Now that we have identified your donation personas (Step 1), chosen your targeted first nonprofit (Step 2), established a relationship with your preferred nonprofit (Step 3), and identified the methods you want to run to lift your ecommerce conversion, average order value (AOV), and lifetime value (LTV) (Step 4)...
We are ready to walk through the steps you will want to take to increase conversion.
This is Step 5 in the process. If you haven’t completed the previous steps, please go back and walk through them. This process is simple, but it’s necessary to follow each step sequentially to optimize your results.
- Picking your donation persona
- Choosing the right charity
- Establishing a co-marketing relationship with a nonprofit
- Choosing and testing the best donation option
- Conversion best practices
- Compliance
- Improving LTV and Average Order Size
- Marketing the relationship overall
- Multiple personas
- Effectiveness audit
In Step 5 of this Master Class, we are going to teach you the:
- Importance of visibility at the outset
- Importance of visibility throughout the shopping experience
- Importance of consistent messaging in the checkout process
- How to increase your company donations –to increase your conversion
Assuming you got your cause-persona matching correct in Step 1 & Step 2, you have set yourself up for a dramatic conversion lift by partnering with a nonprofit.
But communication of the relationship throughout the shopping process is critical to lifting conversion on overall sales.
When you incorporate a cause consumers care about, consumers unfailingly will:
- convert better,1
- buy more and,2
- stay a customer longer3
Importance of visibility at the outset
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 company (we’ll keep them anonymous) works with seven (!) nonprofits to optimize social engagement and cause marketing. They do over $250 million in online revenue, have 5.1 million website visitors a month, a low bounce rate – but unfortunately, are not enjoying the full benefits of partnering with nonprofits.
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 this 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.
Pro Tip: Allow the customer to mouse over the nonprofit logo, but DO NOT make the logo clickable to the nonprofit website – we never want a customer to click away from your site before converting. That being said, DO give them adequate information about the nonprofit, like the mission statement or the community they serve.
Importance of visibility throughout the shopping experience
To optimize conversion, it's critical to emphasize your company’s relationship with a nonprofit throughout the customer shopping experience.
Best practices include nonprofit relationship reinforcement as the prospective customer shops on your site.
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.
Another tip to supercharge your results is to align the nonprofits you choose with multiple customer personas. We discuss the value of persona-based cause marketing here, but here’s a quick summary: align your products and customer personas with nonprofits that match the interests of your customer personas.
The more customer personas you market to, the more nonprofit causes you should incorporate into your marketing.
For example: 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.
Free to Run is a nonprofit devoted to using outdoor sports (primarily running) to develop girls’ and young women’s leadership skills and improve their health & wellness. A savvy marketer would feature Free to Run on their product pages for women’s running shoes since it aligns with those products.
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.
Note: we aren’t being solely sales-conversion motivated. Better conversion on your site results in more donations collected for the end nonprofit!
Deploy the 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.
