A high conversion rate is essential for any business. If people are not converting on your website, you are losing potential customers and revenue. In this article, we will discuss how to optimize your eCommerce conversion rate.
Understand what a Conversion Rate is
A conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who convert into customers. It's a key metric for eCommerce businesses, as it can help you determine how well your website is performing and what you can do to improve it.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the practice of improving conversion rates for a website. The goal of CRO is to increase the number of visitors who take some type of the desired action, such as making a purchase.
What is eCommerce conversion rate?
The Ecommerce Conversion Rate is the percentage of visitors who convert into customers on your website. According to Google, the conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the number of visitors (in the case of advertising, by the number of ad interactions).
For example, if you had 50 conversions from 1,000 visitors/interactions, your conversion rate would be 5%.
This can be measured through a number of different methods, such as landing pages, email capture forms, and contact forms. The higher the conversion rate, the more successful your eCommerce business will be.
How CRO can it help eCommerce businesses?
As eCommerce grows, so does the need to optimize conversion rates (CRO). CRO can help you increase sales on your website without increasing your advertising budget. It means you can scale sustainably and massively increase your profit margines! Conversion optimization results are evergreen, unlike advertising or SEO. This means once you did the required changes, you can benefit right away. Another advantage of CRO for your business is the immediate results.
There are many techniques that can be used to improve your conversion rate, and many factors that need to be considered. In this article, we will discuss some of the basics of CRO and how it can be applied to eCommerce websites.
Analyze Your Current Conversion Rates
To find out your current conversion rates, you first need to analyze your data. This will help you determine where you need to make changes in order to improve your overall performance.
Identify the Factors That Affect Conversion Rates
There are a number of factors that affect conversion rates, and it's important to understand which ones are most important. Some of the most important factors include:
-The quality of your products or lack of variety of products. Make sure the quality fits the price. Make sure you have a wide range of products available for sale, as this will help you attract a wider range of customers. If you only have a few products available, your conversion rates will be lower because potential customers won't be able to find what they're looking for.
-The quality of your customer service. If you can provide excellent customer service, it will help win over potential customers who are hesitant to make a purchase. If your customer service is poor, they may never bother to contact you again and your conversion rates will stay low.
-The layout and design of your website. Make sure your website is easy to use and navigate. Poor website design can lead to frustrating users and lower conversion rates. All elements and features should be conventional and easily identifiable. That is why the layout and features should be simple and straightforward. Poorly written descriptions can also be confusing, which can lead to lost conversions.
-The speed of your website. These days people are not willing to wait for more than 3 seconds to load the site. The sites that load for ages irritate customers, and they simply drop out and look for more user-friendly stores to buy from.
- SEO: The more search engine results that are associated with your website, the more likely potential customers are to find you. And as a result, they are much more willing to purchase from you as they come to your site with the buying intent!
Make improvements to your website and Ecommerce processes
Once you have identified the factors that affect conversion rates, it is time to make improvements to your website and eCommerce processes. This will help you increase your conversion rates and improve your customer experience.
Monitor your conversion rates and make adjustments as necessary
Once you have made improvements to your website and eCommerce processes, it is important to monitor your conversion rates in order to make adjustments as necessary. By monitoring your conversion rates, you will be able to identify where improvements need to be made in order to increase your overall performance.
Techniques that can be used for eCommerce CRO
Some common methods include A/B testing, user testing, and funnel analysis. A/B testing is a process of testing two different versions of a page against each other to see which one performs better. User testing involves observing how users interact with your site in order to identify areas that could be improved. Funnel analysis is used to track the progress of users through your site, from start to finish. By understanding where users are dropping off, you can identify areas that need improvement.
Complete CRO Process:
There are several steps to conversion rate optimization. At Leangenix, we incorporate heuristic evaluation with design thinking for best results.
Step 1: Heuristic evaluation. During this stage, we review your site against the rules of thumb to measure the usability of your online store and report issues. The established heuristics (e.g., Nielsen-Molich's) allow us to uncover insights to quickly fix key usability issues and enhance the online shopping experience. Hierustic evaluation is one of the aspects we cover in our Lean CRO audit. And after implementing the uncovered issue, you can quickly see positive results in conversion increase and user satisfaction. For example, by fixing the navigation issue we uncovered during the audit stage, the novelty beauty site had its conversion increased by nearly 300%.
Step 2: Empathize. At this stage, we research your users' needs and habits. An empathetic understanding of your customers' problems and needs helps everyone set aside their assumptions and gain insight into your customers' true needs.
Step 3: Define. At this stage, we define your customers' needs and problems you customers might have with your online store and product. The information accumulated during stage 2 is analyzed and synthesized into multiple problem statements.
Step 4: Ideation. With the solid background from the previous stages, we start generating ideas to address any uncovered issues that cause a low conversion rate or low AOV.
Step 5: Prototyping. At this stage, we get ready for A/B testing. We often A/B test the headlines, descriptions, design elements, and features - each addressing a concern uncovered and defined in previous stages.
Step 6: Testing. At this stage, we conduct the tests and analyze the results identifying the winning elements and implementing them in your store. Although this is the final step, conversion optimization is iterative and continues process. Technology is changing rapidly, continuous conversion optimization helps you stay relevant to constantly changing users' shopping behaviours and stay ahead of your competition. If you are wondering how to improve conversion rate optimization for your store and need professional input, I encourage you to book a free trial Lean CRO audit call.
Tools and resources that can help you with eCommerce CRO
Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to track the performance of your website. It provides information on things like visitor traffic, conversion rates, and how long people stay on your site. There are also a number of paid tools available, such as Crazy Egg and Optimizely. These tools offer more advanced features, such as heat mapping and behavioral targeting
However, every online store is unique, and so are the optimization strategies. If you wonder how to optimize conversion for your online store, book our free trial Lean CRO Audit call and uncover five issues causing a low conversion rate to your eCommerce store.
Conclusion
If you're looking to improve your eCommerce website's conversion rate, CRO is a great place to start. By making changes to your site's design, layout, content, and functionality, you can increase sales, improve your bottom line, reduce your cost per acquisition and make sure every marketing dollar you spend works in your favor.
By continuously optimizing your online store, you will understand your customers better. As a result, an overall shopping experience will improve significantly and allow you to acquire more customers from the same amount of traffic you already receive.
The main benefit of CRO is that even a slight improvement in conversion rate can result in immediate and tangible profits, just like these results our clients achieved after working with us.
So, do you want to know how to improve the eCommerce conversion rate for your online store? Book a call with us now!