If you are doing cause marketing, it should lift online conversion by at least 19%.
If it hasn’t, then you are probably making one of three visibility mistakes.
Everybody wants a higher sales conversion rate on their website.
If you are in marketing, it’s the number one metric you’re measured on.
Be it order conversion rate or lead conversion rate – you’re measured on it.
Cause marketing is a proven tactic to raise conversion, usually by 19% or more.1
Are you seeing that level of conversion lift?
Assuming you got your cause persona matching correct, you should be seeing the conversion lift.
When you incorporate a cause consumers care about, consumers will:
Brands that do cause marketing typically have at least one nonprofit they work with, but more often than not, they work with multiple nonprofits to match their multiple customer personas.
You’ll find however, that they can still fall victim to one of these three mistakes.
So if you see yourself in this group, don’t take it too hard.
Instead, be confident that if you fix these mistakes, you’ll see an immediate lift on conversion.
And, great news: improving your overall site conversion always leads to an increase in donations to the causes you choose to support.
The featured, or most customer persona-aligned cause, isn’t displayed immediately on your store when a visitor arrives.
Below is a typical ecommerce site navigation bar.
You’ll notice the different categories like new, outerwear, and shoes.
This particular ecommerce company (we’ll keep them anonymous) works with seven (!) nonprofits to optimize social engagement and cause marketing.
They have a LARGE online presence.
On the main nav bar, they have a huge opportunity to align their brand with an impactful nonprofit they support.
But you’d never know that they support charitable causes.
There’s no mention of it anywhere.
Lots of wasted space on both sides of the centered logo.
A simple, clickable image that says “We support (Charity Logo)” would have an immediate impact on conversion.
It would intrigue consumers and would inspire them to learn more about how your company supports this cause.
Remember, consumers want to see that you care and what you care about.
Show them immediately.
Don’t believe us?
A/B test it.
It works every time.
This mistake is twofold.
The core mistake is not reinforcing your company’s relationship with a nonprofit throughout the product shopping experience.
Best practices include nonprofit relationship reinforcement as the prospective customer shops on your site.
First, when a consumer navigates within your site, keep the banner above the navigation results in view and keep your nonprofit and its logo in the banner.
Secondly, you can really supercharge your results by aligning your nonprofits with multiple customer personas.
We discuss the value of persona-based cause marketing here, but here’s a quick summary sentence:
Align your products and customer personas with nonprofits that match the cause desires of your customer personas.
The more customer personas you market to, the more nonprofit causes you should incorporate into your marketing.
So, if you sell men’s and women’s running shoes, when your customer “signals” what they are interested in through navigation or search, you should change the nonprofit they see in navigation to the nonprofit they would most care about.
In the running shoe example, Free to Run is a nonprofit devoted to using outdoor sports (primarily running) to increase girls’ and young women’s leadership and wellness.
A savvy marketer would feature Free to Run on their product pages for women’s running shoes.
Conversely, if your prospective customer navigates to a men’s running shoe product, Band of Runners might be a better cause to show them in their customer journey.
Again, we aren’t just being sales-conversion motivated.
Better conversion = more donations at checkout.
Deploy best practices of matching your personas to causes throughout the customer journey and you’ll see improved online sales conversion.
You can also use our tool to pick the persona-matched, vetted nonprofits that meet your business goals.
Click on the button to schedule a quick intro on our persona-matching nonprofit tool.
Once a customer adds a product to their cart or begins the checkout process, it’s not uncommon for ecommerce merchants to drop the reference to the nonprofit until the very last step in the checkout process.
This is typically done with a round up or donation button at the last moment before hitting submit for the purchase.
But consider all the data we provided:
Consumers…
…when you incorporate a cause they care about.
So why show that connection on the last page of the checkout experience?
The average cart abandon rate is (hold on to your seat!), 69.99%!4
If there’s any place during the shopping experience where you want to reinforce your commitment to cause marketing, it’s during the ENTIRE checkout process!
So, keep your persona-based nonprofit logo prominent throughout the whole checkout experience and assure your customers they will have a chance to roundup or donate to their favorite cause at checkout.
Then, make it easy and prominent at checkout for them to donate.
Change integrates with all major shopping carts and ecommerce platforms, including Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Squarespace, OpenCart, as well as custom applications.
Follow these three conversion best practices to supercharge your cause marketing conversion.
You’ll immediately enjoy site conversion improvements and, in addition to higher sales, you’ll drive increased donations for your sponsored nonprofits.
It’s a win-win!
Sources
Note: Change has no affiliation or relationship with Free To Run or Band of Runners. They are used here for examples only. They appear to be worthy causes and we recommend you check them out.
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