- Introduction
- What is an e-commerce conversion rate?
- How do I calculate the conversion rate?
- What factors impact e-commerce conversions?
- How do SEO and CRO go hand in hand?
- Tips for increasing ecommerce conversion rates
- Closing thoughts
Introduction
The primary goals of any e-commerce store are to generate revenues and foster customer satisfaction. There are many factors that work together to increase your revenues from an e-commerce store. However, there are two factors that have the maximum impact on your conversions.
- Offering high-quality products to consumers
- A website that’s easy and fun to use—your website should be easy to use so users can easily and quickly get everything they are looking for.
To enhance the customer’s experience visiting your site, you need to work on factors like offering good-quality products, great customer support, and a functional and optimally optimized website. Though your production and sales team will take care of quality and customer support, you need to hire digital marketing and website design experts to work on enhancing the features and functionality of the site. Apart from that, you need to invest in the right tools like ESL Ranks Pro to measure and improve the performance of your website, as well as take the right steps to enhance its visibility on the search engines. In this post, we will talk about the importance of conversation rate optimization and the best practices to increase conversion rates on an e-commerce site.
What is an e-commerce conversion rate?
The conversion rate is a valuable tool for an e-commerce organization to measure return on investment (ROI). In simple terms, the e-commerce conversion rate can be defined as the ratio of the number of buyers to the total number of visitors to a website. For instance, if you have 1,000 visitors, out of which 50 made purchases, your conversion rate equals 0,05, or 5%.
Apart from purchases, e-commerce sites can also track and analyse smaller conversion goals, such as newsletter sign-ups, email sign-ups, or referral invites. Some of the typical conversions for e-commerce websites are as follows:
- An online sale.
- Adding products to a cart.
- Adding products to a wish list.
- Email signups.
- Social media shares.
- Newsletter subscriptions
- Any other KPI that an e-commerce store finds valuable
How do I calculate the conversion rate?
The conversation rate is primarily calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the number of visitors and multiplying the result by 100 to get the percentage.
As long as you are appropriately defining conversion, you should calculate it and use it for further tracking and analysing the results. For instance, if your conversion rate is based on newsletter signups on a website, you will divide the total number of newsletter form submissions by the total number of website visitors and multiply it by 100. So, if you had 500 submissions and 20,000 visitors to your site in the last quarter, then your conversion rate would be 2.5%.
Similarly, if you need to calculate the conversion rate of an eBook, you need to divide the total number of downloads by the number of people who visited the page where it was listed. In the same way, you can calculate your website’s conversion rate by dividing the total number of conversions for every conversion opportunity on your site by the total number of visitors on your site.
What are the main elements of CRO (conversion rate optimization)?
There are many factors that affect the e-commerce conversion rate. Here are the main elements of CRO:
- Conversion research: Conversion research involves gathering insights from various sources and using various techniques such as web analytics, heat maps, visitor recordings, surveys, user testing, and expert CRO reviews.
- Website engagement: Website engagement is necessary to convert visitors into clients. One should use the best web copywriting practices, create engaging content, and use the best practices to influence others, such as social proof, scarcity, urgency, and reciprocity.
- User Experience (UX): Your website’s user experience plays a vital role in converting your visitors into customers. It is important to work on all aspects of the website that play a role in improving the user experience, such as website navigation, forms, and user flow.
- A/B Testing: A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a test that examines two different versions of the same site to find out which version increases the conversion rate the most. If you are not tracking and analysing the conversion rate of your site, you are actually putting your business at risk. Conversion rates help you to elicit the flaws in your strategy and take the right actions to improvise it.
What factors of an e-commerce UX help drive conversions?
Here are the aspects of eCommerce UX that help drive conversions:
Loading speed
How fast a website loads its content is crucial for any website and is even more important for e-commerce sites where people have arrived to conveniently buy the products they want. There are several studies that have shown how page loading speed influences the user experience and, ultimately, the conversion rate.
As per study by Backlinko suggests that the average page speed of a first-page Google result is 1.65 seconds. Another study reveals that the conversion rates of e-commerce sites are 3x higher for e-commerce sites that load within a second.
If your website page is not accessible within two seconds, your website visitors will move on to another site, or it will cause them distress, and they may not like to buy products from your website in the future. One should identify and fix the elements that might be slowing down your website.
Website structure and navigation
Your website should make it easy for users to find what they are looking for on your site. They should be able to easily move from one page to another. If something blocks the user’s journey when they buy products or services, they will probably leave your store. It is prudent to analyse the hierarchy of your pages and make sure to design helpful navigation elements such as menus and filters.
Relevant content
People looking to buy something online will make decisions based on the images, videos, and descriptions of the product. Make sure to provide realistic descriptions to avoid returns and disappointment from customers. It is also good to provide as many details as possible in the content, such as how to use the product, what is the USP, what is the brand story, what is the payment and delivery process, etc. Your product pages must be informative to help people make buying decisions. Incorporating additional helpful content related to your niche is also beneficial, such as video reviews, tutorials, and so on.
Personalization
People are more likely to buy from brands that offer a personalized experience. It refers to tailoring a product or service to accommodate the specific needs of individuals or a group of individuals.
Interactive features
As there is an increase in the number of tech-savvy shoppers, people are looking for different ways to research the product and make an informed decision. The use of interactive features on the website helps customers to make an informed decision. These features may include video tutorials, customers’ video reviews on the use of the product, etc. AR and VR technology are nowadays popularly used to enhance the product experience so that people can make informed decisions.
Customer service
Good customer support is essential to succeeding in any business. Customers feel safer when their queries and grievances are quickly resolved. When e-retailers offer customer support in the form of a call center, live chat, or other channels, they tend to be rewarded with more loyal customers.
Why is it significant for an e-commerce business to work on factors that escalate conversion rates?
High conversion rates are one of the most important goals for any e-commerce store. They not only help to increase business revenues but are significant for many other benefits.
- It helps you generate more sales with your existing traffic by putting effort into turning them into customers. It means you don’t have to spend more money to drive sales.
- It increases your average order value, which means when the users make a purchase, they buy more products per order or buy more expensive products.
- The process of conversion involves thorough research of how visitors interact with your website and what products they are looking for. It gives you better insights into customer behaviour than conversion rates.
- Many times, purchases are not completed due to technical issues on the website that people may not be aware of. When you probe into the reasons for the declining conversion rate, it may help you identify problems you were previously unaware of.
How do SEO and CRO go hand in hand?
A lot of people think that search engine optimization (SEO) and conversion rate optimization (CRO) are just two completely different strategies. However, SEO and CRO should go hand in hand.
Search engine optimization is related to all the techniques used to boost your website’s ranking in search engines’ organic results. When your website ranks higher on search engine result pages, more people are able to find your business and ultimately buy your products and services.
Conversion rate optimization is the process of constantly testing your website elements to increase your conversions and revenues for your business.
While SEO focuses on increasing traffic to your website, CRO aims to encourage more people to act, such as buy a product, sign up for a newsletter, download an eBook, etc.
For the success of an e-commerce site, it is important that SEO and CRO work together. It means a website should be optimized to get higher rankings and bring quality traffic, and traffic should be converted into sales. It requires time and expert insights to achieve it.
When monitoring and tracking conversions, it is recommended to consider the various markets you are targeting. Some of the important considerations for monitoring and analyzing your conversion rates are international customers, location-specific logistics, the degree of credit card penetration, and market maturity. One should also keep improving and calculating conversion rates constantly.
Tips for increasing e-commerce conversion rates
A higher conversion rate for an e-commerce site is one of the key signs that it is running successfully. Whether you are trying to bring people to your eCommerce store via affiliate marketing, content marketing, or paid ads, there are many different ways to pursue website visitors to turn them into leads. You can read here more about the effective strategies to boost your online sales in 2023.
There are many things that contribute to increasing the conversion rates of e-commerce stores. Here are some tips to improve the conversion rates and revenues of an e-commerce site.
Identify the flaws in the conversion process
For improving your website conversion rates, it is important to understand where your users are getting stuck. You need to identify if it is the price of the product, a slow-loading website, a complex check-out, or any other such reason that is hampering clients from buying your products and services. For this, one needs to make use of the mix of analytics and user behavior analysis and use expert insights to find what is
Building trust by using stats and useful content on the landing page
Your landing page should have clear information about how your product is useful and how it stands apart from your competitors. The content of your page, including the text, images, and videos, plays a vital role in the client’s decision-making. It is important to make a strong statement to make a great first impression on potential buyers.
- Use an attractive and appealing headline.
- Share briefly how your products are useful to customers.
- Use statistics or other information to help people trust your product more than others.
Use a simple website design layout
A simple e-commerce design is more appealing than a ubiquitous design, as it makes it easy for customers to browse your site. Apart from that, your website should be easily discoverable, and then only they will be able to buy your products and services. Here are some things to consider to maintain the website design layout:
- A website should have a clean and easy page design and transaction process.
- Use eye-catching call-to-action buttons to entice customers, which has a huge impact on the conversion rate.
- Make sure to test the call-to-action button for color and design.
Enhance product descriptions with quality photography and AR and VR technologies
The more details you provide about the product on a page, the better impression it will make on customers. It is advised to include high-resolution photos made from different angles to help people make better purchase decisions. One must tell customers about any parameters that apply, such as materials, ingredients, colors, measurements, etc.
As e-commerce customers cannot physically touch a product before they buy it, it is good to invest in good photography so people can better understand the features of the products. Nowadays, e-commerce sites are popularly using AR and VR technology, which allows customers to see products with more details from all dimensions and even experience how they look before buying them. For instance, furniture stores use AR technology that allows buyers to see furniture in their own homes virtually. All you need is to point your phone camera, choose a furniture piece, and watch it pop up on your screen, perfectly scaled and styled.
Make use of social proofing
Social proof plays a huge role in influencing the customer’s purchase decision, as it shows whether or not your product offers the kind of experience they expect from it. It helps them to know other people’s experiences. It is recommended to ask your customers to leave reviews on your Google business page as well as your website. It will also help to improve the credibility of your business.
- Add authentic social proof, including reviews, testimonials, and images, to your product pages and landing pages.
- Make sure to include both negative and positive reviews so that people can trust your store.
- Product use cases, case studies, and testimonials play a vital role in boosting conversions on any platform.
Make the checkout process easier
The difficult checkout process is one of the most common reasons people abandon their carts. It is essential to make the check-out process smooth to enhance the customer journey.
- Make sure your check-out process is smooth and faster.
- Check-out should be easy and not complicated.
- Many customers don’t have much time to create accounts, so make sure they can make purchases through a guest account.
Optimize your site for mobile
Nowadays, customers are increasingly using mobile devices to buy products and services. Mobile-friendly sites are shown higher in search results. For this, it is essential that your website look and work great on small screens as well. It should load faster, be easy to navigate, and have all the other features that enhance the customer’s buying experience.
Personalization
Personalization is one of the best tools to enhance customers experiences and convert them into visitors. People want to buy products that match their tastes and preferences. By using data like demographics, traffic sources, and other such information, you can customize the experience for your website visitors. It helps them to get recommendations for products and services that are relevant and useful to them.
Accessibility standards
Make sure your website pages are ADA-compliant and are available to people with visual impairments and cognitive disabilities. There are tons of solutions available to make websites accessible to people with disabilities, such as voice-enabled navigation.
Flexible search options
It should be easy for visitors to find what they are looking for on your website. They should be able to easily navigate through category pages and search for products they want. When thinking of the structure of a website, think about how to feature the best-selling products or products based on
Size guides and try-on experiences
If you are dealing with clothes, it is essential to provide size guides and, if possible, try on experiences with the users. Don’t let people wonder how clothes will fit. Similarly, if you are selling make-up products, you may integrate an immersive virtual experience for the buyers so they can upload their photos and try the products.
Multiple payment options
It is recommended to provide multiple payment options. A lot of customers don’t buy products because the payment option is not convenient. One should research the target audience to learn the methods they use as preferred payment options and incorporate them into your website. Make sure your payment options are visible on the page, usually in the footer, before checkout.
Trust signals
Trust and transparency are essential to the design of an e-commerce website. Most people research reviews, read return policies, and pay attention to contact details on a website before making a purchasing decision. Thus, it is essential to be careful about all such things.
FOMO marketing
The fear of missing out is a technique that can help you significantly increase your conversion rates. By creating urgency for the products, you can encourage potential customers to buy them. For using FOMO marketing, you may use messages like “only 1 left in stock” or “offer ends in 2 days.”
User-generated content and engagement tricks
User-generated content is unpaid content that customers create related to your brand, such as reviews, photos, videos, and even social media posts. When you show UGC on your website, it shows your brand is authentic and trustworthy.
Engagement tricks are another effective way to boost the popularity of your brand and ultimately have a positive effect on your conversions. Here are some of the ways to boost conversions using engagement tricks:
- Run contests and giveaways.
- Ask open-ended questions on social media.
- Partner with micro-influencers:
- Create prompts and templates.
Closing thoughts
Conversion rate optimization is a way to increase your e-commerce leads and leap ahead of your competitors. It is important to learn as much as possible about the customer’s behaviour and use the insights to improve your website’s functionality and other aspects to maximize your return on investment.
