Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is all the rage in the ecommerce industry, and for good reason. Let’s face it: bringing traffic to your online store is not the real challenge; converting them into paying customers is!
This is where the science of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) plays an important role.
And as far as CRO tips are concerned, we’ve compiled the most result-driven ones for you to implement on your ecommerce store for better conversion rates!
Dive in and start implementing these CRO tips on your WooCommerce store.
- What Is Conversion Rate?
- Conversion Rate Optimization: Presales Tips
- Reduce Page Loading Time
- Shorten the Checkout Funnel
- Position and Wording of CTAs
- Integrate Customer Reviews
- Create Sales Promotions
- Play on Scarcity Effect
- Improve the Product Page
- Make Your Online Store SEO-Friendly
- Improve Store Navigation
- Multiple Payment Options
- Build Multilingual Stores
- Integrate Currency Switcher
- Improve Mobile Experience
- 24/7 Live Chat Support
- Offer Same-Day Delivery
- Return and Exchange Policy
- Get Feedback from Customers
- Write Effective Copy
- Add Ecommerce Chatbot
- Check out Social Commerce
- Define Your Unique Selling Point (USP)
- Enhance Your Site’s Security
- Conversion Rate Optimization: Post-Sales Tips
- Conclusion
What Is Conversion Rate?
For the uninitiated, the conversion rate of a website is the percentage of visitors who complete your site’s goal.
Your site goals depend on you and your website. While goals differ from site to site, yours could be someone creating an account, someone signing up for a newsletter, or a visitor paying for a product on your ecommerce site.
Assuming that 50,000 people visit your ecommerce store and 1000 of those visitors either created an account, bought something, or subscribed to your newsletter, your store has a 5% conversion rate!
Of course, the goal is to further improve your conversion rates, or as we call it, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Because the better your CRO is, the higher your revenue and the bigger your brand’s digital footprint will be.
This brings us to two important questions:
- How to measure conversion rate optimization?
- How to improve conversion rate optimization?
Slow Store = Bad Conversion Rates!
Try Cloudways and maximize your WooCommerce store’s performance.
How to Measure Conversion Rate?
We’ve established that Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a useful ecommerce KPI for analyzing the return on investment.
So how do we measure it? It’s simple, really:
The number of conversions/number of visitors (or sessions) x 100.
Here’s a graphical representation of the formula:
Let’s take the example we discussed above and plug it into this equation:
1000/50,000 x 100 = 5%
Great, the formula seems to be working!
What Is a Good Conversion Rate?
Good question, but there’s no easy answer because it depends on a lot of factors like the industry you’re in, your competition, or whether you’re selling directly to consumers or businesses, etc.
Hence, there’s no universal rate of good conversion, but as a general rule of thumb, remember that it’s higher than your current conversion rate.
However, industry standards can give us an idea of the general conversion rates:
- In the B2B sector, the benchmark is around 1-2%
- In B2C ecommerce the benchmark is 1%
- In medium-value B2Cs, it’s around 2%
- In low-value B2C, it’s around 3-4%
If your ecommerce conversion rate is lower than these percentages, there might be too much competition in your market or maybe you never built your store with the industry-suggested best practices.
No matter what the reason, though, you need to identify and analyze the problems, then implement a new strategy to increase conversions.
How to Track Conversion Rate?
Google Analytics is one of the many tools that can help you track your conversion rates.
You can even create a funnel in Analytics (and you should) to track your visitors on different stages of their buyer’s journey. This helps in segmenting your visitors from their first visit until they make a successful purchase.
To create your funnel, go to Google Analytics → Admin → Segments → New Segments → Sequences.
— Source: Google Analytics
Each step is defined in Google Analytics by a URL.
You can set up virtual page views for cases when there’s no URL change between 2 steps.
An example is when a pop-up appears on a page, which does not have a separate URL, but can prompt action from the user.
For in-depth know-how of setting up and creating funnels, you can find all the information you need in the Google documentation.
Now, let’s move towards what you really, really want from this article; Conversion Rate Optimization tips.
These result-driven conversion tips have been divided into pre-sale and post-sales tips so you can test them out on both these important stages of the buyer’s journey.
Conversion Rate Optimization: Presales Tips
1. Reduce Page Loading Time
According to a conducted survey, around 40% of visitors leave websites that take more than 3 seconds to load. Amazon, the ecommerce giant, found that a 100ms latency in load time reduced sales by 1%.
Needless to say, but it’s crucial that your site loads instantly for a better conversion rate.
— Source: Think with Google
Here are some essential tips that will help you improve your site’s loading speed.
- Use performance testing tools like Pingdom Tools, GTmetrix, or Google PageSpeed Insights to analyze your site’s speed.
- Use a lightweight theme.
- Remove unused/unnecessary plugins.
- Choose an optimized WooCommerce hosting.
- Reduce your images and videos’ size.
- Compress JavaScript and CSS files.
- Use a cache plugin.
- Set up a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
After you execute these steps without running into problems, you’ll notice (measure it with the performance tools) a significant improvement in site load time.
2. Shorten the Checkout Funnel
The checkout funnel is the steps that a buyer takes that ends in a paid transaction.
The shorter the checkout funnel path, the more likely it is to convert a visitor.
— Source: Nimble
An example of a complex/long checkout funnel would be when you require your users to first create an account on your site, have them sign up for your newsletter, make them go through a detail or two about the product they wanna buy, have them read your policies, and once they are ready to buy from you, they have to go through a complicated payment method.
It’s exhausting just to read that, let alone trying to buy from an online store that makes buying something terribly complicated.
Without a doubt, a majority of your visitors will abandon the cart and leave.
Hence, ecommerce giants, like Amazon, make it super easy for people to buy products, and that’s one of the biggest reasons for their immense success.
— Source: Amazon
If you go through conversion rate optimization best practices, you’ll always be advised to keep your site from asking for too much info.
Requesting minimal info coupled with fluid website navigation and swift product searches is the sweet spot you should aim for.
This should be enough to get them started, and once they become recurring customers, you can always get more info later on.
In short, your site should be easy to understand, easy to navigate, and give your customers an experience they’d want to come back to again!
— Source: AliExpress
3. Position and Wording of CTAs
The call to action (CTA) buttons, as evident from the name, prompts your visitors to perform a specific action. CTA buttons should be present on all your pages, and of course, they should be prominent to the visitors!
— Source: Cloudways
There are three things to keep in mind while creating CTAs:
- Placement: Placing your CTA at the top of your fold is more effective than one below the fold.
- Color and shape: Your CTA should not blend in with your site; it should stand out with the shape and color of the button you choose so that it’s easy to catch attention.
- Make it benefit-oriented: Too many CTA’s have a bad copy; “download”, “click here”, and “Continue”, for example, are bland and aren’t action-oriented as well. Instead, make them benefit-oriented; “Get my ebook”, “stay connected”, or “Show me more”, etc.
However, it’s not always easy to know which CTA is working well for you, so use the A/B testing method (discussed below) to determine what works well for your store!
4. Integrate Customer Reviews
Do you know what reassures a potential buyer? Customer reviews.
If your online store is even slightly popular, good or bad reviews will pop up here and there on social media no matter what.
If you integrate customer reviews right on your product pages, though, not only does it build credibility, but it also helps potential buyers make an informed decision.
Amazon is perhaps the most significant example of an ecommerce giant taking reviews to the next level. So much so that even if people buy things offline, they visit Amazon to find out if the product is worth it!
— Source: Amazon
Even if people leave negative feedback (something that can hold you back from displaying reviews on your site), keep in mind that criticism helps you improve.
Use the feedback to overhaul your service or products, and you’ll have happy customers in the future that will bring you better conversion rates.
5. Create Sales Promotions
It’s no secret that customers love promotions! Why not take advantage of it?
AliExpress understands this open secret well, and that’s why most carousel images on their website are centered around promotions.
— Source: AliExpress
If you can offer a cool discount on products people like and you promote it well, there’s a chance that your conversion rate will see a spike.
Why? Because discounts and promotions prompt people to buy more!
Apart from direct sales & promotions, you can couple it with other beneficial services like ‘Free Delivery’, ‘Guarantee on Product’, and ‘Refund Policies’ that helps people purchase more frequently.
6. Play on the Scarcity Effect
Have you ever wanted something, but it wasn’t available? Did it make you want it more?
If it did, then that, ladies and gentlemen, was the scarcity effect in action.
Scarcity, or short supply of a product, can drive sales because it makes people want it quickly or before the stock runs out.
In ecommerce, a variety of tactics are used to take advantage of the scarcity effect. For example, in the image below the site suggests that there are only 36 pieces of the ring left.
Whether there are 36 or 3600 rings left in their stock, the buyers see it as their only chance to grab one before they run out.
— Source: AliExpress (L), Amazon (R)
A limited period discount also has the same effect on potential customers. They may not be there to buy something straight away, but a limited time offer might convince them to push that ‘Buy Now’ button!
7. Improve the Product Page
Inform, Seduce & Reassure.
Is your product page fulfilling the three functions above? Is it seducing the visitor into buying things from you? If not, it’s time to improve your product page.
So how do you inform, seduce, and reassure a visitor on your product page?
Here are some tips you can use to convert your visitors into buyers through an improved product page:
- Place the primary information above the waterline
- Use high-quality images where possible
- Include product features, but don’t forget to talk about the benefits
- Integrate a customer notification module
- Create SEO-friendly product sheets
- Add similar or complementary products (up-selling/cross-selling)
— Source: Walmart
You can even display the most popular products on the front page that have the highest probability of selling.
However, the main objective is to create product pages that attract your visitors and makes them want to buy things from your store!
8. Make Your Online Store SEO-Friendly
It’s okay if you don’t know much about SEO. You can always hire someone to take care of it later, right? But did you know that you’re hurting your sales if your store isn’t SEO optimized?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an essential element that helps people find your website through search engines. So why would you miss out on this opportunity?
Here are some useful SEO tips to increase organic traffic from search engines for your ecommerce store:
- Keep products near the homepage: The homepage is the first page that a search engine examines and it is the primary source of brand identity.
- Write effective title tags: The title tag of a page is a crucial part of SEO. When you work on the title tag, create it using a typical search term for your products.
- Use the right keywords: To improve your title tags, start with the search for optimal keywords with tools such as LSIGraph (free) and KWFinder (paid).
- Improve page URL: Some ecommerce platforms automatically give the URLs of the pages, for example: “www.store.com/?ID=productnumber”. Change the settings to create URLs that include your title tag (therefore rich in keywords), such as the post you are reading at this moment (cloudways.com/blog/woocommerce-conversion-rate-optimization/).
- Tag your products: For each product, add relevant tags that link to similar products. But be careful not to exaggerate or search engines could consider spam.
- Enter the rel=canonical tag in the categories: To prevent the search engines from thinking that your store contains duplicate content (and therefore penalize it), you must choose one of these pages and baptize it as a canon. Then, add a link (rel=”canonical”) to the section (<head>) of all other non-canonical versions, which points to your canonical page.
9. Improve Store Navigation
A lot of online store owners ignore the importance of navigation, which is crucial in a buyer’s journey through your website.
The reason is simple: The faster your visitor can get to what they want, the more chances that they’ll buy it.
If you’ve ever shopped online, you’ll understand how frustrating it is to visit a site that can’t figure out what they want themselves, let alone what their customers want.
In such cases, the navigation bar is full of unnecessary content, CTAs that shouldn’t be there, or menu items that don’t belong there.
And what does that do? Keep you from purchasing anything.
Hence, you need to improve your store’s navigation to help your visitor find and purchase what they want quickly. Take a look at how well this site handles navigation:
— Source: S&S Activewear
An easy-to-navigate ecommerce store generally has these elements:
- It’s easy to identify pages for products, payment methods, and delivery details.
- The link to your cart, the checkout page, and further categories to browse are all identifiable at a glance on top of the site.
- It offers simple navigation from the cart to the checkout page for secure and quick purchasing.
- The product page effectively displays all the necessary elements without any clutter: main photo, price, quantity, variant (e.g., size and colors), “Add to Cart” button, short description, complete description, technical data, and reviews.
Also, it’s 2019, and smartphone usage is perhaps at its highest than ever before. Hence, you should give special attention to your site navigation on mobile devices. If navigation on your desktop as well as mobile site is up to the mark, rest assured, your conversion rate will be way higher.
10. Multiple Payment Options
A crucial factor that enhances users’ experience is multiple payments options.
Not all users who visit your site have the same option for payment. Some have debit cards, some have credit cards, and some might carry other options like PayPal.
If your site only allows payment through one medium like Credit Cards, you are leaving out many customers with PayPal or other options who might want to buy your products.
Here are some form of payment methods you must offer on your site to cater to all your visitors:
Credit/Debit Cards
A survey in 2017 showed that 70% of online shoppers preferred credit & debit cards over any other form of payments. Not only are these two methods safe, but they are quick in transactions and highly convenient as well.
— Statista
Prepaid Cards
Prepaid cards have a fixed amount of money for the use which is also its biggest advantage; in case of frauds, you don’t lose more than the prescribed price of the prepaid card.
Other than that, you can get hold of prepaid cards rather easily. In contrast, credit and debit cards require a lot of formality to get hold of.
Mobile Payment
Mobile is the future. And mobile payments will be the choice of payment for most people as time passes.
Apple & Samsung Pay are the most prominent players in mobile payment options as of now that use NFC for tap-and-pay payments in the real world, and simple ways to pay online. Enabling mobile payments means your visitors can pay for their purchase with the tap of their thumb or through Face ID verification on their iPhone.
Virtual Currency
Did you cash in on the Bitcoin fever that caught the world in 2017?
Bitcoin and cryptocurrency fever may have settled down for now, but it’s predicted that virtual currency will become one of the most preferred methods of payment in the future.
Virtual currencies guarantee safety, unanimity, and quickness apart from many other benefits, so why wouldn’t you make it available for your users?
11. Build Multilingual Stores
If you build a multilingual store, you have a higher chance of converting visitors.
Why? Because all your visitors aren’t native English speakers, and if a foreign user lands on your store and finds information in their native language, they’re more likely to buy than if your online store was available in just one universal language.
Also, it’s an opportunity for you to go global with your store and target different parts of the world.
Here are a few reasons why you should have a multilingual ecommerce store:
- Expand your business by going international.
- Online presence in more than one language.
- Multiple languages give your business the edge and make it look more professional.
- Be one step ahead of your competition by catering to non-native speakers.
- Get excellent results by investing little.
However, before you get excited and decide to adopt another language, keep in mind that merely translating your site to another language isn’t enough.
You can find examples of literal translations that result in hilariously weird concoctions like this:
You don’t want your site to fall prey to such interpretations, so make sure you hire a native speaker that can do the job professionally.
12. Integrate Currency Switcher
If you cater to an international audience, showing prices in one currency won’t do the trick.
A multiple currency switcher on your WooCommerce store, though, will help visitors see prices in their currency.
AliExpress, for example, allows you to easily switch to your local currency easily from the top menu bar.
Not only does it make it easy for visitors to browse through the site, but it also makes them more susceptible to buying from a site that shows them their native currency prices!
The best part about it is that you don’t have to worry about utilizing a foreign exchange broker to convert the customer’s chosen currency. This feature does all the conversion work for you!
— Source: AliExpress
13. Improve Mobile Experience
There’s no doubt that smartphones are the future.
In 2017, mobile visits to retail websites exceeded desktop traffic for the first time.
Google is also working on a new index that will give priority to mobile: in practice, being responsive will no longer be enough.
— Source: Stone Temple
But you need to stop thinking about mobile and desktop users as separate people: research clearly shows that people make key decisions about purchases on their smartphones and then buy on desktops at a later time. Moreover, those who use various devices for their online purchases, such as tablets, smartphones, and PCs, spend an average of twice compared to those who only use PCs.
— Source: Stone Temple
Mobile commerce is now a consolidated reality that has conquered different groups of buyers and in particular the millennials. When an offer is proposed in the right way, users are willing to buy even with the smartphone; just think that mobile transactions are on a clear and constant increase and an increase in mobile commerce of 44.7 percent is expected in 2019.
— Source: Statista
Ecommerce stores who have already aligned themselves with the mobile-first philosophy have so far recorded a higher conversion rate than the latecomers. China, for example, is having a real mobile sales exploit thanks to continuous innovation and exceptional user experience.
This should encourage online stores to become mobile-first as soon as possible, optimizing their store for mobile sales. This means providing an easy, fast and secure mobile shopping experience that is worth repeating and encourages you to make higher expenses.
The philosophy of mobile-first not only involves the optimization of the ecommerce store but the entire marketing strategy that must include activities designed for mobile devices, from the social dimension to the mobile-friendly newsletter.
14. 24/7 Live Chat Support
Transparency is a factor that increases trusts in site visitors. And one of the factors that helps increase transparency is Live Chat Support.
It’s surprising how integrating a live chat support option can subconsciously make your visitors think that your site is trustworthy and that there are real people behind the chat window there to answer their questions.
Not only can they ask questions that create doubt in their minds, but they can make quick decisions about the product they want to buy as well.
— Source: SuperOffice
As shown in the graph above, a majority of people prefer Live chat over email or phone support.
— Source: Marktech Zone
You can even use social media to strike up conversations or provide your users with the option to interact with your community. This usually results in a positive experience, and people are more likely to buy from your store.
15. Offer Same-Day Delivery
The biggest advantage physical stores have over online stores is the immediate possession of your purchase.
When you purchase online, you usually have to wait a couple of days, or in some cases a few weeks, before you get your hands on your purchase.
However, people generally like to get hold of what they want immediately.
If you offer same-day delivery, rest assured, a majority of your visitors will want to buy from you because of the immediate delivery incentive.
Amazon Prime is perhaps the prime (pardon the pun) example of an ecommerce giant taking advantage of the same-day delivery hype.
However, a survey by Forrester showed that 29% of consumers are interested in same-day delivery but aren’t willing to pay extra for it.
— Source: SupplyChain247
Hence, make sure your shipping costs aren’t too high if you decide to offer same-day delivery.
16. Return and Exchange Policy
A Return and exchange policy ensures your visitor’s shop worry-free and with confidence.
Hence, a clearly written customer-centric return policy can boost your sales and minimize cart abandonment because buyers will shop without any doubts.
According to the Consumer Returns in the Retail Industry Report:
- Customers returned $351 billion worth of goods, both physical and online in 2017.
- The rates of return rise to around 30% or more when you only look at online purchases.
- About 6.5% or $22.6 billion in returns were labeled as fraud or abuse of store return policies.
Usually, customers are hesitant to purchase from stores that don’t make it easy to return something in case of a fault or change of mind. Therefore, a clear return, refunds, and exchange policy can make or break a sale or turn a visitor into a lifetime customer.
17. Get Feedback from Customers
Consumers trust other consumers who have invested their time in sharing experiences of buying and testing products. In addition to increasing consumer confidence, this action triggers a chain mechanism that increases the likelihood and, in turn, gives rise to customers’ awareness of being listened to and willingness to continue to buy their products.
— Source: BrightLocal
The visitors like to be listened to and online reviews are the simplest and most direct way to trigger this process and increase brand reputation. But how is the customer encouraged to invest a part of their time to share their shopping experience?
There are several ways to incentivize visitors:
- Surveys: at the end of a transaction, you can propose to the customer a survey as the final part of the purchase process, send an email request to participate in the survey or attach a small promotion, such as a small gift or a discount on the next purchase.
- Comments: insert a form on the page of each product that users can access to leave a comment. The interventions must be free so that each customer can freely share their experience.
- Third-party reviews: many customers trust the reviews found on stores other than the business that makes the product, but not all customers have time to visit these portals. For this, inserting a link to external sites where you can find a large number of reviews on products, helps once again to build trust in the company.
18. Write Effective Copy
If your website copy isn’t compelling people to buy, it’s time to put pen to paper and do some thinking.
An effective headline (copy, title, or tagline) must be able to sell your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) without making it seem complicated.
Keep your taglines short and to the point. They should entice the customers to read further and ruffle their interest in the products.
Take a look at how TruckersReport made a few important changes to their tagline and copy which led to a 21.7 percent increase in conversions.
— Source: ConversionXL
A similar case is that of Wilson HTM, which increased their registrations by 52.8 percent by modifying the title.
— Source: The Growth Manifesto
19. Add Ecommerce Chatbot
Chatbots magazine, a leading authority on chatbots, claimed 2018 to be the year of the Chatbots.
The term blends the word “chat” and “robot”, which should give you an idea of what chatbot really is if you’re not familiar with the term.
Chatbots are basically chats that use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to interact with customers to collect their requests and provide appropriate responses.
It’s a revolution in the way a business interacts with customers. A chatbot lets users track shipments, simplify payments, or it even act as a personal assistant that accompanies the user through all the stages of a buyer’s journey.
— Source: Chatbots Life
Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, and Google are some of the biggest names introducing integrated bots in their instant messaging platforms to help with shopping, bookings and customer service.
Survey shows that users who use live chat spend an average of 5 to 30 percent more on a website. Even conversion rates are 5 to 10 times higher among customers who use an automated chat session.
This year’s trend also saw an increase in the use of voice services such as Siri, Cortana, and Google Assistant for ecommerce purposes.
If you can introduce a chatbot to your site or use artificial intelligence to enhance your user’s buyer journey, it’s a sure shot way to enhance your conversion rate.
20. Check out Social Commerce
From the union between ecommerce and social media comes what is called Social Commerce, a new mode of digital commerce that, through blogs, social networks, forums, etc., offers strong participation from consumers and is based on the concept that “the markets are conversations.”
And influencers, from bloggers to industry experts, will influence buying behavior like never before. The numbers confirm this: 70 percent of users consider reliable suggestions on products and brands from their social circle and 74 percent of consumers use social media to make purchasing decisions.
Social networks are an exceptional tool to promote products and services, through contents of all kinds (images, videos, articles, etc.). The social platforms offer the opportunity to create engagement around the brand and its products, as well as allowing customers to interact with the businesses, expressing their opinions and asking questions.
In summary, social commerce shortens distances between customers and companies, allowing the traditional and one-sided model to be inverted, according to which companies offer products to customers, can encourage the purchase and increase the conversion rate of their own electronic store.
21. Define Your Unique Selling Point (USP)
What’s your online store’s unique selling point? If you can’t answer this question off the bat, you don’t have a defined USP.
Your USP helps you stand out, so defining one is important to entice your customer to purchase from you.
For example, your site’s USP could be, “Lowest Prices Guaranteed”, “100% Original Products” or “Cycling Gear That Lasts”.
Those are random examples, but as long as you can promise something that a user may really want, your conversion rate will be higher.
The Wistia landing page, for a more concrete example, has a clearly developed USP. “Video software for video-loving businesses”. Clear, simple, and specific.
— Source: Wistia
22. Enhance Your Site’s Security
No buyer likes to risk their privacy and financial security while shopping online.
Even while browsing websites, your information is exchanged with the site, and your customers are no exception.
However, the most threat you can face online is when it comes to payments. If your credit card information is stolen due to bad security, you can incur financial losses and even identity theft that can cause further damages.
It’s 2019, and most people are aware of the need for tight security around ecommerce stores. If your visitor can tell that your site security is lackluster, they won’t convert.
Make sure you have all the necessary security protocols active on your site and you have taken all the measures to protect your customer’s privacy and information from frauds and hackers!
Conversion Rate Optimization: Post-Sales Tips
23. Use A/B Testing Tools
I talked about A/B testing to measure the impact of different CTA buttons, now let’s talk why you should do it more often.
There’s a huge probability that your competitors are A/B testing their landing pages, CTA buttons, product placements, and site copy, etc., to see what’s working well for them.
If they figure out what’s working for their customers, even your potential customers might switch to them.
However, if you can figure how to use A/B testing plugins/tools to your advantage, your site will be optimized with the most tried and tested methods and CTAs.
— Source: Cloudways
AB Tasty, Optimizely (free for small volumes), Visual Website Optimizer or Kameleoon are some of the tools you can use to split test your headlines and other aspects of your site.
You can create variations of your landing pages for conversion optimization. For example, to see which works better. Some of your visitors will land on version A, others on version B.
Just analyze the results to find the version that offers the best conversion rate and you can use that as your main page!
24. Reassure Visitors Experience
You never know who you’re dealing with online as visitors tend to be suspicious. So that your users don’t have doubts about the reliability of your ecommerce store, but you must (it is a tautology) reassure them, put them in confidence.
It is necessary that the visitor can say to himself: “this ecommerce store is reliable and looks very serious, I can buy or give my mail without risk.”
Reassurance refers to all the elements whose main objective is to give your visitors a feeling of security, to reassure them, to dispel all the obstacles to action.
Here are some reassurance elements to consider to improve the conversion rate optimization of your ecommerce store. Some are very basic others are more technical:
- Create a stylish yet professional store.
- Create dense institutional and corporate pages. To humanize your website, post photos of the work environment, your premises, etc.
- Create FAQs and comment/feedback section.
- Provide guarantees regarding delivery and payment. Show these guarantees in the form of badges or pictograms on your store.
- Accompany the visitor/customer during their purchase process: include, for example, a live chat so that they can ask you questions during the order. More widely, highlight the means of contact (mail, form, phone, mailing address, etc.).
- Guarantee your customers the confidentiality of their data by displaying mandatory information, certifications, etc.
Example of the eBay, which highlights the reassurance in its header:
— Source: Ebay
25. Retarget Abandoned Shopping Carts
You aren’t alone if you’re facing a lot of shopping cart abandonment on your online store. In fact, almost 88% of people admit to abandoning their cart while shopping online, according to a Forrester store.
So what should you do about it? Retarget abandoned carts customers.
Retargeting makes sure that you’re showing ads to only the customers who visited your store, added products to their carts and then left the store without finalizing their purchase. You can add an offer or discount in the retargeting ad to entice them to come back to your store and complete their purchase.
Furthermore, you can send cart abandoners an email if they’ve provided you one reminding them to finalize their purchase. Again, you can add an incentive in your email to make sure they have a reason to come back.
— Source: MarkGrowth
Criterio and Target2Sell are examples of software that let you automate your retargeting efforts. You can use this software to lower your abandoned carts. However, if you can determine why people abandon their carts on your site and eliminate those reasons, you’ll have less abandonment, to begin with.
26. Optimize Different Personas
Effective targeting aims to hit the business personas that can be more easily transformed into valuable leads. It is, therefore, necessary to segment the different types of targets from a demographic, anthropological and needs point of view.
Once the personas have been identified, it becomes necessary to design a communication suitable to respond to the needs perceived by potential customers. The ideal message varies depending on the type of target and channel used for digital advertising campaigns (Facebook Ads, Linkedin Ads, Google Adwords, Twitter Ads, Instagram Ads, etc.).
The effort made to attract the potential lead would be useless without a useful landing page to convert. For this reason, a fundamental step in conversion rate optimization is to bring traffic to specific landing pages where the product or service is presented.
27. Track Customer Behavior
If you aren’t tracking your customers’ behavior, it’s time to start doing it right away.
Customer behavior can tell you a lot about how your site performs, how customers are interacting with your site, what posts or products get the most attention, which product sells the most, or where your customers are coming from, etc.
— Source: Google Images
One of the most popular tools tracking user behavior is Google Analytics.
The free version of Google Analytics is a powerful tool to determine where your visitors are coming from, what pages they are interacting with, and even their age and the type of device they are using to access your store.
28. Develop Content Strategy
Your ecommerce store is bound to fail if you are not able to attract the target online with your products. You can’t pretend to interest everyone, you must find your niche.
To make sure to stimulate purchases, Beardbrand has created product support content to create a credible business story and image. They have added photos of how customers could appear using their products and have consistently delivered this message across all marketing platforms and advertising campaigns.
Today they are a successful ecommerce store that develops a turnover of $100,000 a month through online sales only.
— Source: Sleeknote
Content marketing (or inbound marketing) is crucial for developing brand awareness of your ecommerce store. You have to write articles on the blog (you have a blog on your ecommerce site, right?), create videos, publish photos, produce social media content that makes you understand who you are.
29. Use Email Marketing Automation
The reasons behind an email marketing automation strategy are simple: you can send the right content to the right person. And if you think about it this is the synthesis of the concept of inbound marketing: you don’t have to be a source of trouble with your message, but you have to be found when individuals need you.
With email automation this is possible: you can do a lead nurturing activity and send messages to a specific audience, shortening the distances between who sends the content and who receives it. This happens with a trigger: an event that becomes a trigger to trigger the sequences you have planned.
What can you do with email marketing automation? There are several examples that various programs to send newsletters and messages of email allow you to put into practice. The simplest and most common:
- Send an email with advice, gifts, and ideas to the people who sign up
- A member’s birthday: send personalized emails with a gift
- Contact, after a few days, users who have left the cart
- Send content that follows a timeline
The basic concept is this: behind a contact, there is a potential buyer who must be followed and fed.
30. Start Retargeting Campaigns
Setting up a remarketing strategy to your ecommerce store is extremely useful for increasing traffic, conversion rates, and retaining customers over time. It is a type of online advertising that relies on previous user actions when these actions did not result in a purchase.
The intent of remarketing is to show potential customers new ads focused on the products they viewed on ecommerce, personalizing their ads and trying to recover the potentially lost customer. This advertising technique is based on the use of an anonymous cookie that is released when a user accesses the website.
The cookie is used to track the visitor’s browsing on other sites, in order to show him more and more times ads related to the products displayed by him, to stimulate him to convert. Every time the visitor is exposed to the announcement, he can define a “contact point”.
Science says that on average 7 points of contact are needed before the consumer makes the purchase.
Social media can also be used for remarketing: for example, Facebook remarketing, you can reach users who have visited a website, group them according to different rules and use the audience segments that are targeted to their campaigns.
Conclusion
Conversions are important.
In fact, without website conversion rate optimization, you don’t have a business. And no matter what your current conversion rate is, a better conversion rate is always desirable. Besides, even if you’re satisfied with how well your online store is doing, there’s a possibility that it can do better.
These are our top conversion rate optimization practices, and they’ve helped us achieve better results. Do you have any suggestions that we’ve missed out on our list? Let us know in the comments section below! You can get help from the cloudways webinar about how to improve your shop’s conversion rate.
Mansoor Ahmed Khan
Been in content marketing since 2014, and I still get a kick out of creating stories that resonate with the target audience and drive results. At Cloudways by DigitalOcean (a leading cloud hosting company, btw!), I lead a dream team of content creators. Together, we brainstorm, write, and churn out awesome content across all the channels: blogs, social media, emails, you name it! You can reach out to me at [email protected].