There is an enormous need to boost eCommerce conversion rates to keep up with trends. In 2018, the average eCommerce site had a conversion rate lower than 5%.
Online customers treat these sites as areas to take information instead of purchasing. Research shows that around 72% of online shoppers do prior research before shopping in an in-person store. Following that, two-thirds report checking prices on their phone while in the store.
When customers browse online, viewing it as a positive sales opportunity for your eCommerce website is essential. To take advantage of these online visitors, improve your conversion rate.
What is an eCommerce Conversion Rate?
An eCommerce conversion rate is the percentage and number of visitors who purchase. The formula below tells you how to calculate your conversion rate:
20 sales from 1,000 site visitors:
20 ÷ 1,000 = 2% conversion rate
The average conversion rate is usually between 1% and 4% across eCommerce. Therefore, if you can boost your eCommerce conversion rate even by the smallest of 1% to 2%, you can increase your sales by twice the amount.
How to increase your eCommerce conversion rate
Before, during, and after an online shopper visits your site, you can take steps to boost conversions.
Start Before Shoppers Get to Your Site
You can start the process before your shopper even lands on your site. Here’s how.
Make advertising and website copy uniform
Utilizing the Rule of 7 in marketing states that an online buyer must see your message at least 7 times before your advertisement is influential.
You must be consistent across your advertisements, social channels, and websites to follow Rule 7. You want to continue hitting your online shoppers with the same sales message to increase conversion rates.
Offer coupon codes
Your online customers are more likely to purchase something when they have a coupon if you put discount codes on sites like Woot! Or Groupon, you can get a better insight into your sales analytics.
Improve Your On-Site Conversion Rate
You have the most power when a visitor is first on your eCommerce website, so it is up to you to do the right things to influence them to purchase from you. Beginning at the home landing page, you can boost your eCommerce website’s conversion rate.
Decrease loading time
When someone tries entering your website, it loads. Every second during that load time is crucial to your conversion rate. One study revealed that the website bounce rate doubled when the load time was raised by only two seconds. In addition, people spend a more extended amount of time on pages that have a quicker load time. Similarly, online shoppers are less likely to return to an eCommerce website if their page takes too long.
Therefore, improving loading time is very important, and you must take crucial steps to optimize your eCommerce website best. These steps can range from testing each page on different computers and mobile devices to checking the size of your images and files so your website can offer enough speed to make it run smoothly.
Offer free return shipping
You must implement something important in your eCommerce website to install an excellent return policy. A risk with eCommerce is that it takes away the physical touch factor of items and seeing it in person. In other words, it makes it harder for online shoppers to be confident that they want to purchase it. However, offering free return shipping makes the buyer much more confident in buying it and taking the risk on the product. Lastly, you must ensure that your policy is easy to see and understandable. Keep the return policy language simple.
Offer free shipping
In 2016, a study revealed that 90% of online shoppers said that free shipping was the factor that made them purchase the product online.
Shoot small
Giving your customers a first sale provides the buyer with a good experience with your brand in the long run. This means you want to sell something cheaper than your most expensive product first. Once your customers experience your good quality online shopping, they are more likely to return.
Use quality images
You want to have good-quality images on your website. Sometimes, this means you have to hire a professional to take professional product photographs to have the photos you need to portray your products on your site correctly. However, if you are a reseller, you must ensure that your photographs are at least 640×640 pixels.
Offer discounts and sales
Sales and discount codes are intelligent ways to get visitors to your eCommerce website to become buyers eventually. A unique way to intrigue your visitors is to offer a limited-time promotion, and this is because it adds a sense of urgency to their purchase. After all, the code will expire in some amount of time coming up. Or, you can increase your prices overall but offer coupon codes more often than a seasonal special. This way, your online buyers will feel like they are getting the best deal possible.
Promote benefits, not features
As you write your promotional copy, you must remember not to do it in the mindset of the creator or the owner, meaning don’t think about the essential parts of your product. Instead, it would help if you highlighted why your online buyers would respect their purchase. You want them to think about the usefulness, not the characteristics.
Harness the power of social media
A solid social media presence lets you connect with your customers daily. It also helps you make use of your online customer reviews. 95% of customers read online reviews before buying a product online. Therefore, you should make your reviews as accessible and viewable as possible to boost your eCommerce website conversions.
Optimize your FAQ page
When doing this, you want to do it in your customer’s mindset. Use your customer’s feedback and the support data from the customer to customize your FAQs. This is helpful as it means you will address the questions you know most of your customers have. Make sure to address your return policy and shipping questions on your FAQ page and provide vital links to other resources to help give more insight if needed.
Allow guest shopping
Something that will increase your conversion rate is to have guest shopping as an option. If you make your customers create an account before they can either browse or complete a purchase on your eCommerce website, the odds of them wanting to do the whole process is relatively low. The chances of this happening are high for someone purchasing from you for the first time. First-time customers may not know if they want to continue shopping with you, so they will not want to create an account if they do not have to. If you allow guests to shop from the beginning and they continue to shop there, they will eventually create an account.
Show security to build trust
You must create a trustworthy relationship between you and your buyer when you ask them to purchase from you via a website. If you include a trust badge on your site, it will show that you value security. If your online shoppers can pay smoothly with their credit cards, they will likely feel safe to purchase from you again.
Create a sense of urgency
Creating urgency with your customer can be an excellent way to increase purchases. Similar to having a coupon code that expires at a specific time, adding text under a product that says “Low Stock” can also be a clever tactic as it creates urgency. It makes your buyer feel that the time to buy is now, and it also makes the product more desirable as it is almost sold out means other people want it as well and have already purchased it.
Other Tips for Improving Conversion Rates
The following are six other tips on how to boost your conversion rate and get more shoppers on your site.
Optimize for mobile
With the improvement of mobile phones, eCommerce sales via mobile devices are rising. Therefore, your sales will decrease if your eCommerce website is not easy to use on mobile devices. Possible customers are likely to purchase from your site if they have a positive experience on their phones. Sales via mobile devices are so prominent nowadays that in 2018, Black Friday mobile sales were more than $2 billion.
Include video
Including videos on your eCommerce website will increase the number of visitors your site receives, and it is constructive in showcasing your products. Zappos, a shoe retailer, does a great job of including videos on its site as it shows the shoe itself and somebody walking in and using the shoe.
A/B test prices
You have to be very careful when you are pricing your products. You may not get as many sales if you price them too high. If you price them too low, you risk messing up your profit margin. It would help if you tried offering two narrowly different versions of the same product to A/B test your cost.
Send abandoned cart reminders
Around 60%-80% of online shopping carts are left abandoned. To avoid this happening to your eCommerce website, a kind email reminding your shoppers that they went items in the cart might decrease the abandoned rate and increase your conversion rate. You can use a Shopify plugin to help manage and send out automatic emails.
Reduce form fields
While it is true that fewer form fields will increase conversions, recent studies prove that it is even more essential to comprehend which areas you should cut and which ones to keep. Asking the correct questions at your checkout will draw your visitors in.
Re-target visitors
Finding new customers can be tricky, but one of the best places to look is people who already know about your company. Someone who has been on your eCommerce website at least once has a higher chance of purchasing from you at some point. When someone randomly sees your ads and is untargeted, they won’t be interested in your products. However, if you set up a re-targeted campaign, you are spending your marketing money on an audience with a high chance of converting.
How Will You Increase Your E-commerce Conversion Rate?
Throughout the life cycle of a website visitor, several touch points can alter their choice to buy something. Whether it’s as little as how your product photo is photographed or as significant as your fulfillment operations, the range in between can completely alter your conversion rate.
Your sales will inevitably boost when you use almost all of these tips.
Better conversion rates can stress your operations, and ensuring supply chain logistics and fulfillment are in place is critical to reaching the boosted demand. This is precisely the type of situation that every eCommerce website should desire to have.
