Low-Lift, High-Impact Commerce Tactics to Boost Conversion

Holidays and seasonal sales bring a nice traffic boost to your site. But are you doing everything you can to turn all those extra visitors into paying customers? The truth is, you might be missing out on opportunities to boost conversion. The good news: These opportunities can be fast and easy to implement.

As a Value Delivery Manager for Commerce Cloud, I’ve seen my fair share of successful ecommerce launches and optimization endeavors. But I’ve also identified a recurring trend: Many businesses are, quite simply, missing out on opportunities to increase revenue. More specifically, they are underutilizing a few accessible, impactful commerce features. These are the functionalities I suggest you leverage today to enhance conversion rates and increase sales.

These are important strategies to consider for your website regardless of your ecommerce engine, but I also provide actionable, in-app steps and quick demos for businesses that use Commerce Cloud.

• Customer groups
• Homepage banners
• Content and marketing
• Merchandising
• Search and sorting rules
• Product recommendations
• Campaigns
• A/B testing

Customer groups are one of the most valuable yet underutilized functionalities in an ecommerce toolbox. Why would you give everyone a generic experience on your site when you can tailor content, promotions, and recommendations to customers’ specific preferences and shopping habits — in just a few clicks?

If you’re gearing up for a high-traffic moment like a holiday or sales event, customer groups can play a significant role in increasing conversions. A little personalization goes a long way. For example, you might create the following customer groups along with targeted content to entice shoppers to buy.

• Loyal customers: Create a group that includes your most valuable shoppers. You can specify this by defining groups based on number purchases throughout the year, average order value of $X or higher, or shoppers who have made a single purchase of $X or more.
• Engaged non-buyers: Most potential customers signal interest before they make a purchase. You can increase follow-through with high propensity shoppers by adding them to a customer group and personalizing their experience on your site. To do this, create a group that includes folks who have visited your site multiple times in a short period or spent a significant amount of time on your site.
• High intent first-time visitors: Key moments like sales and holidays bring in many first-time visitors. But certain first-timers show signals of high intent, like browsing multiple product pages in one session, or viewing key conversion pages (like checkout pages or sizing guides).

Based on the groups you create and the conditions you set, you can deliver tailored content, campaigns, and promotions to different users.

Once you create customer groups, you can define and personalize the way each segment experiences your site. One way you can do this? Homepage banners.

Small tweaks to your homepage can have an outsized impact on conversion rates, especially during peak traffic moments. As you prepare for holidays and sales events, your homepage banner should be a major consideration. After all, this large design element and key message represents most shoppers’ first impression of your brand.

Some commerce platforms, like Commerce Cloud, make it easy to create, personalize, and adjust homepage banners in just a few clicks, without engaging creative or technical resources. It’s as easy as:

1. Select your media. Choose the image or video you want to display in your banner.
2. Write your text. Enter details of the message or offer you’d like to promote.
3. Define your call to action. Choose a button and populate it with a drive-to link.

Viola! You’ve created a homepage banner. The best part? You can personalize them by customer group, ensuring you get the right messages to the right segments. For example, you can give loyal customers VIP treatment by announcing early access to a sale or touting loyalty program incentives. You can also entice first-time buyers with a discount on an initial purchase.

Content and marketing strategies can make or break the success of high-traffic moments on your site. Proper placement and the adaptability of your messaging, promotions, and coupons will entice shoppers to buy and create a sense of urgency. Here are a few features that can help you make the most of sales and holidays:

Promotions help you quickly launch special offers like percentage discounts, fixed-price offers, BOGO deals, free shipping, and more. The right commerce platform makes it easy to schedule start and end times for specific promotions (which means your teams won’t need to manually activate deals at midnight). You can also target promotions by customer group, region, or device.

Coupons allow you to create single-use, multi-use, or public codes, then track redemption rates and user behavior. Coupons help build urgency and reduce cart abandonment, especially during high traffic moments.

Page designer makes it easy for marketers, merchandisers, and content teams to create, edit, and manage pages using drag-and-drop tools. With reusable components like banners, carousels, product grids, and CTAs, you can quickly build tailored landing pages for new campaigns, categories, or high-traffic moments

For merchandising teams, high traffic can mean high stress. This is especially true for teams managing a range of campaigns and promotions for multi-site, multi-geography brands. Fortunately, out-of-the-box merchandising functionalities can take the edge off.

Product sets are a simple but powerful tool that helps merchandisers quickly create and showcase themed or curated product groups — without developer support. Merchandisers can either hand-pick items to curate together, or create dynamic sets based on specific rules, like brand, category or availability. To make the most out of a high-traffic event like back-to-school season, a retailer might create a “back-to-school” essentials product set that includes items like backpacks, headphones, and writing supplies.

Scheduled merchandising allows you to pre-plan changes to product assignments, sort orders, category visibility, and more. This is crucial during high-traffic moments when merchandising teams are spread thin. It ensures your site and offers stay fresh, relevant and accurate, without too much manual intervention. For example, a merchandiser can use the scheduling tool to swap in a new “Deal of the Day” every 24 hours during Cyber Week.

Manual merchandising comes in handy when teams want to maintain direct control over certain aspects during high-traffic periods. For instance, if a certain product has a viral moment on TikTok, merchandisers can manually push it to the top of category pages for extra visibility. Merchandisers can also manually create special categories for holiday-specific items or gift guides.

These features enable teams to work smarter, not harder to boost conversions when it matters most.

Did you know that customers who use the search function on ecommerce sites are 6.4 times more likely to convert and generate revenue? Shoppers using site search have a stronger intent to purchase, they’re looking for specific products, and they know what they want.

That’s why search and sorting rules are such an important ecommerce functionality. They dictate which products show up at the top of results pages, and help you get the right items in front of the right shoppers at the right time. Here are a few high-impact ways you can implement search and sorting rules to quickly boost conversion during peak traffic.

• Product attributes: Highlight items based on various product attributes (such as price, popularity, or rating). During a high traffic event, you can easily elevate products tagged as "on sale" or “limited time” to align with timely marketing campaigns. You can also sort products based on availability, whether you have high-stock items you want to sell or low-stock items you want to preserve.
• Active data attributes: Personalize search experiences based on customer live or real-time signals from customer interactions, product performance, or system events. For instance, you can cash in on trending products by creating a sorting rule that automatically prioritizes items with the most views or highest add-to-cart rates.
• Dynamic attributes: Unlike static product attributes (like color, size, or brand), dynamic attributes are calculated in real-time based on shopper behavior, site activity, or inventory. They can include metrics such as how quickly a product is selling, stock levels, percentage of shoppers who buy after viewing, and more. Include example here

Campaigns bring marketing and merchandising efforts together. You can think of a campaign as a container that includes all the features listed above (like banners, content, search and sorting rules, product recommendations, merchandising, and promotions). When you package all these experiences into a campaign, teams can schedule them for specific timeframes and tailor them to different customer groups.

During the most critical times of your retail calendar, automated campaigns are especially useful to boost conversions and take advantage of high traffic. They help improve the shopping experience on your site, drive higher engagement, basket size, and conversion rates, and reduce manual effort.

Once you utilize commerce features to boost conversions, the final step is to test the ROI of all your efforts.

A/B testing helps merchandisers and marketers turn guesswork into data-driven decisions. This is especially important during high-stakes periods like holidays, promotions, sales events, and product launches. Your commerce platform should make it easy to assign promotions, content, or sorting rules to an A/B test using common qualifiers, like customer groups.

Here’s an example: Imagine you’re a merchandiser tasked with increasing the sell-through rate of Back to School inventory by 15%. By running an A/B test, you can determine which promotional messaging leads to higher sales. Do more customers convert when they see “BOGO” or “25% off”? Running tests on specific aspects of your site, like homepage banner messaging, product sets, or campaigns helps you optimize over time.

Based on A/B test results, you can adjust different elements of your customer experience to make sure you get the most out of every holiday and sales event.