The impact of communication on your conversion rate

Communication has the power to fulfill multiple objectives: improve your company's reputation, increase your brand awareness, differentiate yourself from the competition, attract new talent to your team ... But what impact does it really have on the conversion rate of your e-commerce site? How much value can it create? We have studied the question for you.
In order to determine to what extent communication has an impact on your conversion rate (because yes, spoiler: it does), we need to take a step back and ask ourselves a simple question: "What influences my conversion rate? This way we can make a non-exhaustive list of things that can boost your sales, and notice the links they have with your communication.

Brand awareness and reputation

It's quite simple: the more people know about you, the more likely you are to increase your number of customers...

...is it really that easy?

In reality, not really: being "known" or "recognized" is not enough, it is also necessary that what is known about you encourages the act of purchase. Basically, your brand image must be in line with your target's values and what they are looking for in a brand.

Let's take a concrete example by looking at a recent case of French bad buzz: that of D+ for care and its controversial director, Claire Despagne. After a podcast during which the founder gave a speech that caused a lot of virtual ink to flow, the impact on the notoriety of the whole brand is obvious, and the impact on its transformation rate logically follows. It is not sure that even customers who were loyal to the brand will continue to buy after such a bad buzz, especially since the management of the crisis, considered late and clumsy, was more than badly perceived. One thing is sure: if before, qualities could be associated to D+ for care's brand image, today it is this crisis that is mainly sticking to it, and the brand is witnessing the loss of potential prospects for whom this first contact will be fatal in their purchasing process.

What can we learn from this experience? Two things. That it is not because more people know about us that the transformation rate/number of customers will increase, and that the brand image has a huge impact on our target (in addition to contributing to loyalty).
Furthermore, controlling your communication, by extension your brand awareness, allows you to have control over what people know about you, and therefore has a strong impact on your conversion rate.

Presence on social medias

Social networks are nowadays the backbone of the communication of a large majority of brands. Depending on your strategic field of activity, but also on your communication strategy, any network can be more or less beneficial in the perception that your target has of your brand. TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook ... They allow you to remind your audience of your presence and play on your reputation and notoriety, but not only.

 

We are now in the era of interaction between brands and their consumers, that is to say that the speech is no longer only directed from the brand to the consumers, but that a real dialogue takes place between both parties. Therefore, when you ensure a presence and daily content on your social networks, it is imperative to follow them closely by using a handful of KPIs. We are talking about the number of impressions, reactions, shares, subscribers, but also the engagement rate or the dilution rate.

"What does this have to do with my conversion rate?"

We are getting there: each of these KPIs, which, let's remember, are basically used to monitor the evolution of your communication on social networks, can be related to various KPIs of your e-commerce performance. However, two seem more obvious than the others: traffic and, you guessed it, the conversion rate.

The impact of social media on your traffic (which in itself has an impact on your conversion rate, yes, it's all connected) is relatively easy to track: as my impressions increase, will my traffic increase as well? As my engagement rate is high on this post, will my traffic increase proportionally? The same goes for the conversion rate: do my conversions increase as I gain subscribers? Am I making more sales since my posts are getting more and more reactions?

You can usually find correlations with many of the KPIs quite easily. Moreover, with solutions like Google Analytics, the origin of your visitors is very easy to determine.

 

Be careful though, you have to look at these links with a critical, even scientific eye. Rather than trying to prove that the slightest correlation between two elements is true, it is better to look for reasons why it would be false, and see if these reasons hold up. The impact of communication is not as easily seen as that of marketing, for example.

If I see a proportional change in my number of impressions and my number of sales, I can easily think that the two are linked. But maybe the increase in my sales is linked to some kind of seasonality of my products, or to a marketing operation, or simply to a twist of fate.

A practical example: when in 2020, Nintendo releases the game Animal Crossing: New Horizons, it is possible that their number of impressions on social media has increased during this period thanks to some communication actions, but the explosion of the game's sales is mainly due to a context favorable to the consumption of this type of product: the quarantine. The two KPIs are therefore not necessarily linked.

To summarize, it is important to know how to create links between the evolution of your network KPIs and those of your sales because there is a good chance that they are true and verifiable, but it is just as important to know how to step back from these same links.

E-mailing

E-mailing is also an important part of e-commerce communication and marketing. It also has precise indicators that are inherent to its operation, such as the open rate, click rate or click-to-open rate, which communicators and marketers regularly study with interest.

Once again, these KPIs can be linked to your conversion rate, and this is even easier than with the various indicators listed above, because the mailing benefits from a very transparent tracking: when someone clicks on a link, we know it. Thus, making links between the increase of one statistic and another becomes relatively easy: if I send my emailing campaign on a specific date, and on that specific date my traffic and/or my sales increase, the correlation is obvious.

To conclude

Finally, if you take a step back, it is easy to find a plethora of indicators that allow you to link your communication actions to the increase of your sales and your conversion rate. We have only mentioned three factors that can have an impact, but communication is vast: Ads campaigns, print, advertising ... All means are good for a prospect to become a customer, and above all, there are no small actions.

The communication of a company is composed of a multitude of actions, of different sizes, on different supports, and composing a whole. Studies are carried out beforehand to be aware of the context in which the company communicates, to whom it communicates, but also which way of communicating would be the most relevant with the image that one wishes to convey.

The communication has an impact - not neglectable moreover - on your conversion rate, to exercise it with seriousness is consequently imperative when one wishes to make their e-commerce activity grow.

Moreover, if you need the support of a communication professional in order to run a communication campaign, to improve your content strategy or to refocus your targeting, contact us!

PS: The list of possible actions is not exhaustive, so let's discuss your needs together ;-)