The eCommerce market has evolved and matured tremendously in the last few years. Attracting and converting customers is harder than ever. It’s not enough if your online store is seeing heavy traffic – you need to be making enough conversions (sales) from the traffic. To do this, you need to learn eCommerce CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) – a set of skills that help your website visitors become converting customers.
Although the average eCommerce conversion rate is between
#1. eCommerce CRO Begins With Mobile
Did you know that Google penalizes non-mobile friendly sites by dropping their SERP ranks? Yes, you read it that right! And this is because almost 60% website traffic is driven by mobile phones.
Not convinced? Then you should know that 75% shoppers use smart phones while shopping (source: InReality). This shows how seriously you need to think about going mobile with your eCommerce site, making it absolutely responsive to mobile and tablets.
While you’ve decided to woo your mobile customers, it’s important that you deliver them the best user experience, be it in-app or a mobile version of your site.
Below is an example of both the website and mobile version of Walmart, Canada. After realizing their website needed a thorough makeover and they drove maximum traffic through mobile devices, they set up a mobile site. Eventually, their decision increased their conversion rates to 20% and they were able to increase their mobile orders to 98%.
#2. Understand What Needs To Be Optimized Before You Start
With cross-device activity on the rise, it’s necessary to understand consumer behavior, trends and a customer’s expectation from you. By taking some time and analyzing different metrics, you’ll be able to understand and implement the best segmentation strategies, specific for your site and industry. There are different kinds of tools to analyze your traffic and understand your customers by conducting surveys.
Google Analytics is one of the most popular and reliable analytics tools available to track your website traffic. Through such analytic and survey tools, you can study different metrics, like your site’s bounce rate, goal funnels, exit rate, behavior flow, site speed and the like.
Based on the data, you can work out on how to further convert your online traffic. These tools highlight the various reasons why your visitors aren’t converting and, based on the findings, you can plan on optimizing your website.
#3. Being ‘Intuitive’ And ‘Predictive’ With Your Search
When a visitor arrives at your site, one of the primary actions is searching for a product. Therefore, it’s not a surprise to see that a Jupiter Research Study found that 80% visitors abandon a site due to poor site search. A visible and an effective search bar is the first place where your visitors interact with you. Your search filters should sync with your customer’s interactions and preferences.
Meanwhile, it’s important that you keep up to the latest trends in predictive search. Ever since Google introduced the autocomplete search in 2004, predictive search has come a long way. You can incorporate various kinds of strategies to enhance your predictive search.
Predictive search includes popping up similar suggestions, autocomplete with relevant search suggestions, drilling down a search based on various criteria (Like most popular/frequently used products, brands, categories) and much more.
PS: The key is to anticipate what your customer wants and build an intuitive, intelligent site search around that need.
Some pro tips to integrate to your predictive search functionalities include implementing technologies like keyword-triggered banners, Rich Autocomplete and Product highlighting.
Graham & Brown saw the product page views increase by 20% and the bounce rate reduced by over 35% after introducing predictive search.
#4. Interact With Your Customers With Product Videos
Not many visitors have the time and patience to go through your site for a product. Having high-quality images is great, but when you have a product video, there are more chances for consumers to convert. And the chances are as high as 64-85%! Having product videos have many other advantages, like ranking better, reducing your site’s bounce rate and, above all you, managing to communicate a half-page text through a 30-second video. Such are the effects of product videos. Creating targeted, personalized and mobile-optimized videos can do the trick.
StacksAndStacks found that visitors are 144% likely to buy a product after watching a video. There can’t be any better that Zappos for utilizing and experimenting with videos for their products. And it worked: They found videos have a positive sales impact upto 30%. Marketers have big hopes on videos being the future of eCommerce CRO.
#5. Gain Their Trust
When a visitor enters your site, chances are high that they look for some kind of confirmation of security and authenticity from your brand. Trust factor for an eCommerce business is extremely important to get and retain customers. Likewise, for an eCommerce site, customers are convinced when they see your site is legitimate and absolutely secure when they see Trust Badges. The presence of trust badges/seals work like magic.
ExpressWatches saw an incredible 107% increase in sales when they mentioned “Seiko Authorized Seller Site.” This is a proof that consumers are quite serious about the sites they want to buy from. Try using recognizable trust badges and placing them on appropriate pages of your site especially on checkout pages for better eCommerce CRO.
#6. Be There For Your Customers Throughout Their Shopping
While buying from a physical store, the sales people have an important role in guiding the customers and increasing the sales. Similarly, when it comes to online sales, live chat is the latest hype among all other communication channels. In fact,90% of online customers are likely to stick with companies that provide a live chat.
Implementing live chat not only helps you increase your eCommerce CRO, but also it’s one of most effective ways to tackle customer retention and build your relationship with them. When customers are attended to promptly and effectively, they will purchase.
#7. Grab Your Customer’s Attention Through Personalization
Customers love attention and the best way you can do this is through personalization. Segmenting your users based on their tastes, gender, age, interests, purchase history, etc. helps them to connect with your website. Your product page could be the most important page for personalization. Pleasing images, appropriate colors, addressing customers with their names, tailor-made offers based on their location, language, retargeting, smart CTAs, pop-ups and navigation and customized content can create a huge impact in your eCommerce CRO target.
Unfortunately, many eCommerce site owners neglect the vast scope of personalization. It takes a lot of time and patience for personalization to affect your website. But with plenty of web personalization tools (like Autonomy and Broadvision) available to optimize your website, it’s never been easy to have a fresh and personalized website.
Each website is unique. Before implementing any sort of a change, however little, always be sure to A/B test. What works for one website, may not work for another. So, the importance of testing your eCommerce CRO experiments should not be overlooked. And that’s exactly why brands which understand the importance personalization yield better conversion rates.
Images: ” Digital Online Marketing E-Commerce Office Working Concept / Shutterstock.com“
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