What is Conversion Rate?
The conversion rate is the percentage of people who have performed an action called the goal in relation to a target population. On an e-commerce site, the main objective is that the visitor buys something or opts in for an event. The conversion rate is thus represented by the percentage of visitors who made a purchase compared to the total number of visitors to the website.
Improving the conversion rate of your website
The majority of e-merchants generally seek to increase the traffic of their site to increase their conversion. It is important to understand, however, that a 20% increase in your visits will not necessarily mean a 20% increase in your sales. It is indeed essential to make your site flawless and attractive before you start to increase the number of visitors, otherwise you will be counterproductive. Your goal should not be to bring as many people to your site as possible, but rather to improve your conversion rate so that your visitors buy, almost, for sure.
How to Increase Conversion Rate on your E-Commerce Website
To increase the conversion rate of your online store, there are several tips and details to work on.
1. Decrease the loading speed
The loading speed of your site is a crucial point in the transformation of your visits into a purchase. According to the latest Google survey, more than 53% of mobile visitors leave a site immediately when the wait time is more than three seconds. If you want a happy customer who is more likely to convert in to a sale, don’t make them wait.
Slow loading websites can also penalize your SEO on search engines (SERP), including Google.
Sites like GTmetrics and Google’s PageSpeed Insights are great free tools that will help you analyze your e-commerce websites page speed and suggest how to decrease the loading speed.
2. Place Call To Action
To transform the test and make your visitors click on the famous “Add to cart” button, it is necessary to place your “Call To Action” buttons, while working the wordings. Use contrasting colors with the background for easy identification. Also be precise in your titles: for example, prefer “Add to cart” rather than “Continue” or “Next” which remain too vague. Your client should know exactly what will happen after clicking the button.
3. Focus on Clean Product Descriptions
To convince your visitors to buy your products or request a quote, you must provide them with descriptive information about what you offer. It is therefore important to look after and maintain the description of your products. Products that look like they have been recently update are likely to increase conversion rate. This will also be beneficial to your SEO by the use of suitable keywords and to stay unique.
4. Sell the Product benefits
Do not hesitate to add a lots of photos of good quality, to finish convincing your undecided visitors. Videos are also becoming increasingly popular and can communicate a product more effectively to sell more product. Explain the product benefits and the key reasons why your product is better.
5. Trust Signals
Another way to increase conversion rate is to portray your site or product as trusted and convince your future customers to order from your online store. You can add trust signals and banners. This can be in the form of “They trust us” or with a reinsurance banner featuring the company’s unique strengths and benefits.
You can also place security emblems if your site is verified and secure. Security emblems and trust signals are relatively easy to get. In most cases you just have to register your website at a place like McAfee Secure or Norton Safe Web. Once they have finished their scans of your website they will present you with an secure trust logo that you can present on your website.
6. Highlight Customer Reviews
Customer reviews often represented in the form of small stars, can be a decisive aid during the decision-making process to trigger the purchase. It is therefore essential to put in place techniques to collect the positive opinions and place them on your site. Your future buyers will then be comforted in their choice and you will see the sales of your site increase.
7. Cross-selling to Increase Conversion Rate
Cross-selling consists in proposing to the Internet user related products, similar or complementary, with the product consulted, at an almost identical price. By offering a refined selection of products similar to the one that your visitor consults, you will be more likely to offer a product that meets your needs and quickly turn your visit into a purchase.
8. Product Comparison
To help your visitors make decisions, you can also offer a product comparison tool. This works perfectly when you offer a large catalog of products, many of them similar, and especially in the technological field.
9. Shorten the Sales Tunnel
To avoid shopping cart abandonment, it becomes increasingly important to shorten the sales tunnel as much as possible. Do not ask too much information, only those essential for billing and delivery. The more you ask for, the more likely you will lose your visitors along the way.
It is also possible to allow the customer to create an account or continue as a guest without creating an account.
The path on your website that leads to a product sale can sometimes be tricky or confusing to travel, with many spots where potential buys could drop off. In this case you may want to look in to what are know as Sales Funnels. Sales Funnels will help you target your traffic and guide them to the purchase. For help with this we advise you to take a look at Click Funnels. Click Funnels is a powerful tool designed to minimize visitor drop off and increase conversion rates.
10. Shipping Costs
Your delivery offer is a criterion that counts in the purchase decision of your users. If shipping costs are too high, this can be a drag and your visitors may abandon a cart during the order. The best option for converting a visitor in to a buyer is to offer free shipping. Try experimenting with some free options:
- Free shipping on all purchases over $25
- Free shipping on orders over $50
- Free shipping on 75 dollar packages (valid only on domestic orders)
- Free shipping no minimum
Also offer reliable and widespread payment methods, while leaving the choice to your customers among several solutions, including the most popular: PayPal. If you want to increase conversion rate it would be beneficial to except all the preferred payment methods.
11. Highlight Promotions
To push the visitors of your e-commerce site to buy, you can use promotions:
- Decrease prices based volume
- Display Clearance Prices
- Value Packages & Bundles
The choices are numerous. Do not forget to highlight these commercial promotions through a banner or in the carousel of your homepage, via news on the blog section or on your social networks.
Lastly, think about offering limited offers over time: the feeling of urgency will drive your users to buy, thus promoting the conversion of your site.
12. Cart Abandonment Opportunities
Despite all these techniques put in place, you still have cart abandonment. In this case it is possible to set up automated follow up email to revive your customers. Thus, after a visit to your site and the abandonment of a shopping cart by a user, it will remind the buyer that they have items in their shopping cart and encourage them to place or finish an order. By reaching out a second time to that same potential customer you are very likely to increase conversion rate.
The same principle exists via Adwords cookies that track your users by offering them your Adwords campaigns on other sites or blogs they visit. You can set the products so that those proposed are similar to the one visited or abandoned in the shopping cart.
