Key Tactics to Increase eCommerce Conversion Rates
As mentioned in part one of this blog series, achieving high eCommerce conversion rates requires continuous measurement, testing, and optimizing of your eCommerce platform – and if you’re not constantly focusing on enhancing customer experiences and streamlining the purchasing process, you’re missing out on potential gains. In this blog, we’re sharing ten additional key practices to boost eCommerce conversation rates.
More Ways to Increase Your eCommerce Conversions
Reduce the number of steps at checkout
When it comes to eCommerce conversions, checkout is arguably the most important area to focus on and optimize. It’s at the bottom of the conversion funnel – so when optimized properly, all other parts of the flow are likely to improve, as well. “If you improve the conversion rate of your final purchase page by 5%, your overall sales will go up by 5%.” One way to improve checkout? Try out some A/B testing of the content, imagery, and layout. Another? Make sure the cart can be easily edited. There’s nothing worse than not being able to figure out how to reduce the quantity of a product from 2 to 1, or remove one of the products from your cart. Lastly, try setting up auto-fill areas – such as the city, state, and zip code fields. “Research shows the average cart abandonment rate across all industries is around 69.57%.” Don’t let it happen because of a difficult checkout process. Most often – the simpler and easier the checkout, the better.
It’s also important to provide multiple payment options. Make sure all the most common ones are covered. You wouldn’t want a potential customer getting to the last step of the checkout process with the means to pay your company, but not the ability.
Think through the customer journey – then go through it backwards
Always have user experience in mind when reviewing and testing your eCommerce site’s effectiveness, while making sure it portrays and exemplifies your unique brand. If an eCommerce site is too complicated and confusing, customers will leave and find your product elsewhere. Additionally, make sure this simple design and experience is optimized for mobile. While it depends on your product and customers, it’s usually best to design with a mobile-first perspective. 91% of online purchases are made via a mobile device.
Differentiate your eCommerce site and your product
As noted above, it’s important to show off your unique brand and offerings. Make sure your product or service’s different qualities are clearly exemplified on your eCommerce site – and ensure your site and offerings compete with those within your vertical. If you don’t differentiate yourself, customers will likely navigate over to a company that does.
Use high-quality images & video
High quality, clear imagery not only looks professional, but can help the potential purchaser envision the products they’re interested in, in real life. In fact, “75% of shoppers rely on product photography to make purchase decisions.” Low quality, poorly lit, or badly photographed images look bad and can cause distrust and disinterest for the potential customer. 65% of people are visual learners…so make sure they’re learning what you want them to.
Here are two more photography tips that increase conversions:
- Product images work best with neutral-colored backgrounds (such as white, black, and beige), although this can differ depending on the nature of your product. Sometimes images need to show mood, style, lifestyle, and so on, so a background that tells the story but isn’t the focus is, at times, necessary. Use your best judgement with knowledge of your customer base and product.
- To create focus on your product, make the subject of the image either much bigger or much smaller than the background.
Video is also a great converter, enabling the viewer to not just envision the product in real life, but see how it works, where it works, and who it works for. Additionally, if your video is intriguing and well-shot, it will keep customers on your eCommerce site for a longer span of time (which is never a bad thing).
Think through and develop consistent understanding of data passing back to your site
This data includes that from digital ads, social media, print ads, and so on. Reliable and consistent data passed back from all traffic sources to your eCommerce site is crucial to knowing where to focus your efforts. But keep in mind, digital ad programs often mark all conversions as incremental, when that’s not always the case. Think through where and why this traffic is coming to your site and what it leads to. Yes, this takes time and effort – but the effort pays off. Understanding these pass backs can lead to higher profitability and better outcomes.
Along those lines, it’s often better to direct traffic to landing pages rather than to product pages or your site’s home page. This makes for easier tracking, increasingly focused targeting and CTAs, and often, better conversions.
Minimize (and test) the number of recommendations per page
“Choice Paralysis” is when a person is overwhelmed with the number of choices they have in front of them, making it difficult, if not impossible, for them to make a decision. When this happens to a shopper, they’ll often become so overwhelmed that they’ll leave your site altogether. Limit this paralysis by offering fewer, more relevant options per page. To increase conversions, A/B test the number of items customers see at each section of your website. It’s often even effective to give the customer the option to make that decision themselves, by adding a products per page dropdown at the bottom of each page. Additionally, make it easy and accessible for customers to search and narrow down what they’re looking for with a search bar.
We hope both part one and two of this blog series help you increase your conversions – but if you have questions, we’re always here to assist you. And, if you’re ready to explore our services or chat further about eCommerce conversion strategies, don’t wait! Contact us today.
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