How to Increase the Conversion Rate for your Online Store

Every aspect of marketing is entirely useless unless it produces conversions.

– Jeremy Smith, Serial Entrepreneur and Consultant.

If you’re not concentrating on the conversion rate of your website your revenue will likely stagnate and will incur a serious loss. The more you work on increasing your conversion rate by addressing the issues that your site visitors are facing the better your conversion rate will be. To begin with, you need to what works best for your audience and what doesn’t. Your prospects may have a specific set of expectations/pain-points that you will have to address and the offer you make should be something they can’t refuse.

How to Optimize and Increase your Conversion Rate?

Product Images

Use high-quality professional product images to give a proper look and feel of your product. A regular no-so-good image can convey the wrong message and won’t be appealing for a prospect to fall in love with the product.

Product Recommendations

The easiest way to increase your sale is by offering product recommendations. The recommendation engine can learn about the customer journey in real-time and the pages they interact from the home-page to check-out. The three major engines used to filter through SKU’s are – Collaborative, Content-based filtering techniques, and Hybrid recommendations.

Guarantee / Return Policy

Include a 14 or 30-day refund policy, no matter what. A customer will feel secure only when you reduce the risk of losing money onto a virtual product

Testimonials / Product Ratings

Provide customer ratings wherever a call-to-action is involved. Reduce the risk by showcasing social proof. Solutions like this Review Coupons allows you to automatically generate a coupon code when a product review is approved.

One Step-Checkout

Don’t include a multi-line / multi-page checkout that can create a cumbersome experience. If the check-out process is complicated, or too long, half of your visitors are going to look for alternatives. Be sure to remove any registration form and offer a one-step express checkout to offer a seamless shopping experience. If you’re looking for an end-to-end cart and check-out customization capabilities for your BigCommerce store then take a look at this Checkout SDK. Also try to use Digital wallets (Google Pay, Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, PayPal Express, etc) if possible.

Free Shipping

Shipping is a psychological game. Remember if you don’t offer free shipping you’re going to lose at least half of the visitors. Try to come up with a free shipping pricing strategy and cover up the additional spends by adjusting other costs.

Discount and Coupon Code

Discounts and coupon codes are ubiquitous in the online shopping world. Some of the key points to consider when you offer a coupon code are – Make the code easy to remember and apply and do test the code before pushing them to live. Normally, paydays, the first and last weekends of the month are the best time to use the coupon code, club them with appropriate holidays to get a good response rate. Do remember a strong call-to-action is what takes to convert any discounts.

Cart Abandonment

Reducing the abandoned cart rate should be your #1 priority to achieve a better conversion rate. You could also use Shopping cart abandonment software to recover the lost sales. If you’re on BigCommerce then unlike other eCommerce solutions they give you complete control to customize the emails. On average, you can see a 15% increase in website conversion rate, but some stores are seeing as much as 30%.

Retargeting Ads and Email

Retargeting ads will run in the background of your business to bring back the visitors who expressed interest. Before you send any emails, you may want to set up retargeting ads, so you can capture peoples who click through to your site and leave. Once you set up and publish the retargeting ad, send out the retargeting email with a Call-To-Action that drives peoples back to your site. Combining the email with retargeting is an easy way to build the visibility of the brand.

Using a Live Chat

A 24/7 customer support doesn’t just end with a phone or email any longer. If you’re truly available in the business hours to immediately spend to a customer query than I would suggest you to use a live chat software. Chatbots are already doing wonders, now that you have to understand creating a real human touch will help build the trust.

Security

Build a level of trust for customers to enter their credit card information without a second thought. eCommerce has come a long way, customers wanted to ensure the store they’re about to purchase is a legitimate one and follows the industry standard security measures. Some of the guidelines you can ensure are – Install an SSL certification at the check-out (if you do it site wide, that would be highly appreciable), show the images of the payment options you’re accepting and display a security badge (Geotrust) to ensure you have an active account.

Call-to-Action

Proper call-to-action is what it takes you to push the conversion rate. Let’s say offering a CTA “Proceed to Checkout” in the cart page and “Buy Now” in the product detail page is what drives the users. Also ensure you don’t overwhelm the visitors by too many options, but, at the same time having mandatory fields like, “Share to Social Media”, “Add to Wishlist”, “Add to Cart” are prominent and are in the same page.

Stand-Out from the Crowd

What makes you different is the way you sell the products and how you stand-out from the competition. You don’t have to be too professional, try to be smart and funny. Companies like Dbrand are getting more attention in the Vinyl skin market since the way they handle the social media marketing and the personalized artwork they send out to their customers has a human (actually a @Robot) touch in it.

Personalization

Creating a personalized shopping experience will allow you to shorten the customer journey and increase your conversion rate. For instance, If I go visit a website that has Leather products and the Wallets on Day-1, the next time I visit the homepage to buy shoes – showcasing a feature Men’s wallets will increase the possibility of conversion will increase considerably.

Adding Filters

The customer may not have time to sit and run through all the products you have in the store, by allowing them to go and sort out by filters will help them to drill down to the right products and help purchase based on the category they want.

Product Customization

Installing a custom configurator solution in your store will help customers to customize and buy a personalized product. Companies like Productimize.com offers a pre-built solution which offers an end-to-end setup for your store and will allow your customers to visualize and make a purchase.

Rich Snippets

The structured data markup that can be added to the existing HTML which will allow the search engines to better understand what information we have on each web page. The Rich Snippets can be used on the following content type – Reviews, People, Products, Businesses and Organizations, Recipes, Events, Music, Video Content, etc.

Dynamic Remarketing Ads

Google will dynamically create ads which will include image, price, and text if your choice, based on the website visitors behavior. Dynamic remarketing helps you build leads by bringing previous visitors back to the website with messages that are tailored to your audience.

Monitoring Tools

Be sure to utilize these tools to improve and monitor the conversion. HotJar and LuckyOrange are excellent tools to understand the user interaction on a high-level within your website. Also, setting up a Google Analytics gives you a great view into the website visitors. This includes – Where are they from, how they found your website, how long they stayed there, are they an old customer or a new one, what browser and OS they’re using and how many of them are converted can be tracked through the analytics.

Experiment with the Layout, Content, and Style of the landing pages. Finally, test and iterate. A proper conversion rate is achieved only with lots of tests, do as much as A/B testing as possible. The more data you have the more you can succeed!