For eCommerce businesses, the ultimate goal is to have high conversions. Of course, there’s no point in having high website traffic when you’re not making any sale at the end of the day – and that’s the primary problem of many eCommerce businesses. Many web stores face low conversions – the key here is to optimize your website by creating effective sales funnels.
In this blog, we’ll give you tips on how you can solve this problem through conversion rate optimization by giving you the basics and the steps that you can follow to improve your site conversion rate.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion Rate Optimization is a marketing strategy aimed at increasing the conversions of a business website. Whether your website is aimed at sign-ups, purchases, or downloads, Conversion Rate Optimization will help drive your website visitors to the end goal of your website.
Through Conversion Rate Optimization, you will better understand the factors that drive your website visitors to engage in a certain way with specific elements on your website. By having a good understanding of your website visitors’ behavior, you can, in turn, implement specific marketing strategies that will work to increase your conversion.
How to Compute Conversion Rate Optimization?
If you’re still unsure how your website is performing, the best way to check it is by computing your site conversion rate. To do this, divide the number of conversions or orders by the number of sessions in one month.
To illustrate it, let’s say you have 5,000 website sessions in one month, and from there, you were able to get a total of 50 orders.
When put in an equation:
50 orders / 5,000 website sessions = 1% Conversion Rate
Take note, however, that you should use sessions and not the number of visitors. Thus, if a user visits your website twice, it’s counted as two sessions.
There are more specific metrics that you can check to understand the behavior of your website visitors. These include the following:
Category Pages Conversion Rate
This metric computes the number of visits for a specific product category and the total number of orders submitted from these visits.
Average Visits to Purchase
This metric monitor the average number of sessions it takes for your website visitor to convert – starting from the first visit to the actual purchase visit.
Average Days to Purchase
This metric tracks the average number of days that it takes for your website visitor to convert – beginning from the first website visit to the actual purchase visit.
Creating a Robust Conversion Rate Optimization Plan
Are you now convinced on how Conversion Rate Optimization can help improve your business? If yes, then now let’s get to it!
Define your Website Conversion Goals
The first step is to know your goals and objectives. This part is where your target should be clear – whether it’s for an increase in sales, downloads, or sign-ups. Your Conversion Rate Optimization strategy will depend on your objective, so it should be defined from the beginning.
These are some examples of conversions for an ecommerce website:
- Online sale
- A website visitor adding a product to their cart
- A website visitor adding an item to their wish list
- Email sign-ups
- File / media download
- Social media shares
- Any other KPIs for your business
Identify and Monitor Conversion Paths
Once you’ve identified your website conversion goals, you should partner with the right conversion paths and monitor them accordingly. For instance, there must be collection pages, product pages, and check out pages for eCommerce shops. These are the multiple touchpoints that your website visitors pass through before converting to actual sales. Having a good understanding of this will gear you up for the next steps that you can make to improve your sales. For instance, you’ll need to monitor your product pages’ insights in relation to check out pages and see how much of your traffic converts to sales.
Understand the Macro and Micro Funnels of Conversion
Besides understanding and tracking your customers’ conversion path, you also need to understand how your web visitors engage with each macro and micro funnels of conversion. Macro funnel conversion is the ultimate step that the website visitor makes for full conversion. On the other hand, micro funnel conversion includes a series of steps that lead to macro funnel conversion.
To illustrate it, macro funnel conversion is the final step wherein the website visitor submits and order. Meanwhile, micro funnel conversion includes scrolling through the homepage, checking out the collection page, and examining each product page.
Figure out the Bottle Neck
Once you’ve identified your conversion paths and understand how each one performs, you can now identify where the problem lies on your page conversion. The issues typically lie on the website pages or elements that do not support your conversion objective. Perhaps your product page has insufficient information, or your check-out page is too complicated; whatever it is – it’s something that you need to identify.
What is the ideal eCommerce Conversion Rate?
The average conversion rate in US eCommerce brands is at 2.63%, while it stands higher at 4.31% at a global level. Your baseline goal for your online store should be at least 2%. Once you reach that level, that’s the perfect time for you to move onto the more advanced conversion rate strategies.
The next question is, how can you improve your conversion rate? Well, we’ve listed some tips on the most effective ways that you can improve your conversion rate.
How to Boost your eCommerce Conversion Rate?
1. Use High-quality Image and Graphics
Most people are highly visual. That is precisely why apps like Instagram and Snapchat are such a big hit. Plus, when buying anything online, your customers can’t hold or touch the item – thus, the only way to check the product is by seeing it in its entirety, detail by detail. No customer will be enticed to buy something from your store if you can’t even provide actual and high-resolution photos or videos of your products. It also helps to have attractive graphics to lure in your customers as it increases your customers’ chances of buying from you.
2. Use Live ChatWhen a customer is interested in your offering, the chances are high that he will be asking questions about it then and there. Many businesses need to compete in terms of urgency as customers tend to buy from a vendor that responds faster. Hence, having a live chat feature on your website working will help you get higher conversions. Keep in mind that the average attention span of a person is only 8 seconds - of course, it’s a bit longer when waiting for a response, but under the marketing funnel, once a customer is considering a product, you need to capitalize on that interest and close it as fast as possible.
3. Earn the Trust of your Customers
One way of securing customers is by showing that your brand is legitimate. This is something that many businesses take for granted. However, it’s worth noting that while this part may seem to be a minor thing, it’s a big deal for customers when deciding to purchase or not. There are several ways of doing this – you can either employ trust badges on your website, secure your website, and highlight customer testimonials.
4. Design a Customer-friendly Structure
The key to securing a sale fast is by making your customer journey simple and easy. Essentially, you need to have a simplified structure of finding products – as much as possible, do not put in so many levels, so customers will not get overwhelmed. It’s also beneficial to allow filters so that customers will find their preferred items easily. The general rule here is that the faster your customer finds a product, the faster you land a sale.
5. Employ a Seamless Check Out Process
Maybe you have tens and thousands of sessions a month, but most of these do not push through with their purchase upon reaching the check-out page. What might be the reason for this? Perhaps your check-out process is complicated and is such a hassle to deal with – this situation is what you want to avoid. Always make sure that you make your check-out process as simple and straightforward as possible.
Many check out pages ask for too much information that’s not necessary for purchasing their product/s. For instance – when you’re selling a cosmetic item, there should be no reason you need to get the customer’s birth date and age. These simple things make a huge difference when a customer files an order since filling out an order form that requires too many details can be such a hassle and sometimes even raise a privacy/security issue.
6. Write a Compelling Copy Ad or Product Description
Product descriptions should not be boring. Instead, it should be insightful and lucrative for your website visitors, which can help them decide why they should buy the product. Your product descriptions should effectively communicate the value of your product to them.
While there are products that sell themselves without product description, most products are still expected to have one. This part of the product page should be indispensable as it should explain everything that the buyer needs to know about the product to prevent returns and misunderstandings.
7. Launch More Promotions
In launching a campaign, your strategy must be driven towards a specific goal. For instance, it can promote new releases; it can be a discount deal for specific dates or a product-specific promotion. Whatever it is, it must be communicated across all your marketing channels and for every step of the marketing funnel. Launching several promotions and distributing them across all your social media and online platforms will undoubtedly drive traffic to your website and increase your conversions when done correctly.
8. Ensure Mobile Optimization
As mentioned earlier, your images and text must be of high-quality. Otherwise, your website visitors will not appreciate your store. The same goes with mobile optimization; since almost 80% of smartphone users make an online purchase through their smartphones, I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a web store optimized for all kinds of devices, including tablets and laptops.
9. Strategic Placement of “Call to Action”
Your web page must be the right combination of lucrative, insightful, and strategic. It doesn’t have to scream “buy here” in every corner of your site. What I’m trying to say is, you don’t have to “hard sell” all over your website. Instead, place the CTA buttons strategically on every page so it won’t look like you’re trying so hard to earn a sale. Try using different action buttons like add to wish list, learn more, add to cart, or social sharing buttons. Don’t be afraid to be playful with these elements – just don’t put in a “buy now” button in every single corner. Remember that you want to build a relationship with your customers and not only to make a sale.
10. Highlight your Brand Value Proposition
What sets your brand apart from the others? The answer to this is something that should be well-communicated with your website visitors. Your value proposition should be made known to your customers the moment they go to your website. This will help them decide faster if your brand stands better than the others.
Conclusion
Overall, understanding where you’re at in terms of conversion rates is an excellent way to know your eCommerce business's progress. Knowing this will help you craft a better strategy towards conversion rate optimization to boost your sales strategically. The great news here is that success through Conversion Rate Optimization is a lot simpler than you think. There is no need to overhaul your entire website – it’s more of ironing the bits and pieces of your website elements to attain a holistic approach towards better conversions.
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