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 chosen the best donation options for testing (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.
The ten key steps are as follows:
In Step 5 of this Master Class, we are going to teach you the:
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:
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.
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.
Once a customer adds a product to their cart or begins the checkout process, it’s important to maintain the visual connection to the nonprofit until the very last step in the checkout process. Consider the data we provided:
Consumers…
…when you incorporate a cause they care about. Once you have made that association, hold that connection through every step of the sale lifecycle.
The average cart abandon rate is (hold on to your seat!) 69.99%!5 If there’s any place during the shopping experience where you want to reinforce your commitment to your chosen nonprofit it’s during the checkout process!
Keep your persona-based nonprofit logo prominent throughout the whole checkout experience and assure your customers they will be supporting their chosen cause. Then, make it easy and prominent at checkout for them to donate.
When you partner with a nonprofit, you inherently enhance metrics like conversion rates, average order value (AOV), and customer lifetime value (LTV).
This is largely because consumers tend to form a connection with your business when you demonstrate a commitment to customer-aligned causes.
Therefore, you are economically engaged in these partnerships, either through matching donations or contributing directly to their partnered nonprofit, the more pronounced the benefits in terms of conversion, AOV, and LTV.
The depth of your investment in these charitable relationships signals to customers your genuine support for the cause – in turn, encouraging them to deepen their engagement with your brand.
Make sure you test donation methods wherein your company contributes financially to the chosen nonprofit. Examples of donation activations include matching donations and percentage of sales being donated.
From a strict economic analysis, these methods almost always increase conversion and AOV in excess of the incremental cost of company donations. In other words: it’s worth the financial investment!
Follow these conversion best practices to supercharge your ecommerce cause marketing conversion. You’ll immediately enjoy site conversion improvements and, in addition to higher sales, you’ll drive increased donations for your selected nonprofits.
It’s a win-win!
*Results may vary depending on your deployment, usage, adherence to best practices, customer personas and demographics. Estimates of performance based on internal data, and various external marketing studies and surveys.
Examples and brands in the Ten Step Ecommerce Master Class are often, but not always, customers of Change. We try to show best examples of best practices in this Master Class, which sometimes includes businesses which are not (yet ☺) Change customers. We have no affiliation with any of the company or nonprofit examples that we show.
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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