80% Lift: Easy Ways to Improve Conversion Rates on Your Ecommerce Website
Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, is the art and science of maximizing the number of actions taken by visitors to your site in a single session. To help you optimize or improve conversion rates, we’ve compiled some tried-and-true tactics you can use in your own eCommerce strategy.
What counts as a conversion? It depends
Note that ‘actions’ don’t always mean purchases. Micro conversions are defined as any action that you want someone to take on your site: clicking on a CTA button, playing a video, moving from the landing page to the product page, etc.
Active, engaged visitors are much more likely to become customers (to move from micro conversions to macro conversions).
You calculate your website conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions by the number of site visitors in a given time. Obviously, maximizing this rate is crucial for any online business.
10 Effective Ecommerce Conversion Rate Tactics
Here are 10 simple, proven tactics that will help improve your eCommerce conversion rates.
1. Have a Personalized Value Proposition
Having a clear value proposition, or unique selling point (USP), on your landing page means visitors can see immediately what you’re about and why they should buy from you rather than your competitors. But to boost your eCommerce conversion rate, you’ll want to have multiple landing pages and tailor them to specific offers. Hubspot found that companies who increased their number of landing pages from 10 to 15 got a 55% boost in leads.
2. Know Your Conversion Funnel
A conversion funnel is the journey visitors take from initial search to checkout, and all the stages in between. Identifying where customers are in the funnel will help you cater to their specific needs. The messages a casual browser sees should be very different from the ones displayed to repeat customers, your content should be designed accordingly.
3. Track Everything
Tracking conversions is the first step to increasing conversion rate. It isn’t just about tracking the number of sales per visitor, you need to collect data on everything you can. Which page elements are customers engaging with most? Are there blocks along the customer journey that impede conversions? Are visitors from Google Ads behaving differently on-site to those stemming from organic traffic?
Once you have a lay of the land,, you can more easily see where you need to focus on to improve CRO, and your bottom line.
4. Test Everything
Don’t just experiment with differently designed landing pages, A/B test every aspect of your site. Even slightly different phrasing on a page element can have an outsized impact on conversion rates, but the key is to identify the parts of your site that convert the most and road test different versions to see what works best.
5. Use Social Proof Marketing to Increase Trust
When visitors are aware of other customers’ behavior, it makes them less hesitant to make a purchase. If someone knows that others are doing the same thing they’re doing, it puts their mind at ease. Customers can confidently complete a purchase, even of big-ticket items, safe in the knowledge that they’re in good company.
It’s not just about increasing trust with product reviews and testimonials, adding an element to a product details page that lets customers know how many items have been purchased that day, for example, is simple to execute and creates a sense of urgency.
The more targeted and segmented your customer data is, the more personalized your social proof. If you know which type of customers are buying products, you can pass this information along to site visitors, increasing confidence that people like them are making similar purchases.
6. Use AI-powered Product Recommendations
Sophisticated algorithms backed by artificial intelligence and machine learning can collate data from a wide range of sources – customers’ previous behavior, geographic, time, and date information, previous site visits, etc. – and use it to offer personalized suggestions. Customers will thank you for helping them get what they want faster and it can have a dramatic impact on CRO.
7. Make Sure Your Site Has Personalized Search
Customizing personalized search results is another great use of personalization technology. Just like Googling ‘hairstylists’ brings up a list of salons near you, eCommerce sites can utilize customer data to deliver bespoke search results.
Instead of having to scroll through reams of irrelevant products, searchers can find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. The resulting reduction in friction helps improve conversion rates.
8. Use Targeted, Precise Calls-to-Action
Confusing CTAs are a sure-fire way to send your CRO into a nosedive. Therefore, it should be obvious what action you want your visitors to take next. Instead of multiple CTAs on a single page, have one definable action that takes visitors to the next stage and guides them through your site the way you want them to.
This turns micro conversions into macro conversions and casual browsers into repeat customers.
9. Offer a Guarantee
If there’s a money-back failsafe, customers feel they’re taking less of a risk and are more likely to complete a purchase.
It also shows you have confidence in your product, bolstering trust.
10. Make It Easy
No one likes spending time on a website that’s hard to navigate. So, if you have a time-consuming checkout process, your CRO’s going to suffer.
In short, make site navigation as simple as possible and let your customers know how long they have to go with progress bars. Shorten forms and allow customers to checkout as guests.
Improve Conversion Rates Using Industry Benchmarks
To help orientate your CRO here’s where you can find our interactive Ecommerce Benchmarks. We’ve compiled billions of customer sessions across devices, channels, and regions. We hope it will be of value in helping you assess your CRO KPIs and improve your conversion rates.