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How to Boost eCommerce Sales Using Interactive Content

Interactive content elevates content marketing. It’s a tool that accelerates the buyer’s journey, leading to an increase in your eCommerce sales.

Along with being powerful, it plays a strong supporting role – helping frame buyer needs in a way that portrays brands as value-driven and solution-oriented instead of sales-y.

And results have proven it to be highly effective too. Conversion rates are nearly 30% higher and bounce rates are 45% lower when you use interactive content as compared to standard landing pages.

Like various other industries, interactive content has managed to work its magic in the e-commerce sector as well. Want to see how? Well, here are all the reasons why you should use interactive content to boost your e-commerce sales.

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Firstly, Why Should You Use Interactive Content in eCommerce?

Interactive content is useful because it pinpoints exactly what buyers need. It helps identify specific pain points buyers have along their customer’ journey.

When you’ve clearly defined a pain point, you can deliver relief. Interactive content is a mechanism that not only helps you in identifying those pain points but delivers immediate relief too.

Interactive content is essential in the eCommerce business’s sales process because:

1. Buyers Want Personalized Content

77% of consumers have picked, recommended, or paid more for a brand that prioritizes personalized service or experience. While having a speedy website with great UX is essential for increasing your prospects, offering personalized content can position your brand for more paying customers.

Interactive content types such as calculators and personalization quizzes recommend your customers the products that fit them the best, thus helping them escape the paradox of choice.

2. Buyers Put Skin in the Game

Buyers move from a passive to an active role when interacting with tools. They become engrossed in the process of finding a solution to a pressing pain point. Hence, interactive tools like quizzes provide more stimulation than static content, making the process of shopping online more enjoyable.

Want some inspiration? Check this out! – Our Favorite 21 Marketing Quizzes of All Time

Research by Salesforce shows that 45% of consumers will switch brands if brands do not actively anticipate their needs. And, interactive content offers a tangible transformation that is immediately visible.

3. Instant Gratification Is a Major Driver

For example, a calculator can make a problem easier to understand for a buyer by offering quantitative data like retail pricing, ROI, savings, etc. – an intervention that goes a long way for buyers who don’t know what to purchase or why one product is better than another. Real-time value addition to users is one of the key benefits of using interactive content.

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Preview this calculator example

4. Earns Authority Faster

Instant gratification positions brands as solutions providers and trusted authorities. With value quickly realized, the buyer’s journey accelerates too. Hence, interactive content helps you generate more qualified leads –  a relationship that has a greater chance of leading to a sale.

Interactive Content and Understanding Your Buyer

Before you use interactive content to boost eCommerce sales, you must understand your buyer. Like all things marketing, a deep appreciation for what your buyer goes through along their journey will help you use your interactive content in a more strategic way.

This way, you’ll be able to bring ideas and interactive content tools to life in ways that make buyers attracted and engaged with your brand.

Here’s what you must do to know your buyer:

1. Explore Your Buyer Persona

Understanding your buyer starts with the development of a persona. You need to know what their pain points are. And because pain points, needs, and challenges evolve throughout the buyer’s journey, documenting what your buyer experiences is crucial.

Buyer Persona

Image: DigitalMarketer

DigitalMarketer’s customer avatar is an easy-to-use tool to help you narrow down your buyers’ challenges. As you consider what your buyers’ challenges are, turn to the buyers’ journey. Use the awareness, consideration, and decision stages to assign what you know about your buyers’ needs in order.

Remember: buyers want solutions to their challenges. Thus, you should design your interactive content keeping that in mind.

This brings us to the different states of the buyer.

2. Know Your Buyer States

You also need to understand what your buyer’s before and after states are in relation to addressing a specific pain point. The Before and After Grid is developed by DigitalMarketer as a smart and simple way to deliver true value to buyers.

It works by helping marketers identify buyer emotional states, challenges, needs, and desires before and after they interact with your interactive content.

Here’s an example of DigitalMarketer’s grid for their flagship product, DigitalMarketer HQ.

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Image: DigitalMarketer

How to Boost eCommerce Sales With Interactive Content?

Using interactive content is all about context. When using it to boost eCommerce sales, interactive content is useful for framing buyer pain points. Then, you can present your surplus military product as a solution for those concerns.

Here’s how to do that in 5 steps:

1. Identify Obstacles

Clearly define a pain point and assign a weight to it. Pain points are the obstacles your customers may face. You can identify those by doing usability testing with various usability testing tools. The bigger the obstacle you can remove from your buyer’s path, the easier it will be for them to continue along their journey faster.

Assigning a weight to a list of pain points is a matter of listing them. Next, prioritize your list in order, identifying which come first or in sequence.

PROBLEM:

For example, let’s assume that your buyer is in the market for a golf training program. Pain points your buyer might experience could be:

  • Overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information to remember before taking a swing
  • Concerned about their equipment and whether it needs an upgrade
  • Doubtful about whether this program is the right choice
  • – Afraid that they might not be physically fit for the sport

SOLUTION:

How would you prioritize this list? Here’s what it would look like and how you can tackle them with the right interactive content:

  • Remove the overwhelming feeling caused by the sheer amount of information with an outcome quiz on what they need to know before taking a swing.
  • Address the doubt about whether this program is the right choice with an ROI calculator to help them understand the value they can get out of your product.
  • Cover the fear that they might not be physically fit for the sport with a fitness quiz and follow up with recommendations of exercises to help improve their physical fitness.
  • Speak to the concern about their equipment and whether it needs an upgrade with an assessment to gauge the quality of their equipment and give product recommendations if they need it.

As you explore your list, go deeper. Determine what the cause of pain is. You can even make a flowchart in Word or Google Docs to map out all the different factors that may be contributing to your pain. Knowing what and why a problem exists helps you better frame a solution and later pick a type of interactive content to use.

2. Identify Before and After States

We explored ‘before’ and ‘after’ states earlier. They help address the pain and deliver relief. Take the example of the ‘before’ state of prospective online yoga students. It involves a feeling of uncertainty about the value of the yoga classes and skepticism about pricing.

The after state is about certainty. This includes knowing they got a good deal, what their fitness routine will look like, and how much value they’ll get in the form of on-demand and live classes.

Bulldog Online is a company that offers online yoga classes. They chose to incentivize buyers by offering an interactive spin wheel and a chance to win a discount or an extra month off their monthly subscription to their yoga OTT platform.

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3. Pick the Right Tool

There are different types of interactive content, but not all are suitable for every pain point. Choose a tool that aligns with addressing the pain point in your first step.

For example, you’re trying to sell more of your new book. The book helps entrepreneurs manage their expenses, helping them save more money each month. Then your best bet is to provide quantitative value.

Using a calculator that gives them an idea of their expenses and savings is better suited than, maybe, a giveaway. The calculator can show the potential value of future savings based on the education your book provides.

On the other hand, a quiz or an assessment would be ideal when helping buyers uncover a less obvious or more qualitative solution like which dress to wear to a summertime dinner party.

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4. Map-out Your Interactive Content Experience

Create a map of interactions your buyer will experience with the tool. For instance, if it’s a calculator, what information will your buyer enter? What questions will you ask?

Take for example CareOf, an online store that sells supplements. To sell their products, CareOf helps buyers figure out what they need through a series of questions.

CareOf’s questionnaire is a little complex but saves time. It delivers insights that buyers would otherwise have to spend hours searching for online.

how to boost eCommerce sales

There are tons of interactive content options to choose from. Whichever you opt for, make your tool as engaging as possible and ensure it is aligned with your buyer’s problem.

Need some inspiration?

Read “Boost Audience Engagement With These 21 Types of Interactive Content”. It’s filled with 21 examples of interactive tools in action to help you find yours.

5. Design the Next Step

Interactive content can be used at any stage of the buyer’s journey. During awareness, your goal is to capture leads; in the consideration stage, to educate; and in the decision stage, to convert. As you create your map, establish what your buyer’s next step is along the way and create interactive content for each stage.

For eCommerce stores, you have the chance to offer solution-based interactive content engagement. BullDog Yoga’s OTT marketing strategy continues with an email sequence designed to get you to watch your first class once you’ve spun the wheel. CareOf makes recommendations on supplements that buyers can purchase after completing a questionnaire.

Wondering how you can make such interactive content for your website too? Check out Outgrow’s free trial today!

What Happens After Creating Interactive Content?

Growth is the goal, be it more leads or conversions. But what happens when buyers don’t bite? When a key action is not performed by a buyer, there’s still an opportunity to help buyers along their journey.

When using interactive content to boost eCommerce sales, you can leverage retargeting. Retargeting can be part of an email marketing strategy. In fact, you can add engaging interactive content like surveys, polls, quizzes here as well. These tools can be embedded into email sequences, picking up from where buyers left off.

Read more about interactive emails here.

Where buyers fail to become leads, using retargeting ads will help drive more interest in what you have to offer.

This concept map visually represents the key components and relationships associated with the concept of retargeting. Always align your retargeting campaign with the next step in the buyer’s journey.

Which Tool Will You Use?

As we wrap up this post, we hope that you got some interesting ideas on how to boost eCommerce sales. But while you find different ways to use interactive content to up your eCommerce game, remember that buyers want personalized experiences. Hence, smartly choose the content type that would fetch you the desired results.

Make your brand’s experience more endearing by delivering relief and providing real-time value with different interactive content. When you get that right, you’ll be well on your way to creating transformative experiences for your buyers. So, which interactive tool are you going to use? Let us know!

Author’s Bio

Amir

Amir Shahzeidi
Amir is the SEO Lead at Uscreen, an all-in-one video monetization and OTT platform provider that empowers video entrepreneurs and creators to monetize their content and build thriving businesses around their videos.

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