In a competitive digital world, one of the biggest challenges facing e-commerce stores today is increasing their conversion rate. A successful website that generates plenty of purchases, add to cart/wishlist and email signups don’t just happen overnight. It happens because you’re optimising your e-commerce conversion rate. It goes without saying that your conversion rate is a critical metric to monitor as you grow your business.
What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is the process of improving your e-commerce conversion rate through small, incremental improvements to create a better user experience. Having a better understanding of why customers convert, why they don’t and how they behave with your site can help drive more conversions. Conversion rate optimization can be conducted on landing pages, category pages or any other customer touchpoint. Better optimising your website will lead to lower Customer Acquisition Costs by getting more value from the website traffic your site already has, increasing your revenue per visitor. At a time where Customer Acquisition Costs are increasing due to growing online competition, anything we can do to lower this cost is a win.
Conversion Rate Optimisation Strategies
Use high-quality product images and videos
High-quality images have a significant impact on your e-commerce conversion rates. Users can tell a lot about your brand from the images on your site. Low-quality images or images that don’t allow zoom will lead to high cart abandonment as users can’t evaluate the product properly.
Remove friction from your checkout process
Research shows that users have abandoned their cart due to the checkout process. It’s either too long, too complicated or looks for unnecessary information. Your checkout process should be seamless and easy. Converting visitors who are the closest to the buying stage is a great way to boost conversions.
Build Trust
Your customers need to trust your business to be willing to enter their card details on your site. Enhancing your onsite trust and credibility should be the basis for many of your conversion rate optimisation activities. Displaying trust signals like SSL, security certificates and card provider imagery helps ensure customers that their card details will be protected.
Collect customer feedback/reviews
Customer reviews are critical to users’ confidence in the suitability of the product, evaluation and learning more about a product. Users typically look for two key pieces of information from reviews: the average rating score and the number of ratings the average is based upon. Make sure you display both for each product.
Live chat
Using live chat and chatbots to communicate with customers can help give them answers to their questions without the need for them to email or call you. Nowadays, live chat pop-up boxes seem to be everywhere, so careful consideration is needed when implementing chat features on your site.
Easy to navigate website
Users expect logical website navigation to find what they are looking for in the least amount of clicks possible. Having user-friendly navigation is as important as having solid categories for products. Make product categories visible at the top level of the main navigation, so the user doesn’t have to hover on desktop.
Mobile optimise your site
While most websites are optimised for mobile, many e-commerce sites are not providing a great mobile experience. Over half of website traffic comes from mobile, so attention to the mobile customer experience is critical. Making your e-commerce store easier to use on mobile devices is one of the best ways to increase your conversions.
Mobile users should be able to pay in a streamlined way. Payment Method selection is a step where users often experience usability issues. Most sites have a primary method but still display a handful of third-party payment options. All of those choices can be challenging to balance on a small screen, leading to users becoming overwhelmed and confused.
The goal of Conversion Rate Optimisation is to increase the number of conversions from your current website traffic. Implementing these strategies can steadily increase your conversions and continually bring in more revenue.
Concerned that your website is not optimised for conversions? Contact a member of our web design team to discuss how we can improve your website to drive more conversions.
