In today’s highly competitive digital marketplace, there are some essential steps businesses can take to encourage customers to buy from them. These processes revolve around ecommerce conversion rate, a key metric that needs to be tracked when building the business and increasing revenue.
Organizations use personalization and conversion rates to measure Return on Investment (ROI). In fact, according to a survey conducted among marketers in both the U.S. and the U.K., almost 90% of personalization efforts result in a positive ROI.
Businesses need to prioritize them to ensure conversions do not just happen by chance. Whether it is a start-up or an ecommerce manager/marketing director, they all need to understand what a conversion is and how to achieve it. Thus, businesses must define conversions based on goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for the year.
Understanding Ecommerce Conversion Rates
An ecommerce conversion rate is the proportion of visitors to your online store who make a purchase. Generally, ecommerce sites have the following rates of conversion:
- Making an online purchase
- Adding items to a cart
- Creating a wishlist
- Signing up for email updates
- Sharing on social media
- Tracking any KPI your company considers necessary.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a great way to improve the user experience of your store and drive desired KPIs such as sales. This guide will help you better understand how to increase conversion rates across landing pages, category pages, or any other customer touchpoint on your ecommerce site.
Let us dive into some tips for boosting your conversion rates.
How Is The Conversion Rate Calculated?
If your online store gets 5,000 visitors and 50 conversions over a certain period, the conversion rate is 1%. To calculate this value, you divide the number of conversions by the total number of visitors. Many analytics tools can provide this metric through segmentation.
Before raising your conversion rate, it is essential to identify your current problems and analyze how people interact with your store. By comparing these benchmarks to see progress, you can measure success in improving conversions. Frequently, experts recommend testing different methods in order to increase conversion rates.
However, it is essential to understand what issues need to be addressed before starting any experiments.
What Is Good Ecommerce Conversion Rate?
The average conversion rate for ecommerce stores typically ranges from 2.5-3%. This means that even when you are following best practices, only around 2-3% of your visitors will make a purchase. Achieving a 3% or higher conversion rate should be the baseline goal for your online store; once this is achieved, you can focus on more advanced tactics.
Metrics to Help Measure Ecommerce Conversions
In addition to your store’s conversion rate, a few other metrics play an important role in boosting your overall store performance. Keeping track of these metrics and improving them can help improve your store’s conversion rate.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate refers to the proportion of visitors who leave your store after only viewing a single page. If you have a high bounce rate, people need help finding what they are looking for when they visit your site and leave quickly afterward. This is not desirable as it indicates that potential customers may be unsatisfied with their experience on your site.
To address this, consider reviewing the content and design of your store to ensure that it meets customers’ needs.
Exit Rate
Exit rate, sometimes mistaken with bounce rate, lets you measure the percentage of visitors who leave your page after viewing it. Closely monitoring this metric can help you identify pages causing high exit rates and optimize them for better performance.
A very high exit rate on a single page should indicate that something needs to be changed. Through landing page optimization, you can work towards reducing this rate.
Click-Through Rate (Ctr)
Click-through rate is a metric that measures the number of people who click on a link that leads to your store from an advertisement or email. When optimizing AdWords and email marketing campaigns, the goal is typically to get more users to take action by clicking through to make a purchase or engage with your content on social media.
Average Session Duration
Average session duration is a metric that helps you gauge how long people spend in your store. If the bounce rate is high, it indicates that visitors only stay for a short time and are unlikely to make conversions.
Tools That Can Help Improve Ecommerce Conversion Rates
Google Analytics
For most stores, having access to Google Analytics can be incredibly valuable. With this platform, you can gain a greater understanding of your store visitors’ habits, including:
- How visitors found your store, e.g., through keyword searches on Google, referral stores, or direct visits.
- How long have visitors stayed in your store?
- Where the visitors came from.
- If the visitors were returning or new.
- What browser or operating system was used, and whether the visitor was using a mobile device or computer?
- How many visitors converted, and which interactions led to the conversion?
- Link to your Google Adwords campaign to track paid traffic.
Shopiroller Analytics
Shopiroller provides an Analytics section within the platform that reveals all of your store’s abandoned carts, including the products inside. You can also gain insights into customer search queries with Shopiroller’s in-store Search Analytics feature. This is a great way to determine what content and language you need on your site based on your customers’ needs.
Shopiroller Analytics also contains several other helpful analytics dashboards, though these are only truly effective when you have customers. If you are still at that stage, the two mentioned above provide helpful diagnostics for conversion problems.
Ways To Boost Your Ecommerce Conversion Rates
Use High-Quality Images And Videos On Your Product Pages
When shopping online, customers cannot get the same tactile experience as in a physical store. To make up for this limitation and give users an idea of what to expect from their purchase, it is essential to provide high-quality images or videos on product pages. Doing so helps customers better visualize the item they are interested in, ultimately leading to higher conversion rates.
Offer Free Shipping
Customers have come to expect free shipping when making purchases online, so if your store doesn’t offer this perk, they may look elsewhere. An alternative option is to add a small quantity of the shipping cost into the product prices, but be careful charging too much will drive customers away.
Provide Limited-Time Coupon Codes
Creating coupons or discount codes for a limited period can help customers get a certain amount or percentage off their purchase when they use it at checkout. This sense of urgency will cause shoppers to make purchases without hesitation. Remember to set an expiration date for your code.
Be Competitively Priced
If you offer products from big-name brands, keep your prices competitive to stand out among other retailers. Keep track of what others are charging and adjust your prices accordingly. The quality of your marketing efforts and visuals can heavily influence how much customers are willing to pay for your products. Reach the right audience with the right message and visuals to maximize revenue.
Tweak And Test Your Ecommerce Checkout Process
If your store checkout is too lengthy, complex, or unorthodox, it could lead to you losing many potential customers right when they are about to make a purchase. Experimenting with A/B tests and personalization techniques in this funnel phase is essential. Although most hosted ecommerce sites have their standards, you may still need to adjust the process according to your customers’ needs.
Use Shopping Cart Abandonment Software
If you have trouble with abandoned carts in your store, utilizing abandoned cart software can help boost your conversion rates. Many ecommerce platforms, such as Shopiroller, offer this type of software as part of their store features for free. The results you can expect from using this kind of software will vary from business to business, but it can definitely help ecommerce stores.
Use Live Chat Software And Chatbots
Using live chat support software and chatbots can assist customers in getting fast solutions to their queries without enduring extended wait times on the phone. Although they are often viewed as mutually exclusive options, businesses that use both – by allowing chatbots to communicate with customers during off-hours – will likely experience the most success.
Let Customers Know Your Ecommerce Store Is Safe
Organizations must work quickly to gain customers’ trust, making them comfortable entering their credit card information in the store. Studies have demonstrated that displaying signals of trust can significantly boost conversion. Improving your online credibility and trustworthiness should be at the heart of your strategies for optimizing conversion rate. Consumers want to ensure they are dealing with a credible store that follows industry-standard security protocols, guaranteeing their credit card data is secure.
Here are a few things that help:
- Install SSL at checkout (out-of-the-box on most ecommerce platforms) and site-wide if possible.
- Show small images of credit cards, PayPal, and other payment options to signal that you use customer-trust payment options.
- Display McAfee, GeoTrust, or other security badges, and make sure that you have an active account with them.
- Only add an image if you are truly secure.
Structure Your Site So Visitors Can Easily Find Products
Organize your product categories intelligibly by giving shoppers choices such as ‘Shop By Color’ or ‘Shop By Product Type.’ The aim is to ensure that you use the least number of steps possible to enable users to locate a product quickly. Adding a rotating banner highlighting top products and using store search to facilitate customers in finding products can be a great help. Remember that the quicker visitors can find what they are looking for, the likelier they will purchase from you.
Make Your Checkout Form Easy To Understand
Ensure that all information on your checkout form is clearly understood, such as CVV and input formats. It is helpful to limit what can be typed into specific form fields to streamline the process for users; when a user is typing their credit card number, format it visually so that it is easy to read and challenging to make a mistake.
Instead of allowing them to type a date, provide a date picker or dropdown menu. It is essential not to give users any reason to be hesitant when entering their credit or debit card info; digital wallets make the process much smoother and more secure.
Digital wallet services such as PayPal Express, Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, and others allow users to sign in with their account information and fill out the form automatically. This speeds up the process and makes it safer for everyone.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Q: What Should Businesses Focus On When Designing Their Checkout Form?
A: Businesses should focus on ensuring that all information on the checkout form is clearly understood, such as CVV and input formats, limiting what can be typed into specific fields, and visually formatting their credit card numbers.
Q: What Is The Worldwide Proportion Of Online Shoppers In 2022?
A: Around 85%.
Q: What Kind Of Strategies Should Businesses Prioritize When Trying To Optimize Conversion Rates?
A: Strategies that focus on improving trustworthiness, structuring the store for easier product discovery, and making the checkout form easy to understand should be prioritized by businesses when trying to optimize conversion rates.
Q: What Are Some Ways To Improve Trustworthiness?
A: Ways to improve trustworthiness include installing SSL at checkout, displaying images of credit cards and other payment options, displaying security badges, and using digital wallets for payments.
Q: What Are The Benefits Of Using Digital Wallets For Payments?
A: The benefits of using digital wallets for payments include streamlining the process, making it easier and more secure for users to enter their personal information, and speeding up the checkout process.
Q: What Is The Aim Of Organizing Product Categories Intelligibly?
A: The aim of organizing product categories intelligibly is to enable users to locate a product quickly using the least number of steps possible.
CONCLUSION
In 2022, the worldwide proportion of online shoppers was around 85%. As online shopping is becoming more and more prominent in retail and ecommerce companies, a well-crafted store is integral to achieving both short and long-term success. Enhancing ecommerce conversion rates should be the top priority for businesses as it motivates customers to do what matters most to purchase your products.
