Are you making the most out of the traffic coming to your online store? You may have several users, but if you’re not converting them to sales as best as possible, you could be leaving a lot of money on the table. Small tweaks and changes could very well make the difference between a customer purchasing or leaving your website.
In this blog, I’ll show you five effective ways you can start increasing your ecommerce conversion rate to increase revenue and achieve your goals.
Take Advantage of Abandoned Carts
Do you have an abandoned cart strategy? For those who don’t, you are letting customers slip through your fingers. If someone has visited your ecommerce store and added products to their cart, sometimes all they need is a little nudge to finish the checkout process. Maybe Facebook distracted them or they wanted to visit other websites for the best deal. There are endless reasons they didn’t convert.
Listrak published a shopping cart abandonment index which revealed there was a 77% abandonment rate in the last six months of 2017. Odds are, you are going to experience many users not completing the checkout, but it doesn’t mean you can’t get them to convert. Platforms like Shopify have a built-in abandoned cart recovery system that allows you to send email reminders for customers to come back and finish. If you use WordPress and WooCommerce, there are plugins that will do the exact same thing. Make sure you’re taking advantage of these freely available tools to easily see a rise in conversions.
Fewer Features, More Benefits
Sure, if I’m buying something from your store I need to know the materials, color, and similar features, but how is it going to change my life? Will I be happier? More confident? One of the most effective ways to increase conversions is by changing up your copywriting. In your product or service descriptions, always hone in how the customer will benefit. This, of course, differs from product to product but it could be anything along the lines of:
- How your product or service will help your potential customer achieve their goals
- The ways in which your product or service can improve someone’s image and confidence
- How your company can help create lifelong memories
See how much better that is then stating a dry description of features? Take a walk in your customer’s shoes. People want experiences that are actually relevant to them. Remember that people don’t buy products, they buy emotions. I mean this both literally and figuratively, as purchasing is emotion based, but at the same time products elicit certain feelings.
Coupons for Everybody
Everyone loves a good discount, I know I certainly do. Offering a coupon code is a simple way to offer free value to your customers and is proven to improve conversion rates. According to the consumer psychology report from Marketing Prof’s, over 50% of customers wouldn’t have purchased from an ecommerce store if it didn’t offer a discount. Even something as small as a 5 or 10% coupon can be enough to motivate users to complete their purchase. Always make coupons easy to find. Customers can’t use them if they can’t find them, after all.
Learn From Amazon’s Shipping Strategies
You’ve probably spent a fair amount of time on Amazon. If there is one thing they do well, it’s shipping. One approach Amazon uses is to offer free shipping if you add a certain amount of items to your cart, which is an easy strategy to adopt. This has a secondary benefit of encouraging a higher cart value which means increased revenue for your business.
Make it Easy as 1, 2, 3
Users should be able to reach checkout on your ecommerce store within approximately four clicks. This usually manifests in the actions of adding to cart, hitting check out, entering your information, and clicking purchase. If a user were to land on the homepage first, it may take an extra click or two but your goal should be to make your sales funnel as lean as possible.
The most important pages of your sales funnel include the product page, cart, and check out. Break down these areas and note where you can make room for improvement.
Here are some ideas for each:
Product page
Include high-quality images from several angles, enticing copywriting, and a clear add to cart button. Displaying reviews are also incredible social proof which can make users more comfortable purchasing from you.
Cart
Line items and totals should be easy to see and include estimated shipping costs. Providing editable field options for quantity, coupon input, upsells, and warranty policies are known to increase conversions at this stage of the buying process.
Checkout
Name, email, shipping address, and payment method are the core bits of customer information you need to complete the purchase. Make non-essential information and setting up an account optional for checkout. Not every customer will want to set up an account and we want the process to be as quick as possible.
Increasing your conversion rate should be an ongoing process of optimizing your store and testing out new ideas. Have you tried implementing any of the above ideas? What were your results? Tell me about your process in the comments.