Today, most marketing teams focus on driving traffic towards their websites with the hope that this traffic will convert into qualified leads for sales representatives to close. Even so, that’s merely half of the battle.
Getting more out of your existing traffic and leads can propel your business towards a long-term, sustainable growth–conversion rate optimization (CRO) can help you achieve that feat. In this post, you’ll discover why your business should focus on how to improve conversion rate and the tips and best practices for conversion rate optimization.
What Is Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization?
Getting tons of traffic to your website is always a good thing and something that most businesses desire. But when that traffic doesn’t convert into something like a sale, a sign-up to an email list, or an eBook download, then there really is no point.
This is where conversion rate optimization comes in. It refers to the process of optimizing your website to increase the number of leads you generate. Marketing teams can achieve conversion rate optimization through split testing, content enhancement, and workflow improvement. Conversion rate optimization for ecommerce results in highly-qualified leads, an increase in revenue, and lower acquisition costs.
Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization Best Practices
The conversion rate optimization process constitutes a number of best practices that you can leverage to gain an understanding of what your audience responds to. Here is an outline of some of them:
1. Simplify User Experience (UX)
It’s crucial to ensure that your visitors find your website intuitive so that they can easily do what they need to do on it. When it comes to CRO, a big part of enhancing user experience is considering how to minimize barriers.
One way to enhance user experience is by reducing the number of fields one requires to fill a form. Simplifying such processes can result in more conversions.
2. Perform A/B Testing
A/B testing involves publishing two different versions of a given item to determine which one performs better. You can use it to test out different hypotheses.
For instance, which color of the CTA button results in more conversions? Which of two headlines will get the most clicks? And so on. A/B testing is an essential CRO best practice for converting conjuncture into data.
3. Use Color to Your Advantage
Humans respond strongly to visual triggers. As such, how you use color can play a significant role in the rate of your conversions. Using bright, attention-grabbing colors for important CTAs can make them more noticeable to visitors. Similarly, choosing colors that stand out or contrast from the rest of your website’s theme (without clashing) may also do the trick.
4. Use Session Recordings and Heatmaps
Heatmaps indicate what draws a visitor’s attention when on a given page, their scrolling patterns, and the specific areas or items they clicked based on average visitor data. They can help you identify if a less important part of the page is distracting visitors or if an important CTA is being overlooked.
On the other hand, session recordings allow website owners to view what specific visitor interactions looked like—the actions they took, the order in which they took the actions, and how long it took for them to perform a given action. Session recordings and heatmaps can help you understand how well your website is doing its job.
5. Understand the Conversion Funnel
Understanding the conversion funnel will enable you to assign a more accurate value to various conversions. It will also allow you to see bigger trends in what is working. When you understand the relationship between different actions, you will be able to determine what series of actions will lead to a purchase or conversion.
6. Focus on Calls to Action (CTA)
CTA is the building block of conversion optimization. They help guide visitors on what to do next after landing on a page. While using CTA on every page of your website is an excellent practice, you will want to use different ones based on the specific goals you have for a given page.
Determining which CTA is ideal for each page is crucial. But a big part of CRO is deciding how to word and present the CTA in the most effective way possible. Simply tweaking a few words in your CTA or changing its color can produce surprising results.
Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization Tips
Here are some website optimization tips that will increase the conversion rate of your ecommerce website:
1. Improve Ecommerce Website Speed
A fast website is great all around–it’s excellent for search engine optimization, delightful for user experience, and excellent for search engine marketing (SEM). Having said that, keeping your load time down is easier said than done. Among the things you will have to do include:
- Monitoring your page load time with tools such as Google Analytics to determine whether there are outlier pages that get a lot of views but have higher load times
- Leverage tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to check if there are any issues
- Manage the number of plugins that you have
2. Convey Your Unique Selling Proposition
You can help your e-commerce shoppers make a buying decision by informing them what makes you stand out from your competition. Ensure that the content that outlines what makes you different is given prominent real estate in your pages.
3. Build Trust to Increase Conversions
Trust is an essential component in the e-commerce industry—people will only purchase your products when they trust you. To increase your conversion rates, you need to be deliberate about the perception you want your website to have. Ensure that your website has a modern look, is secure, and your contact details are displayed prominently.
4. Aim for Effortless Navigation
While getting the visitor to the right page may sound simple, it requires a lot of effort, and only the most deliberate marketers can get this right. Some of the measures that you can take to ensure that visitors can easily navigate your website include:
- Exposing navigation elements on larger screens
- Ensuring that interactive components have affordance signifiers (they should look clickable)
- Creating clear navigation labels
- Following web conventions–this will ensure that visitors have an easy time navigating your site
5. Leverage Customer Reviews/Social Proof
Human beings are social creatures. When in doubt, we tend to look at what other people have done in similar situations. Because of this, customer reviews and testimonials are powerful in improving visitor trust in an ecommerce website. Reviews provide shoppers with crucial information that they can use to make their buying decisions. Simply put, customer reviews instill confidence in potential buyers that your products actually work.
Ecommerce Checkout Conversion Rate Optimization
It takes a significant amount of effort to get a decent number of visitors to go to your website’s checkout screen. You need to devise a strategy that ensures that a healthy number of visitors who get to your website’s checkout screen proceed to make a purchase. Among the things you can do to increase the chances of this happening include:
- Getting the email address early in the checkout process: When you do this, even if visitors leave your site without completing the form, you’ll have a way of contacting them to go back to the cart and convert later.
- Set user expectations: You should have a progress bar that not only tells visitors what the next step is but also communicates what the step entails using clear labels.
- Limit distractions: Reduce the number of elements you present to a bare minimum once shoppers are on the checkout screen.
- Show any additional charges as soon as possible: Surprising potential customers with extra charges can get them annoyed and cause them to leave.
Conversion Rate Optimization for Luxury Ecommerce
Some of the ways of optimizing conversion rates for luxury ecommerce items include:
- Avoid Incentives, Instead, Create Additional Value: Given that brand identity is essential to the survival of luxury goods, you should avoid offering incentives – offering incentives may reduce the product’s perceived value. Instead, you should focus on making luxury consumers feel special, especially given their willingness to pay premium prices.
- Offer Advanced Product Recommendations: Ensure that you don’t miss any product offering your consumers may be interested in. It’s up to you to provide recommendations to ensure that luxury ecommerce shoppers get the best experience on your website.
- Create Urgency: Given that the purchase of luxury products often involves a high level of involvement, creating urgency is an excellent way of increasing conversions. Use the scarcity strategy when there is a limited number of items left in stock to increase your sales.
- Drive Sales Without Compromise: Value, exclusivity, and image are vital components that make luxury brands what they are. By understanding the shoppers’ needs and the value they desire, you can create campaigns that optimize conversion without interfering with key brand elements.
- Establish social proof: Utilize the theory of social proof. This strategy revolves around the idea that luxury consumers are influenced by what their peers are doing.
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