’re doing, which is kind of like the second one that is huge right now, which is social commerce. So being able to upload your store inventory up onto your social platforms such as TikTok or Instagram or Facebook and then being able to create posts and create adverts based on your inventory that take people straight back to those store, the audiences are there on those platforms and they’re far more engaged and likely to buy if they see something that’s on one of those platforms as well. And that’s actually a really good way of driving traffic to your store.

Katie:
Yeah, that is good. Yeah, I’m not an expert in this area, but there’s some plugins that you can use to automate that. There’s an Instagram plugin called, it’s a WordPress plugin for Instagram called Spotlight, which will add actual buy buttons and things into an Instagram feed which integrates with your WooCommerce store and things like that. And probably similar things for other social networks and particularly ones that have the e-commerce in Google shopping as well. You can integrate with all this stuff and have your WooCommerce products appear in the Google products results. And that’s a really big opportunity. I know when I’m buying online, I always go to the shop section of Google in the results. So anybody that’s displaying their products there is onto a winner.

Paul:
And I think WooCommerce offer a bunch of plugins that are branded plugins, not all of them, but that allow you to sync your inventory up to those platforms and do that as well as your merchant. So appear in, you’ve also got to retarget people as well with adverts. I said browsing around the web, if they’ve come to your platform and they’ve seen something, then actually you can set those retargeting ads up to follow them around. But obviously you’ve got to understand your audience. Going back to what we were saying earlier as to know which channel is going to be the best week, particularly on social. So if your audience is Gen Z and 18 year olds, they probably aren’t going to be on Facebook, are they? Because they’re all left when their grand joined Facebook, but they will be on TikTok and they will be on Instagram.

And actually I think Pinterest is quite an interesting platform as well because Pinterest is like 80% women purchasing using Pinterest and they’re generally higher earners and they’re generally moms as well. So actually there’s a really nice persona for some of these platforms where you can go actually, well, I don’t need to do all of them. I can just work out what my products are critical and send it over to there. And it might be that Facebook’s absolutely right for you, the biggest audience and it’s got your target market, but I think you need to have a think about what your audience is, who’s going to buy from you and make sure that you’re targeting the platforms where they’re already on

Katie:
And with the right platform. I think social retargeting ads can be very powerful because it almost jumps you straight back into the shopping experience that you either completed or abandoned previously. I’m old, so I use Facebook and often say I’ve been drowsing jewelry or something and not bought that same jewelry shop will appear in my Facebook feed with a gallery that I can swipe to view the different items, some of which are the ones I viewed and some of which I dunno how they’ve chosen, but they’ve cleverly chosen related things. So suddenly you are not scrolling Facebook, you’re shopping on a shop you were interested before and it is very clever psychologically that it just changes your mode somehow into now I’m shopping

Paul:
And I think that the only platform that I’d actually not advertise on right now is X or Twitter because I think that the quality of ads and the types of products that are being advertised on that social platform right now are not as good. So I look at a lot of the products that are advertised and I either don’t like the advert or the kind of products not quite right for me. So I guess you do need to be a bit careful about where you’re going to reinforce that.

Katie:
Yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever engaged with an ad on Twitter. They just aren’t interesting. They’ve got it wrong somehow.

Paul:
They have, and obviously I think they used to be better platform maybe is degrade. I know you spend a lot of time on Twitter, you probably see more efforts than I do unless you pay for premium so you don’t have to look at them. But do use, so in the WordPress community, particularly gl, we’re building stuff actually, there’s a lot of opportunities for sponsorship and things like newsletters or what we’re doing. An influencer marketing is quite a big thing as well. Have you ever used or would you say that you’ve used social media influencers or sponsorship in that way to drive interest in one of your products?

Katie:
Not particularly successfully. Our products are very, very specific and our marketing has always worked best when we just make sure we are there for people that are searching for our solutions. So if somebody Googles WooCommerce product filter plugin, we want to be there, but if we do a more general influencer type advert, someone does a YouTube video about us, generally it’s not that likely that someone that’s looking for WooCommerce product filters in that moment is going to watch it and buy. And we’ve got 19 premium plugins as well. So it’s like, well, what do they focus on? So it would just be a kind of general brand awareness play about Barn2. And that’s not what gets most of our sales. We get most of our sales, like I say, from people searching for solutions and if they’re aware of us as a company, we might have more credibility, so they’re more likely to convert, but ultimately we just need to show that we meet their problem. So I think we’re a bit unusual in that respect because if you are selling something that people could buy at any time, like a clothing store where if they like the clothes, they’re going to buy it, they’re not like, right this week I’m going to buy a T-shirt and any other week I’m not going to buy a T-shirt. That’s not how it works. So I think it can work for other things, but not necessarily for us.

Paul:
So I did, we come across clients using social media. I’m always surprised at the cost of doing so, what they can charge based on their audience and actually how effective it’s, it’s a lot of money and it’s a bit of a gamble, but if you can get the right person, it’s obviously not going to take your brand and your brand image is quite important when you associate with somebody else outside of that, then I think that you’ve got a chance of really going viral with one particular product. I think it’s based on one particular product at a time, but yeah, I know that that works or some company. What’s

Katie:
Your view on Google ads, particularly for newer WooCommerce stores that maybe haven’t built up an organic profile yet?

Paul:
I think paid marketing is important for everyone, but I think it’s what adverts say. So I think there’s a lot of competition out there and it’s really hard to get seen. And there’s also a lot of people say ads don’t work and you need to spend a lot of money to do it. I think you’ve got to target your advert to the right audience. So for instance, if you are selling towns, for instance, your advert probably shouldn’t say we’ve got a large selection of bar pals or something like that. You should be trying to concentrate on the more niche elements in USP of your towels. So you might say that they’re handwoven eco-friendly towels and actually that’s going to find its own audience of people that are looking for that kind of thing in particular. So I think with Google Ads, I think it’s part of the strategy. It’s very short term, it’s very costly and it can get very costly as long as your margin’s right, as long as you know that if you spend a thousand pounds, you are going to make 2000 pounds in revenue and actually you you’re going to make the profit of two pounds. If you can get to that stage actually then it’s just feeding the ads because you can just carry on with that strategy all you like, but getting to that point is a little bit more difficult.

Katie:
I know some people have done it very successfully and others that have put lots of money in and never had anything back, so needs a bit of investment to get started.

Paul:
And I think it is all about that targeting. It’s just like what you do with your SEO organic SEO, making sure you’re targeting for the right solutions for the right. It’s a cheaper, quicker way of doing it. I do wonder how accurate the search ads statistics are and how many people are actually clicking on them versus bots. I think that’s always a worry. You can see clicks and nothing happens and you can’t always tie up the data. And obviously Google has so much off the market that you are beholden to them and you don’t really get a say. And I know the people that advertise a lot on Google, they’ve seen their cost rise over the past decade where they might have spent a million pounds on ads previously and they’re now spending 10 million pounds on ads to get exactly the same effect. But with that kind of paid advertising, it’s always about understanding your margin for doing that ad. As I say, if you know are going to spend X amount of money, but then that’s going to mean that you get X back. And as long as you’ve got your margin in there, you almost don’t want to turn that tap off as long as you’ve got products to sell because you know are making money every time you spend a pound you are going to get three pounds back, for instance, bounce.

Katie:
Yeah, that’s really good. Yeah.

Paul:
Also, I was just going to talk about that kind of more organic long tail SEO, because you do that really effectively with the stuff that you’re doing, but are you mainly blogging and then directed people to the store once they’ve come and read an article? Or are you using those SEA tactics in your product description and titles and things like that as well?

Katie:
Our product pages tend to rank relatively well anyway, without needing that much extra optimization because mainly our product names are very descriptive. They are exactly what the product does. They’re not marketing names, they just are what it does. WooCommerce product filters, WooCommerce product table. So that makes it a lot easier to rank. And a good thing about Google is that it recognizes that product pages and long form content are different things. So we will often have a long blog tutorial ranking together with the product page for the same keyword. They don’t tend to compete with each other, so we try to do both. But most of our SEO efforts go into long blog articles, which tend to be tutorials because of the type of products that we sell. And then as you say, they direct to the product page then?

Paul:
Yeah, sure. Do you see much from product videos from YouTube, for instance, do you see traffic coming from there?

Katie:
Yes, a lot. We hired a full-time YouTuber just to build our YouTube channel just over a year and a half ago now actually. And that has really grown. But we did that because even just for me doing videos with no kind of strategy, we were tracking regular sales from YouTube. So we identified that that was a good income stream for us. So now we are investing in it properly. And while it doesn’t bring in as much as our organic SEO, it’s a good backup. And I think it’s important to have multiple marketing channels which are generating sales in case something ever goes wrong with a Google algorithm change or something like that, that at least we know we’ve still got YouTube.

Paul:
Yeah, I think with physical products it’s quite important as well, but the unwrapping of products creates that borrow thing, doesn’t it? And your strain kind in social media plus the territory there again, where you might hire somebody to do a video and review your product, but that can be quite effective for certain types of products. What about affiliates? Do you use affiliates much?

Katie:
Yeah, we have an affiliate program with the best affiliates for us are people that are quite high profile in the industry, like WordPress blogs for example, that lots of people go to their site. WordPress blogs about WordPress I should say. And the best affiliates are people that are motivated to produce regular content about our plugins and we would advise them with keyword ideas and things like that and information about what works for other people. Whereas if we have to do everything, they’re not really engaged and it’s not really any better than having content on our own site. So we try to support them in really promoting the products their end.

Paul:
Yeah, there’s a lot of affiliate networks aren’t like Commission Junction and if it’s still called Commission Junction right now or Impact.com, where people will create niche sites or in particular areas and just be aiming at getting affiliate links, which is actually quite a helpful, useful source of traffic if you want to follow that route. Again, as long as the people that are talking about your products are the right kind of people and you’re not introducing any kind of toxicity into your own marketing, that’s quite importantly

Katie:
They need to add value, don’t they? Because if they’re just outranking you and you’ve got to pay them commission, you lose. But if they’re producing unique content, videos, whatever to get a wider audience to your product, then it’s worth paying their commission.

Paul:
And I think they can target niche audiences perhaps in a way that it’s very difficult for you to do just as a store owner because you’re probably casting a slightly wider net. So quite useful I think just to target those really niche audiences and get somebody else to work on that for you and then take a small commission if they do actually drive any signs.

Katie:
Yeah. Okay. So that’s been amazing. We’ve covered a lot of both the on page and off page elements of building a successful WooCommerce store. So this is basically just a small amount of what’s in the ebook. So you can get the free ebook marketers guide to WooCommerce from the filter.agency website. Paul, where on the website is it? Because the link’s quite long.

Paul:
Ah, that’s a really good call. So in our navigation we have a resources in the top navigation, we have a resources drop down, and within there we have a link to our enterprise guides and we have those enterprise marketers guides to a bunch of different types of things that are related to web. So WooCommerce is one of them. We’ve also done ones on personalization, sustainability, security, the WordPress platform. So it’s worth checking them all out. They’re all free. Obviously we ask you to register and we get an email address. We might talk to you in the future, but you don’t need to receive our emails if you don’t want to. That content is there for free to look at.

Katie:
Excellent. Thank you so much for coming on Do the Woo. Apart from Filter.agency where can people find you online?

Paul:
Oh, well I can be found on LinkedIn and I can be found on Twitter. I still call it Twitter, not X. I’m there, I post. I will also be around at WordCamp EU in June in Torino. So if you see me there, please do come up and say hello. I get a little bit anxious, so I like people to come to me. It’s easier. So please do come and say hello, and if you want to check out, I’ll plug in Personalized wp, you can go to personalizedwp.com. There’s a free plugin in the org repo into search, personalized p. And then the pro version is on our website where we have some tips and tricks on how you can segment users, how you can score people or a lead, and how you can build this profiles and then showing hard content.

Katie:
Excellent. Well thank you so much. Bye.

Paul:
Thank you. Bye-Bye.