Increasing your conversion rate is one of the most important ways to grow an ecommerce business. You need to do everything you can to ensure visitors to your online store make a purchase, otherwise, all your marketing and advertising efforts that drive them to your site are going to waste.
In this article, you’ll find some of the key ways to get more conversions on your ecommerce site.
Review site analytics
The starting point when looking to improve your ecommerce conversion rate is to review how your website is performing. Take a look at the Google Analytics data for your site to get an understanding of:
- Where your visitors come from
- How they interact with your site
- At what point they leave.
Look at what your highest converting pages are, and which ones are the lowest — what’s the difference between them?
When you’re looking at where traffic is coming from, consider what visitors might have been expecting. For example, if they’ve come from Google search results and don’t convert, what did they actually search for and why did the page they landed on not fulfill that. Or if you’re getting a lot of traffic from paid advertising that leaves straight away, you might need to look at rewording your ads or directing traffic to a better page.
Reviewing your site’s analytics will help you to identify any problems with your website that stop visitors from converting. You can prioritize which areas of your site to work on first, and you’ll be able to replicate the strategies you’ve used on high converting pages.
Utilize social proof
Social proof is one of the best ways to convince shoppers to purchase from your ecommerce store, especially if you’re a small brand that they’re not familiar with.
- Use customer testimonials on your home page and across your social media accounts to build trust with your audience.
- Share images of your customers using or wearing the products that they’ve bought from you so that others can get an idea of what it looks like in real life.
- Add customer reviews to your product pages — this feedback will help shoppers to decide if a product is right for them.
External reviews on Google or sites like Trustpilot are also a valuable way of creating trust and establishing a reputation.
Improve your checkout experience
Checkout is the final hurdle for converting your ecommerce store’s visitors into paying customers.
It’s important that you provide the best possible checkout experience and minimize the chance of anything putting your visitors off buying. While many people will abandon their online cart before paying because they’re just browsing or comparing prices, there are a number of other issues that you can resolve.
Firstly, check that there are no bugs or glitches in your checkout system, and make it as simple as possible.
You should offer multiple payment options — debit and credit card and PayPal are standard, but adding Apple Pay and Google Pay will allow shoppers to check out a lot quicker. If you’re using a simpler ecommerce platform, for example, osCommerce, then you may have to add plugins to your site to offer more payment options as covered in the osCommerce review.
Forcing shoppers to create an account will impact increasing your conversion rate. Most people want a quick and easy checkout and setting up an account, filling in their personal information, and coming up with a password will put them off. You can always take their details and ask them to create an account after the order is placed by just entering a password.
However, the number one reason for cart abandonment online is extra costs such as shipping, taxes, and handling fees. While offering free shipping is the best way to tackle this, if that’s not possible then you need to be upfront about the costs you’re charging before customers reach the checkout stage.
Update your Call To Actions
The call to action (CTAs) also plays a big role in increasing your conversion rate. They need to be bold, enticing, and perfectly placed to convince someone to click.
If someone’s on a product page you don’t want them to miss your ‘Add to cart’ link, it needs to stand out and catch their attention. And make sure that it’s high enough on the page — shoppers shouldn’t have to scroll to the bottom to purchase your product.
You can run an A/B test using a tool such as Optomizely where you have two versions of the same page with different versions of the CTA to find out what works best. Experiment with where you position it on the page, different phrases, colors, or sizes.
It’s also worth looking at tools like Hotjar that show you a heatmap of how visitors are using your website — this insight could help you figure out the best place to put your CTAs to increasing your conversion rate.
Work on your SEO
Your on-page SEO can also have a significant impact on your ecommerce site’s conversions. You want your site’s content to be targeting the right keywords so that it appears in relevant searches, but you don’t want to stuff too many keywords in — Google will see it as a negative and your visitors will be put off.
Ensure you’re using keywords in the right places such as page titles, H2s, and the image alt text. But try to avoid including them too many times in the page’s copy. And research other relevant long-tail keywords that shoppers might use to search for the products you’re selling. It’s important that the page visitors land on actually matches up with what they were looking for in the first place, otherwise they’ll leave straight away.
Add a live chat feature
A lot of the time people will leave your site without making a purchase because they have questions or issues that they can’t find a solution to. By adding in a live chat feature you can give shoppers the opportunity to ask their questions and get a response that will clear up any reservations or convince them to buy.
It might not be feasible to have someone online at all times to answer questions, so you could use a chatbot that provides automated responses to frequently asked questions. Or you can use a help desk tool such as Zendesk that asks visitors to submit a question and their email so that you can contact them later.
To ensure that it works effectively and helps improve conversions, you’ll need to find live chat software that integrates with the ecommerce platform you’re using or if you’re using WooCommerce you’ll need to find the best plugin.
Update your product pages
Take a look at your product descriptions and consider how you could improve them. Do they provide enough information? You want to cover all the details that someone might need to know before buying — consider adding an extra section with clear bullet points of all the important specifications.
For items like clothing, where shoppers want to know whether something is going to fit you should add a size guide and feedback from other people on how the items fit. More advanced size guides that ask shoppers to share details about their measurements and body shapes will make them feel more confident that they can order the right size, and it will also reduce returns.
Is your copy convincing? Your product description needs to persuade shoppers that they need that product and that they should buy it from you. Don’t make it overcomplicated and long-winded, but ensure it covers all the key points and details that might push shoppers to convert.
You should update your product photos as well — include multiple high-quality images that show the products from all angles. If you can film product videos, even better. Online shoppers can’t view items in real life, so your product page has to do as much as possible to make up for that.
Abandoned cart emails
If you’re not already using abandoned cart emails then you should be. They’re an email that’s sent out to someone who’s added items to their cart on your site, started the checkout process, but not completed the purchase. It’s a fairly simple way to remind someone of what they were going to purchase and entice them to come back to your site.
Already using abandoned cart emails? Then take a look at how they can be improved. You need to get the timing just right. Send the email straight away and it could be annoying, or the person is doing something else and will miss it. If you leave it a week then they’ll probably have forgotten about it or purchased it from somewhere else.
You also need to make your email stand out in your customer’s inbox — test out different subject lines to increase your open rates.
Focusing on conversions will ensure that you’re taking full advantage of the traffic that comes to your site. These are just a few of the ways that’ll help you in increasing your conversion rate, but it’s important to remember that you need to continually optimize and improve your ecommerce store.
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