How to Improve Your Ecommerce Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate is, effectively, a measurement of how well your Ecommerce website can turn visitors into customers. How many of your visitors end up converting? While gaining more traffic to your website is a worthy goal in and of itself, increasing the conversion rate and, thus, the sales tend to be the ultimate goal of any Ecommerce marketing plan.
Here, we’re going to take a look at steps you can take to better understand, and then improve, your Ecommerce conversion rate.
Use software that can help monitor your conversion rate
Before you start taking steps to improve your conversion rate, you need to ensure that you actually know what it is. Your Google Analytics can offer some data, but to get a more precise look, there are free tools like Hot Jar that can show you specific details of how customers interact with the site, including heatmaps showing which parts of each webpage get more attention. Knowing how they’re using your site is crucial to better guiding them towards conversion.
Set and track goals
Having realistic goals for any conversion rate optimisation campaign is essential. You can’t go into a campaign expecting 50% of all visitors to end up converting. In fact, the average conversion rate for Ecommerce websites that are performing well is between 1% and 2%. Setting realistic goals means aiming for the higher end of that range. If you exceed them, then you’re doing exceedingly well. Just don’t set yourself goals you won’t be able to reach.
Use great media
Improving your conversion rate is all about winning the visitor over, and getting them to click more, bringing them closer to the point of purchase. In the physical world, this is done with visual merchandising, putting your most attractive products on display in the window and through the store to entice shoppers in deeper. In the digital world, high-quality images and videos of the products can make just about any product into your most attractive product. Pages with good media have been shown to consistently have better conversion rates, with video tending to outperform pictures.
Remind customers of what they left behind
Set up an automated email system that gets in touch with your registered customers under specific circumstances. One of those circumstances is shopping cart abandonment. The customers who were that close to buying might be the easiest to convince to convert. All you have to do is send an automated email that, for instance, makes a slightly better offer such as a price reduction or a voucher for their next purchase. A simple reminder works wonders, however, so don’t feel like you have to make big offers if your margins are tight.
Reduce your shipping prices
Money talks. If you help your customers save money and advertise it clearly and broadly on the site, especially when they’re getting closer to making an order, the message will sink in. Online retail giants like Amazon have effectively forced the hand of many smaller Ecommerce companies, meaning they offer free shipping even when it loses them money they need. If you have incredibly tight margins, don’t feel like you have to match to compete. Lowering your shipping to thresholds just above the margins can still be effective.
Utilize reviews
A lot of Ecommerce store owners are a little nervous about opening the reviews on their website. Yes, it makes criticism visible on your own page. However, you can have reviews displayed so that the most helpful are placed at the top, garnering the most attention. You can automate the process of gathering reviews, having emails sent to customers a day or two after they receive the product, as they’re most likely to leave their impressions while they’re most fresh in their mind. The reviews then serve as the positive social proof a lot of customers need to complete a purchase. Many people won’t buy a product unless they know it’s tested and true.
Stop interrupting the customer journey
The fewer steps and the fewer clicks between your customer and the checkout, the more likely they are to complete that journey all the way. Consider the pages that are most important to the conversion process and make sure that those pages are free of any popups, advertisements, or other interruptions that add an extra barrier between your visitor and the point of conversion. The whole essence of conversion rate optimisation is to make the process smoother, not rougher.
Don’t make every customer register in order to shop with you
It’s one of the most common and most infuriating mistakes in all of retail. If you make your customers register an account with you before they buy anything, your Ecommerce conversion rate is going to suffer as a result. Many customers will opt to sign up to make ordering more convenient, but you may lose just as many customers in that step. Consider if it’s worth sacrificing customer data to allow them to check out as guests. You can still encourage them to sign up after the checkout is complete, but you’re not actively getting in the way of their journey.
Use breadcrumb navigation
Breadcrumbs are a graphical element, often places along the top of the page, that displays how many steps in total there are in the process of purchasing a product, and which step the customer is in. Even if you have slightly more steps than is optimal, it can be reassuring to customers to see that they’re getting closer to the end, reducing the chances of them abandoning the shopping cart along the way. Try to implement breadcrumb navigation in your Ecommerce site. Otherwise, customers might feel every step of the conversion process, wondering when it will end.
With the tips above, you should be able to not only improve your traffic results. You should be able to ensure that you’re turning more of your visitors into customers. After that comes the hard part of retaining those customers, but at least improving your Ecommerce conversion rates gives you a better prospect of that.