Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization for Businesses – Best Practices [2020]
Suffering low eCommerce conversion rate? Follow our step-by-step guide on how to increase conversion rates? Why optimizing it is important?
Did you know, out of the world’s total population, 21.55 percent buy items of daily use online. Ecommerce is likely to reach 2.14 billion lives worldwide in the next year.
That sounds encouraging, doesn’t it? However, to cash in on the opportunity, eCommercialization alone won’t suffice! Therefore, your focus as an eCommerce business should be to improve Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) of your eCommerce website.
Enhance Customer Experience with CRO.
Businesses need a dedicated marketing strategy to stay afloat. That is to say, competition is stiff, and every visitor to your site is a potential customer. How visitors interact with your eCommerce business depends largely on conversion rate optimization strategies followed.
If you’ve done it properly, it becomes easier to convert visits into sales. Moreover, the best part is you keep at bay your competition.
How do you attain – and retain – a healthy conversion rate on your eCommerce website? Most certainly, it ought to be a million-dollar question for any eCommerce business, including yours.
The question has no short answer. Above all, there’s no set eCommerce conversion rate formula adopting which could propel your CRO overnight.
Your website is your digital storefront, and widgets and CTAs its compartments and counters. Like the appearance of a physical store wins customers. Same way, your eCommerce store’s homepage wins sales.
For maximum conversion of visits into sales, therefore, you need to proper conversion rate optimization of your ecommerce site.
Oftentimes, the homepage design that leads to conversion. Sometimes, it’s just a blog that’s enough to entice your visitors.
CTAs and product pages offer the same results – they encourage your visitors to buy a product or service, whichever you offer. Moreover, the good news is that such functionalities of an eCommerce website can be optimized for the best results.
Remember, what improves your conversion rate is CRO – Conversion Rate Optimization. Hence, it is a marketing goldmine for your ecommerce business.
Improving your Conversion Rate by Optimizing your CRO Properly
Here’re some practical ecommerce conversion rate optimization best practices to increase conversions on your store.
1. Optimize your Home Page
Display only best-selling products on your home page. Most importantly, stop flooding your homepage with irrelevant products. Meanwhile, use Google Analytics to learn about products performing better. You can use it to revamp your marketing strategy efficiently.
Use sliders and the ‘recommended products’ feature of your website to promote your best-selling products.
For example, CTAs like buy via phone or email or fax using a credit card, debit card or net banking make it easier for visitors to buy products from the homepage.
Compelling product videos encourage visitors’ conversion to potential customers’. In addition, make it a point to place videos on your site’s homepage.
2. Survey your Customers, Existing and New
Customers who regularly visit your website, first-timers included, are your assets and can offer you valuable insights into your business. So, knowing their opinion about your business and their shopping experience at your eCommerce store can be used for conversion rate optimization purposes.
You can use a tool called SurveyMonkey to email questionnaires to your customers – 4 to 5 questions suffice. In other words, there’s no better way to gauge your business’s reputation and health of your conversion rate.
3. Optimize your Navigation
Make your navigation function quickly and productively. Customers detest delays and give up on such websites. So much so that, even a second’s delay is enough to lose a visitor to your competition. In other words, optimize your navigation menu for top-selling products.
4. Optimize your Categories Tab
Categories for categories’ sake is not a good idea! Try, instead, using it as a marketing tool, it will definitely help you in digital marketing. What interests your visitors the most, you can use the same terms as categories.
Log in to your Google Analytics account. Furthermore, to revise your categories, find actual Search Terms people use on your site. Linking sought-for categories only to your homepage is the best conversion rate optimization practice.
5. Optimize your Product Search Box
A dysfunctional product search box is an annoyance to visitors and a deterrence to business growth. Remember, product search box is what visitors use to search for products on your eCommerce website.
6. Turn On Auto-Suggestions in Search Bar
Auto-Suggestions make it easier for customers to search for relevant keywords. Hence, it allows your visitors to find out what others are searching for. So, make sure that singulars and plurals of a keyword show the same search results, not the opposite.
7. Optimize your Product Page
An eCommerce website is your digital storefront. The more compelling it looks, the more customers you get. Moreover, use only high-quality product images to optimize your product pages.
Images are meant to incite, not dissipate, visitors’ interest in your products. Besides that, product descriptions come next. Certainly, highlighting the unique features of a product in the first paragraph of the description is the best product page optimization practice.
So, using bullets, keeping description simple and accurate come handy as well.
8. Price Tag Optimization
The price tag should be vividly visible. Try using large fonts, bold format, and distinct colors to highlight product prices. That is to say, pricing isn’t meant to stun customers. Therefore, add shipping charges to the final price at the earliest to stop surprising customers.
9. Delivery Date and Time Optimization
Customers require to know product delivery dates and times. Also, product pages should offer it without ambiguity. Moreover, to give users more flexibility, you should enable delay or predate of delivery depending on customers’ choices.
10. Optimization of Site Load Speed
Speed is what thrills modern consumers of the internet and if your site isn’t fast enough visitors resist visiting your eCommerce site next time. Speed optimization is one of the major conversion rate optimization practices. Therefore, utilize it to improve your CRO.
The loading speed can be increased by optimizing your images, enabling compression, clearing cache and doing away with redirects.
These are only a few eCommerce conversion rate optimization best practices. Therefore, not all practices and tips find a mention here, including optimizing shipping and returns policies, customizing ad-rolls, creating informative about page, contact page, adding social media links, and more.