Last Updated on February 29, 2024
Developing a high-speed online store with Ultra-Modern UI/UX with the right technology is no longer enough to make your business survive in today’s competitive e-commerce world. Game of e-commerce has shifted from providing free gifts and coupon discounts to more fruitful engagement. When compared to your competitors, there are various minute factors that will lead customers to abandon your store.
The main goal of a merchant is always to manage the conversion rate of the store and maintaining the conversion rate is difficult with the ever increasing competition. When it comes to encouraging customers to buy products from your website, optimizing conversion rate is all you might require.
But, What is it? Well, the article here contains:
What is Conversion Rate?
What is Optimization of Conversion Rate?
20 Ways for Conversion Rate Optimization
First Things First! What is Conversion Rate?
The percentage of visitors on the online store completing their purchase out of the total number of visitors is known as Conversion Rate. Depending on the different business goals, the conversion rate can be measured. Sometimes, for the online store, the goal is the purchase of product or inquiry received, and for websites, registration for newsletter or shares on social media can be considered as business goals.
“Optimizing the Customer Experience can be considered as indirect Conversion Rate Optimization.”
Conversion rates are higher, especially when the consumers are willing to buy or really searching for a product. A low conversion rate simply represents the lower engagement created by the online store. In order to optimize the conversion rate of your online store, optimizing the overall experience of the store is the best thing you can do.
Here is a detailed bifurcation of conversion rate by traffic source to help you better with the insights of conversion through distinct channels.
Optimization of the Conversion Rate
Expecting a conversion without offering appropriate optimization is a delicate ship to sail. Basically, Conversion Rate Optimization is a marketing optimization process utilized in order to increase the percentage of visitors taking desired actions. The process majorly involves analyzing the visitor’s behavior by carefully monitoring user navigation and also to understand what leads them to abandon your site without completing the desired goal.
The process involves identifying and focusing on the factor which can lead to the achievement of the desired action on the website.
Most of the time, redesigning a website is considered as the Jack for higher conversion rates, but sometimes, making specific optimizations on the existing business can do the miracles as well. Here are specific ways to optimize the conversion rate:
Personalized Experience
A report says, “On average, 71% of consumers express some level of frustration when their shopping experience is impersonal.”
With millennials at a high-rise among the target audience, the personalized experience becomes the key to enhanced engagement on online stores or websites. When an online store offers personalized experiences such as customized page content, customized offers, visuals, emails, etc. to match visitor’s choices and preferences, it makes them stay back longer. It is great for customers when your online store remembers the contact details and the bank details to make the next purchase quicker.
Offer tailor-made recommendations to your visitors based on the previous search made by them, send them an email at the time of cart abandonment, restocking of the item they looked for and what not! Personalization can facilitate customer retention and lets businesses increase recurring conversions as well as improve overall conversion rates.
Enable Multiple Filters
When shopping at an online store, every customer expects their search process to get over quickly. When the store has layered navigation, it becomes easier for them to find what they are looking for and ultimately boost your sales and enhances the conversation rate. Store without well-knit navigation will make the search process lengthier and complicated.
Allow them to select and view multiple categories through filters to get sorted with the result page and make the shopping process more manageable. Enabling various filters on the website gives customers a suggestion of shortcuts to search for the right desired items effectively.
Make Use of Chatbots
Adopting new technologies is the best practice for e-commerce store owners to continue being the priority of their customers. A chatbot is an AI program that conducts conversation through text or auditory methods. It has revolutionized the way utilized traditionally to communicate with customers and helped merchants expand their global market scale.
Integrating chatbot on the e-commerce store will help you remain available for customer’s queries round the clock. Customers prefer interacting with businesses through chats, which makes it a beneficial platform for both customers as well as store owners.
Chatbot built rightly can be your best-friend that functions as a salesperson with an automated response to solve customer’s queries and provide them useful guidelines. A chatbot can also be helpful in recommending relevant products to the customer, offering support to customers.
Use Cart Abandonment Email
The average cart abandonment rate is 67.91% – research says
Not every customer does window shopping on your store when they leave products without buying in the cart. Sometimes they might forget to complete the purchase; this is when a cart abandonment will be bliss. Make sure it is not an automated email and some personalized message about how buying those products can be helpful to them.
You must sincerely go after every abandoned cart to make it a rare occurrence in your e-commerce store.
An abandonment email offers brands an opportunity to keep up with their customers and drive customers to reconsider purchasing the product they left in the cart.
Offer Easy Return Policy
92% of consumers surveyed said that they would buy again if the product return process is easy – mentioned Invespcro
While shopping from an e-commerce store, one is not always sure about the size and pattern or how will the particular design look. In such cases, an easy return policy can encourage the customers to proceed ahead with the purchasing. A customer-friendly return policy represents the merchant’s concern for the customer’s satisfaction and often reduces hesitation among customers even while making shopping for the first time.
Utilize Simple Checkout Process
A streamlined checkout process is one of the essential things affecting the conversion rate. A lot of things can be considered in order to have a well-designed and customer-friendly checkout process. Instead of the traditional 6 step checkout process, try having the shortest checkout process possible (One Step Checkout is the Best).
No customer would like to give away a lot of personal information to buy a single project.
When talking about Checkout, Customers Crave Simplicity!
If your store aims at rich customer experience, avoiding complicated checkout must be the first step as it plays a significant role in the customer’s buying decisions. You can save customer’s information and make the shopping faster in their next purchases. This way, you can offer the utmost convenience to the customers and develop customer’s loyalty.
Improvise Store Navigation
Would you like to buy from a store that reloads the page every time you make a change in the filter? Or takes a lot of time to navigate you within the store? Of course not.
Similarly, for customers, navigation on the website matters a lot. Navigation of the website decides whether it is performing well in keeping customers engaged in the store. Not only customer experience, but site navigation also does great wonders to make the website rank higher on the search engine results page as well.
Tricky navigation generally freaks out the customer and makes them exit the store without making the purchase.
Allow your customers as well as search engine bots to find the products quickly, and you will rock your conversions!
Provide Customized Coupon Codes
Just like personalized experience through website design, you can also offer confidential and limited-time coupon codes through push notifications, which will help to gain the attention of the customer. When a customer is looking for something and leaves the store without buying, you can offer them a special discount coupon code to make them move forward with the buying process. It is seen that customers are more likely to buy a product when they find themselves eligible for a discount offer.
Offering special discounts on a particular purchase and setting a deadline for the included discounts can create a sense of urgency and make the customer take buying decisions quickly to close the deal.
Free Shipping – The Jack of All
Invespcro says 79% of consumers want free return shipping.
FREE shipping is just the best thing required to gain customer’s attention. High shipping cost is one of the biggest reasons for cart abandonment. In this cyber world, where more than half of e-commerce merchants offer free shipping, it is difficult to stay in the competition with the shipping fee being charged on every order.
“Free” is a fundamental psychological trick that attracts more assumptions of “benefits.” Making shipping free is the Jack of all the significant ways utilized to optimize the customer experience of your online store.
Appropriate Sizing System
While purchasing online, buying the right size is a major concern for customers. Many stores sell unstandardized sizing based on related numbering. In order to avoid the frustration faced by customers, you must have an appropriate sizing system and a sizing chart to guide the customers to buy the right size.
Additionally, it also helps to boost the shopper’s confidence by letting them find a perfect fit. Drive more customers with the detailed, systematic and standardized size chart on your e-commerce store. A comfortable and smoother shopping experience is all you need on your Magento store to boost sales.
Detailed Product Description
87% of the online shoppers place a high value on product descriptions – a report mentioned
Your customers shall get every detail about the product from the description itself. A description that offers valuable information is a great way to support visitors making the purchase decision. The primary role of a long description is to clear the customer’s queries and offer them all the necessary information required to make the purchase.
Make sure you mention for whom the product is suitable, what does the product offer, why the customer should consider buying the product and the benefits mentioned in the right way to make your product considerable.
Keep it Mobile-Optimized
Target saw that 98% of their customers were shopping digitally and that 75% were using mobile – mentioned a report
With the mobile revolution, there is a significant increase in the number of people using mobile devices for online shopping. Mobile optimization on your e-commerce story is necessary in order to offer an enhanced user experience as shopping on mobile is much more convenient for customers. The mobile world continues to evolve; hence, businesses need to stay up-to-date with the trends.
Make sure your store is highly optimized on all mobile devices such as tablets, laptops, gaming devices, watches. A store compatible with all the mobile devices is itself an increasingly popular way to develop brand awareness.
Categorize Page with Filters
A well-knit and designed page is what makes the customer stay back on the store and stay engaged. When your store contains categorized menus with the right categories and beautiful navigation, it makes the search process easier for your customers. This helps the visitor to directly reach the right product as it can simply reduce thousands of product searches to a limited amount of products. In order to make your website filled with adequate filter functionality, basic filters are required to be divided based on variant categories.
Conduct Testing Timely
Any website running on the internet needs a quality analysis time-to-time. Similarly, your online store also needs to be checked for bugs timely. At least once in a week, a quality analysis should be done and bugs should be resolved so that the customers may not face any problem.
This will also help in checking the security of the store and the customer’s information. Constant testing can help you find if any new ideas can be executed to the store. With testing, you can also check the customer’s response to the campaigns and help the business decide how to move forward with the business and campaigns.
Keep the Page Load Time As Low As Possible
A report mentioned Nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed influences their likeliness to buy
Time is money applies rightly to an e-commerce store. With the fierce competition going out there, slow websites lose order to fast websites and low speed also affects the store poorly. All your time and money for acquiring new customers are in vain if your store takes too long to load.
Your store is likely to lose sales and loss the customer to your competitor. Always remember, “a one-second improvement will lead to a two-percent conversion rate.”
Avoid Page Reload
AJAX loading is one of the must-haves for any online store. When a customer applies certain filters, they do not expect the store to reload pages every time. This will affect your conversion rate as customers lose their interest due to excessive reloading.
This is one of the best ways to tackle the reloading problem as with AJAX loading, only the portions that have been changed will be reloaded and not the entire page. When the reload is reduced, customers can complete the unfinished shopping process as the web page is available to the customer more often.
Customers’ Testimonials Matters a Lot
A report says 72% of customers won’t take action until they read reviews
Whether it is a brick and mortar retailer or SaaS company or an online retailer, testimonials play a significant role in the customer’s purchasing decision. Customer reviews/testimonies are great to help you build an online reputation for your online store. You can either showcase them on your product page or the home page.
It is said that most of the millennials trust online reviews as much as family and friends. It is high time that every e-commerce store shall start showcasing a review and rating section on the online store. E-commerce giants have already implemented this fantastic idea. Why don’t you?
Remove Sliders from Homepage
According to a report, Only 1% of people actually click on a slider, which almost always was the first slide
Sliders on the homepage are highly responsible for increasing the page load speed of the website. Sliders tend to push down your main content. With the sliders that cover the entire screen, it is difficult to showcase the content in the first fold.
Sliders simply kill conversion leading the store to fewer sales than with a simple image instead of a slider. Here is something to help you believe me – “It’s extremely rare to see sliders work. You’re better off using static images and copy.” – Peep Laja, Owner of ConversionXL.com and Markitekt
Develop a Sense of Urgency
If your online store is a vehicle, urgency is the fuel to it. Developing a sense of urgency is all you need to make a buyer purchase the product on the spot. By offering an end date to the discount or promotion, you can drive sales from those who really want to buy the product and generally wait to buy it later on.
You can also mention “only a few left in stock” “offer till midnight” and a lot more.
Optimize the Store Design
With every festival coming, with every offer you provide, make sure your store is designed with the respective theme. If the design is outdated, consider redesigning with latest trends in the market. Make use of bright & bold colors to make it look intuitive and attract more visitors.
In order to improve conversion, one should constantly make changes to the store design to stay up-to-date with the trends.
Pro-tip: Make a distinct Call to Action button.
Wrapping Up
If you really are looking to boost sales on your online store, you must start utilizing the techniques that aren’t yet used by any of your competitors yet!
You must keep in mind that the Conversion rate highly depends on how well optimized the online store is and how user-friendly the website is.