Boost Your Conversion Rate With Fun Little Gifts
Hey I’m Shane, welcome to another issue of The CRO Weekly where each week I explore how to build a high converting Ecommerce store. If you’re not subscribed you join 1190(!) people that are right here:
Add to cart is only the beginning.
After that comes the checkout and with it, real commitment.
That’s why you’ll typically see a 50% drop-off at each step of the funnel.
50 People add to cart > 25 people reach checkout > 13 people purchase a product.
Most CRO work focuses on filling up the cart. But how do we get people to go through with their purchase?
One way is to use fun little gifts.
The psychology of free stuff
In his landmark book Influence, Robert Cialdini’s first principle of persuasion is reciprocity. It states that as humans we’re hard-wired to pay back debts.
The best study on this focused on tipping at restaurants. They wanted to see if giving a small gift at the end of a meal measurably impacted the tip a waitress received.
What they found is if a waitress provides 2 free mints at the end of a meal, the average tip increases by 14%. If instead they give one mint, start to walk away but then turn back and say “For you nice people, here’s an extra mint” the average tip increases by 23%.
What this tells us is that the gift doesn’t have to be extravagant. Something as small as a mint can make us feel indebted to our server. It just needs to be somewhat personalized and unexpected for it to be maximally effective.
So what does it look like to use reciprocity in practice?
Giving away fun little gifts
BumpBoxes is a subscription box company for expecting mothers. Being a subscription, getting people to commit is that much harder.
One day I noticed they’re running this offer:
They give you a very strong offer to fill in your email. 60% off, free shipping, and free gifts. Of course the free shipping and 60% off are extreme, but they’re also commonplace.
What caught my attention is the free gift set. When you fill in the form, they automatically add a few free gifts to your cart:
There’s quite a range from the small and simple door hanger, to the editable pregnancy announcement, to the coconut oil container. I don’t know about you but to me this seems like a whole lot of stuff to get for free with your first purchase.
Think about it from a customer’s perspective. The price tags listed next to these products ($3, $14.99, $10) all seem reasonable. Maybe you wouldn’t pay $15 for the pregnancy announcement but you could see some people might. And guess what, they just gave it to you for free. You didn’t even have to do anything!
Now let’s put on our Ecommerce hat for a second. You can’t see it, but that coconut oil is a 100ml container. You can buy a single 100ml container of coconut oil on Ali express for $2.30. In bulk, you’re looking at under $1 a container for something that’s not going to add to cost of shipping.
The editable announcement board, another dollar when you buy them in bulk. And the door hanger? You’re looking at pennies per hanger.
All in all, what looks like a free $30 worth of stuff, actually costs you a couple dollars. But it could be even cheaper.
Remember the restaurant study. The gift was a couple of mints. For context, the brand Dorsal Bracelets sells customers a ‘mystery sticker’ for $3:
If a sticker is worth $3, maybe you could offer a free sticker pack. The options for fun little gifts are practically endless.
One change I would make
The BumpBoxes offer is great, and I’m sure it converts really well, but there’s something to consider. When you put the free gifts behind an email capture, you’re no longer creating that feeling of reciprocity. You gave them the free gifts but in return they gave you their email address. They shouldn’t feel compelled to reciprocate.
So how can we do things differently? What if instead of adding these products on email capture, we simply added them as soon as someone added the product to their cart?
Here’s what the cart might look like in this case:
Notice that there’s no strings attached in the messaging. We’re not applying any pressure by saying this offer will expire (although that might be worth a try) and instead just giving these gifts because we feel like it.
Now we’re getting the reciprocity juices flowing. The best way for them to pay us back it to simply go through with their order.
Maybe if ordering wasn’t enough, they’ll even be more likely to leave a review.
That’s all for this week’s issue. If you want bite-sized content on design, CRO, and Ecommerce you can follow me on Twitter.
Hope you have a great weekend and a record-breaking Black Friday next week!
Recommended app this week: EasyGift
After almost every issue I get asked “is there a good app for this?” So I figured I would end off each issue with a recommended app or two.
This week, I’m recommending the app EasyGift. If you want to set up free-gift-with-purchase offers in Shopify this is the best way to do it. You can set rules that add or remove items based on certain cart parameters and you can also configure notifications that tell customers what gift they’re getting and why.