14 Best Brand Management Tools To Improve Your eCommerce CRO

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Most eCommerce shoppers are open to buying more than the product they originally made them come to your site. But you will only be able to tempt customers to add a few extra bargains to their basket if you have optimized your site for conversion.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) increases the number of visitors to a site that will ultimately make a purchase or carry out any action you want them to.

The average CRO for sites is around 2.35%, which equates to approximately 1 in 40 visitors. If you can improve that percentage, you could increase your CRO by 3-5 times.

Intriguing, right?

With those dollar signs in your eyes, it’s about time you took a closer look at your CRO. Instead of providing long-term strategies that will help but will take some time, here are some shortcuts instead: the 10+ best brand management tools that will help you improve CRO.

What is your Conversion Rate

A conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to a site or page that completes a particular goal. So any conversion rate optimization tool aims to improve this percentage. 

Conversion rates are calculated by simply taking the number of conversions and dividing that by the number of total ad interactions you track to a conversion during the same period. For example, if you had 50 conversions from 1,000 interactions, your conversion rate would be 5%, since 50 ÷ 1,000 = 5%.

But what is this ‘goal’?

While we usually think that a conversion is someone buying for eCommerce stores, some other common conversion goals that you can track include: 

  • Submitting information (lead)
  • Calling a business
  • Signing up for a newsletters
  • Creating an account 
  • Downloading an asset
  • Engaging with your site (e.g. time on site)

While a purchase goal is usually the number one goal for an eCommerce brand, you can differentiate between macro and micro conversions: 

  • Macro: a macro conversion is a primary goal for an eCommerce store – this would be selling a product. 
  • Micro: A micro conversion is a goal that helps facilitate the path to a primary goal. For example, signing up for a mailing list will improve customer loyalty and future purchases. 

What are Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Tools

CRO tools consist of various software applications that enable marketers to run A/B tests, analyze user behavior and the website’s performance, and build user engagement and loyalty.

The tools help you understand why your visitors aren’t converting into leads, identify possible changes, and test those changes to improve the conversion rate. Ultimately, they will maximize the efficiency of your marketing efforts.

But what makes a good conversion rate (CRO) tool? 

Good optimization tools should be: 

  • Easy to set up. I don’t know about you, but if I’m spending all my time trying to set up the tool, my time is diverted away from what matters – optimizing my site.
  • Performant. Store performance is a critical optimization issue; good apps understand this and minimize the impact on the overall customer experience.
  • They are focused on conversion. This should go without saying, but if you install a tool and find that it isn’t meaningfully helping you, stay focused and get rid of it.

Popular CRO Tools to Improve your Ecommerce Store

User Experience – User Engagement

1. Wishpond – Best for Building Email Lists and Email Automation

Wishpond

The list of eCommerce marketing tools to improve your CRO wouldn’t be complete without Wishpond. You will understand the importance of choosing tools wisely if you are a startup company with a limited budget. 

If you need a tool that will help your CRO in more ways than one, Wishpond is an excellent choice.

Wishpond is a comprehensive digital eCommerce marketing tool that can give you everything to help refine and improve your conversion process to drive better results for your business. 

Some key features essential in improving CRO are the abandoned cart emails, which can help recover sales, pop-ups to convert more traffic on your website, and an advanced lead management tool that can help you effectively target your best leads.

2. Paperform – Best for User Engagement

Paperform
Paperform

To improve conversion, especially in social media, you need to work on engagement.

And the easiest way to boost engagement is by, well, engaging more on social platforms. Don’t just run marketing campaigns but interact with your followers. PaperForm’s quiz maker helps eCommerce businesses create branded, fully customizable quizzes, surveys and forms that are fun and engaging. 

People love quizzing themselves, so publishing a few head-scratching questions should direct more web traffic to your site and improve your conversion rates. You can also use one of their feedback forms and form analytics to gain deeper insights into your customers’ behavior.

Play around with Paperform’s one-question-at-a-time mode and other intelligent features. Add progress bars, a ranking or scoring field, or use one of their quiz templates to create a more conversational and intuitive experience for customers—particularly on mobile devices. You can even use their share link generator to amplify your reach on social. You can make this share link generator yours, brand it with your logo and messaging, and offer it to your audience as a free, fun quiz.

Brand Insight Tools

3. Latana – Best for Brand tracking

Latana
Latana

Consumers purchase from companies where they feel a connection with their brand. And to improve CRO through branding, a company needs analytics where they can gain valuable insights into how their target audience thinks about their brand.

Latina is AI-powered brand tracking software that provides regular insightful insights that will go deep into your brand.

What’s most important here is that Latina shows you how your target audience converts through the brand funnel. All you need to do is indicate which target audience, brands, and markets you’re interested in analyzing. Then the software will do the rest.

It will help you recognize where things are going right, pain points, and, thanks to the comparison function, understand how the competition is performing with the same audience.

4. Brand Mentions – Best for Customer Loyalty 

Brand Mentions
Brand Mentions

Hashtag marketing is one of the newest ways to increase conversion rates. Studies show that posts with relevant hashtags resulted in a 70.14% increase in likes compared to those without hashtags. All it involves is some careful monitoring of social channels. After this initial monitoring, you can use the data collected to analyze what all those whisperings mean and how you can use them to improve your online reputation.

No doubt you already have a social media presence and are using hashtags, but are you analyzing results to better tailor your marketing towards the customers mentioning you?

Brand Mention’s hashtag tracker allows you to monitor your hashtags to see how they’re doing. It’s also super simple to track trending tags to see which ones are the most relevant for your brand to join in with.

For instance, if you follow the latest viral tags, you might notice one that suits your brand and that your audience is interacting with. Jumping on board this kind of hashtag could quickly raise your profile amongst those in your target audience. They might not have seen your previous marketing or branding, so here’s one extra way to target them.

User Experience Tools – Usability Testing

Many online stores struggle with conversion rates for various reasons, but one constant is often a poor user experience (UX). In fact, 60% of people said that usability is the most important web design characteristic for online shopping.  

If your store isn’t presenting high-quality content, product offerings, or customer journey, then your customers might lose interest and abandon their shopping carts before making a purchase.

We all want to nail the perfect performance and drive conversion rates to meet our sales goals. Adding usability testing CRO tools that map your customer journey, create personas and analyze touchpoints is the way to reach these goals. 

5. Mouseflow – Tracking User Journey 

Mouseflow
Mouseflow

If your brand has difficulty converting web users, Mouseflow could be the missing piece of your puzzle.

This tool lets you see users’ behavior by replaying the entire customer experience on your site. You’ll be able to see any sticking points that are preventing conversions. This will take all the guesswork out of what’s hindering your conversion rates, such as Javascript errors and broken navigation, so you’ll have a clear idea of optimizing.

6. Ethnio – Best for Researching Target Audience

Ethnio
Ethnio

When it comes to testing your brand’s UX experience, testing on your target audience is the way to go, as this will show you what the people you’re aiming your brand at will think about your site.

If they have an easy time navigating around and quickly find what they’re looking for, then there’s a strong chance they’ll convert and make a purchase.

If you struggle to find the right people for your tests, it’s a good idea to sign up to Ethnio, which does all the research recruiting for UX testers. So you and your team can focus on setting up tests and analyzing data rather than getting caught up with who is taking part!

7. WebEngage – Best for Personalized eCommerce Experiences

WebEngage
WebEngage

Creating personalized experiences for your customer will shorten the path to purchase and increase your conversion rates.

WebEngage knows that personalized communications are vital in bringing new customers on board and can help you get yours right. There are numerous ways to use this creative tool, from creating contextual campaigns to improving engagement through push notifications and in-app messages.

WebEngage also features a brilliant analytics section, so you can see insights into which personalization efforts are working and which could do with going back to the drawing board.

After using this tool, you and your whole marketing team should come away with a clear idea of keeping your audience as engaged as possible!

8. AB Tasty – Best For A/B Tests 

AB Tasty
AB Tasty

One of the biggest mistakes eCommerce merchants make when it comes to CRO is relying on a one-size-fits-all strategy and assuming that it will work for all customers. You need to know that your customers have a good experience dealing with your brand. If they aren’t, they won’t convert and will ultimately migrate to your competitors in search of a better and easier experience. 

AB Tasty is a tool for marketing and production teams that allows them to test different customer segments and optimize the customer environment.

Once you’ve launched your website and eCommerce platform, there’s no way of knowing how the overall experience is for web users unless you test it yourself.

Using AB Tasty server-side experimentation and AI-powered personalization, you can get to grips with your brand’s user experience and ensure it’s up to scratch. That means customers will easily find the products they’re after, and there’s a far smaller chance of them getting frustrated with your site and going off to competitor brands.

User Experience Tools – Heat mapping and scrolling

9. Hotjar – Best heatmap

Hotjar
Hotjar

Hotjar analyzes your site without giving you any confusing numbers. Instead, it’ll serve you up a website heatmap so you can analyze customer behavior and instantly see which parts of the site are popular with web users.

Used by marketers, product teams, and UX designers, this tool cleverly removes any guessing and badly interpreted data.

Hotjar can also show you where, if anywhere, potential customers drop off along your conversion funnel. Tightening the overall sales funnel will help move consumers along the process, quickly transforming them from web users to customers.

All of these tools make the process of CRO easy. You’ll find they massively reduce the man-hours of manually combing the web for data and then picking through it to analyze.

Once you’ve worked on the CRO, you’ll find that web users become active customers, and sales start to increase. A good CRO means you’ll also spend less to get those sales.

10. UXPressia – Best for visualizing customer journey

UXPressia
UXPressia

Sample eCommerce buyer journey mapped in UXPressia

Attracting eCustomers is half the battle, the other half is providing the best experience to develop long-lasting relationships with them? 

UXPressia is a collaborative platform full of CX/UX expertise, ready-to-go templates, a toolset for persona & map creation, and free events for human-centered people. It utilizes visual storytelling to understand data, build buyer profiles, visualize their journeys, and do strategic planning with impact maps. 

Knowing your customers is a way to create the most relevant content, identify right channels for outreach, optimize your e-store to ease the enrollment flow, and find areas of improvement. 

11. Crazy Egg – Best for reporting 

Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is another excellent user behavior tool to add to your quiver. Like Hotjar, it provides all the usual mapping and recording features. Heat maps and session recordings can help you identify friction points on your website, while feedback tools give you access to the thoughts of real users.

Unlike Hotjar, Crazy Egg’s scroll maps show how long visitors spend on specific elements. In contrast, Hotjar only shows how far a visitor scrolls.

One of its most notable features is its ability to visualize user behavior.

Crazy Egg offers five visual reports to understand user behavior within your store, including “click percent reports” and it’s signature “confetti snapshots”. You can determine whether your Buy Now buttons are in the right spot, track ad campaign content, and record entire user sessions. It also has a built-in A/B testing tool to determine what changes will result in the highest conversion rates.   

Crazy Egg integrates with all your favorite CMS and platforms, including WordPress, Wix, Shopify, and Squarespace.

Analytics Tools 

12. Woopra – Best for Improving Cart Abandonment 

Woopra
Woopra

Knowledge is power when it comes to CRO. With this in mind, it’s worth signing up to use Woopra. The team at Woopra knows that sifting through data and analytics can be super time-consuming, so they’ve created this efficient tool that does all the hard work for you.

Tracking and unifying brand data is made more accessible than before. You can then use this to analyze the customer journey, retention, segmentation, and many other valuable aspects of your eCommerce campaigns.

Once you’ve got this data snapshot, you’ll see your conversion rate clearly. You will see the best ways to increase engagement and CRO, whether buying a product, downloading a PDF, or subscribing to a newsletter.

13. Google Analytics – Best all-around analytics

Google Analytics
Google Analytics

This tool probably doesn’t need any explanation, with nearly 29 million websites relying on Google Analytics. Considering the fact that Google happens to be the dominant source of traffic for virtually every website on the internet, using a service provided by the same company is surely a very good idea.

GA is Google’s web analytics software that tracks traffic patterns and visitor behavior in real-time, including referrals, sessions, and goal conversions, as well as where you’re falling short—such as what pages have high bounce rates and where visitors exit your site. 

14. Google Optimize – Best free analytics

Google Optimize
Google Optimize

Google Optimize is a free website optimization tool part of the Google Marketing Platform suite. The tool helps online web admins to increase visitor satisfaction through ongoing tests of different content. It offers A/B/, split URL multivariate testing to reduce your bounce rates. Similar to other tools in the category, its WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor enables you to make changes without coding requirements.

 While Google Optimize is suitable for small businesses, its enterprise version, Google Optimize 360 lets you run up to 100 experiments simultaneously. Optimize 360 also offers more advanced and granular segmentation capabilities.

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Final Thoughts

Sometimes finding the right eCommerce marketing tool can be overwhelming, so what’s next?

First, have another scan through this list of brand management tools to see which could be the best bet for your site and CRO efforts.

Please take a look with your team to get their input too. After all, they’ll be the ones that are working with these tools.

Most in this list feature free trials, so you might want to try them before you buy. During the trial, you’ll see exactly how the tool works and whether the benefits will work for website commerce and your overall CRO. Once you’ve test-driven a few, see which provides you with the most bang for your buck.

Don’t just stop there when you notice an improvement in your eCommerce CRO. Continued efforts will prevent any future dips and make your site incredibly efficient in converting web traffic into sales.

amir

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