E-Commerce CRO Guide: How to Enhance Your Shop’s Profitability?
Do you want to know more on how to increase your online shop sales? We’ve got you covered! We’ve created a comprehensive and actionable ecommerce conversion rate optimization guide, designed to help improve your online shop’s performance.
Before skipping to in-depth industry knowledge, let’s cover the basics first and create a foundation for you to better understand conversion rate optimization strategies.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) in the First Place?
The term “CRO” is frequently used across the web in the context of online businesses and their success. There are a lot of discussions and tips on how to optimize it, but before going any further, let’s explain what the so-called “CRO” is.
Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO is an umbrella term for different techniques focused on increasing the percentage of site visitors who take a certain desired action on your website. The ultimate goal is to boost the shop’s revenue, of course.
To make it more clear, it comes down to taking appropriate steps to increase product purchases, newsletter subscriptions, clicking on a particular link, or any other desired action that makes sense for your business.
The same applies to ecommerce conversion rate optimization. If your online store sells work shoes, you’ll probably want to sell more of your products, or at least keep your site visitors engaged and browsing your collections.
What Is a Good Conversion Rate?
Now that we’ve clarified the concept of e-commerce conversion optimization, you are surely wondering what is considered to be an optimal conversion rate. Just like a lot of other metrics in digital marketing, the average conversion rate for e-commerce varies depending on a number of factors.
The industry you’re in, your niche, your audience’s demographics and your traffic channel are some of the variables that come into play when discussing “a good conversion rate”.
Globally, the data from the third quarter of 2020 show us that the average conversion rate for e-commerce sites is 2.17%. Generally, the average number spans across the 2%-3% range. Again, bear in mind that this is just the bare average across different industries. And the statistics can be deceiving if taken for its face value.
For example, global Statista data for 2021 show that the food and beverage (5.5%,), beauty and skincare (3%), general apparel (2.7%) and home, art, and decor (2.4%) are among the industries with the highest CRO.
Compare your conversion rate with the average one in your industry, with your top competitors, or against your goals, and you’ll know whether you need to optimize it.
Calculate Your Conversion Rate
Now that you know what a good conversion rate is, let’s see how you can calculate it! There are diverse methodologies out there for determining how good your CRO is. Some rely on researching opinions of your customers, others include technical analysis of your website, and this is no surprise.
CRO encompasses a number of fields including user interface design, marketing, web development, and statistics.
With that being said, using a simple CRO formula will help you track your CRO and assess where you stand regarding the average conversion rate for e-commerce in your industry.
The standard conversion rate formula is pretty straightforward. It comes down to dividing your monthly number of conversions (for example: sales) by your monthly number of visitors, multiplied by 100.
% conversion rate = monthly conversions ÷ monthly web traffic ×100
If your shop is new, it’s realistic to aim for a CRO between 1% and 2%.
Conversion Rate optimization for E-commerce: 11 Essential Steps
Now that you’ve come this far, it’s time for the good stuff! How do you optimize conversion rate? Understanding your visitors and customers is the best place to start your ecommerce conversion rate optimization journey. But there is more to great conversion rate optimization strategies.
Let’s begin!
1. Learn the Ins & Outs of Your Target Audience
In-depth, meaningful research is essential in understanding your customers and tailoring your digital marketing strategy and site elements accordingly. Surveys, segmentation, interviews and customer analytics are great methods to get to know your customers better.
Once you can narrow them by demographics, behavior or goals, you’ll know how to personalize their experience and even decide on the best wording that will appeal to them.
If you apply the methodologies listed above, you’ll be able to pinpoint what makes your audience take an action. That’s the holy grail of ecommerce conversion rate optimization! Also, focus your attention on their common pain points, and the language they use, especially the words they repeat and common phrases.
By using these insights to optimize your site’s copy you’ll be able to adjust your brand voice so it’s more aligned with your customers’ language.
2. Create Exceptional User Experience
The importance of a great UX can’t be emphasized enough. But what makes an extraordinary user experience? Let’s break it down into some of its most important elements.
Simplicity is the key
You want to impress your site visitors with visuals and amazing copy, but be careful. When showcasing your products and informing them about great deals you offer, make sure not to overwhelm them. Excessive images and text may be counterproductive as they lead to a psychological phenomenon known as the cognitive overload, the enemy of a good CRO.
Make sure your design is simple and visually appealing.
Go With Simple & Intuitive Site Navigation
Online buyers should be able to navigate your site smoothly and reach their objective quickly, without having to think too much. The attention span when it comes to the digital environment is pretty short. Actually, it comes down to 7 or 8 seconds. So, site owners have a very limited amount of time to capture users’ attention and keep them engaged.
Make sure it’s easy for your potential customers to find what they are looking for. Ideally, it shouldn’t take them more than three clicks to access a page, a product, shipping information, or any other piece of content.
Prioritize Page Speed
Today’s internet users expect and demand fast-loading sites. When you’re focused on ecommerce conversion rate optimization, this is something to be mindful of. If your site’s performance isn’t optimal, you may be losing valuable traffic and your potential visitors to your competitors’ pages. Google uses page speed as a direct ranking factor, for both mobile and desktop versions, so it’s critical to stay on top of it.
Use Google’s Page Speed Insights to test your site’s speed. If you identify any issues make sure to alarm your dev team ASAP.
Mobile-Friendly Site Is a Must
Mobile devices have turned the marketing industry upside down. These days, people use their phones to do almost anything – schedule a doctor’s appointment, apply for a job, or buy hiking shoes. Therefore, mobile responsiveness has become an essential feature in today’s digital environment. And it’s a critical part of an ecommerce business’s success.
Again, Google readily gives internet users a helping hand. Use their mobile-friendly test tool to check your site’s performance. As with the speed issues, in case there’s anything wrong, call the dev team for help.
Foster Better Shopping Experience With Chatbots
Providing better shopping experience is essential in ecommerce conversion rate optimization. AI technology can give your business a leg up in achieving it. Luckily, it’s widely accessible these days and it isn’t as expensive as it once was. Chatbots can free your support or sales team’s time, and address your customers’ most frequent inquiries 24/7.
And they are more affordable than having a customer support team around the clock.
Chatbots are especially helpful in product guidance and reminding your site visitors of the items they abandoned in their shopping carts.
Faceted Search Options
This feature is best suited for large online shops. When you have hundreds or thousands of products in your offer it’s best to allow your customers to refine their search using multiple filters at the same time. And of course, the faceted search solution has to be optimized for mobile devices too.
By implementing these solutions you’ll provide your customers with a shorter and more personalized journey.
3. Prioritize High-Quality Product Images
Beautiful visuals are important for every online business, but when it comes to e-commerce ones, they are absolutely imperative. Remember, online store visitors can’t touch or try out your products, so high-quality images together with detailed product descriptions need to substitute for that.
And if you need more convincing, Jutsuno’s data shows that visual appearance is the main deciding factor in purchasing decisions for a whopping 93% of consumers.
4. Recreate Real-Life Experience with Videos
Again, online experience needs to substitute for the real-life one, and the lack of certain elements of it like the product in action or its effect. A great way to do so is to take advantage of video format to showcase a real-life experience with your products.
If you’re selling skincare products, make sure to show the texture of the product, describe its smell and what it does for the skin. And of course, it’s even better to use a model, and display the look of their skin before and after your product’s been applied.
5. Product Descriptions Have to Be Engaging and Detailed
For a well-executed product page, you need product descriptions that sell. In addition to stunning visuals and effective videos, they too need to convince the site visitor to make a purchase. A compelling and persuasive product description will explain what problems your product solves, what will the customer gain from it, and why it outperforms the competitors.
Aside from that, product descriptions should contain all the important details and utilize sensory words. Describing texture, feel and other senses-related aspects of a product can be particularly persuasive. It helps online shoppers gather information they would otherwise get through their senses.
Don’t forget about listing the full price, delivery time, and out-of-stock information if it applies.
6. Implement the Product Comparison Tool
Customers compare different products when browsing your online store. They want to make an informed decision, so they check specifications, features, and prices of multiple similar items. If you don’t have a product comparison tool, they have to open multiple tabs and switch from one to another to gather. This isn’t exactly a user-friendly experience.
The last thing you want is for your customers to head to your competitors who’ve implemented this tool.
How does a comparison tool work? The shoppers select products they wish to see side-by-side, and voila! An even better option is to auto-populate a comparison chart based on your store’s most popular items.
7. Take Advantage of Call to Action Texts & Images
Captivating call-to-action visuals can be more persuasive and effective in comparison to traditional buttons. To maximize your chances of conversion, make sure to add many CTAs throughout your page, in the form of text and visuals.
They should be clearly visible and highly convincing. Make call to action texts short and utilize strong action words like “buy”, “order”, “download”, etc. They are even more powerful when followed by adverbs like “now”. Using FOMO can also be beneficial. Look at this example: “Limited time offer. Get your free ebook!”
Adding a disclaimer like “no credit card required” can be extremely enticing too.
8. Make Shopping Cart Visible at All Times
There are certain web conventions that should be followed to provide your site visitors with superb user experience. For example, internet users are used to seeing logos at the top left of the page. Similarly, your shopping cart should always be placed at the right top corner, as it’s where it’s expected to be.
This way, the potential buyer won’t have to waste time searching for it, or even worse, give up their purchase because the process is too complicated.
9. Use Social Proof to Build Trust: Testimonial, Reviews and Real-Time Purchases
Building trust with your audience is essential in the process of turning them into buyers. Social proof is the way to send strong trust signals to your site visitors. It acts like a word-of-mouth in the digital environment. Therefore, testimonials and reviews can be incredibly effective in ecommerce conversion rate optimization.
Social media comments and mentions, as well as user-generated content, will also help your brand establish long-term relationships with your customers.
Aside from this, there are tools available that can display real-time purchases. This type of data has been shown to encourage potential shoppers to make the purchase.
Having ratings displayed in the SERPs below your meta descriptions is also helpful in boosting sales, and all you need for that is setting up schema markup.
10. Utilize Lead Flows on Your Site
Lead flows is a fancy word for pop-ups that show up on your site to attract attention. They offer value too, so it isn’t surprising that they are a powerful ecommerce conversion rate optimization element. And based on your offer, you can choose between a pop-up box, a slide-in box, or a drop-down banner.
To show you how effective lead flows can be, we’ll cite an example from the Hubspot.
The site implemented the slide-in box on their blog in 2016 and it exploded. Its click-through-rate was 192% higher in comparison to regular CTAs at the end of blog posts.
When discussing lead flows, it’s incredibly important to emphasize that they should be used very carefully. A number of businesses have exploited them to such extent, that nowadays they can easily overwhelm the site visitors or feel too aggressive.
To conclude: if you plan to utilize them, make sure to find a fine balance between informing your audience about your offer and not being too intrusive.
11. Retarget and Re-engage Your Site Visitors
The majority of your site visitors will leave your online shop without taking the desired action and converting. But fear not, as all is not lost! You can re-engage the visitors who left by using retargeting on platforms like Facebook.
Essentially, retargeting comes down to promoting to a selected audience only, often to the ones who visited your web pages with the highest conversion rates. Simply put, your online ads are shown to them while they browse other sites.
In order for this ecommerce conversion rate optimization tactic to work, you need a compelling copy, captivating visuals, and attractive offer.
Experiment With Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies
The steps listed above are designed to help you convert more of your site visitors into paying customers. Your main goal is to create an amazing experience for your customers and encourage them to take the desired action. To do so, there is another important tactic you can implement in addition to the essential ecommerce conversion rate optimization steps.
Focus your efforts on particular segments of your site, especially those that can truly benefit from CRO. The prime candidates for CRO include homepage, landing pages, pricing page, and blog. Test various conversion rate optimization strategies, and see which ones make the highest impact.
Final Thoughts
Some of the ecommerce conversion rate optimization steps are easy to implement. Some will take more effort, or even require expert services if you want to multiply your e-commerce success. Nevertheless, ecommerce conversion optimization boils down to testing, measuring and interpreting the results, and tweaking implemented CRO strategies accordingly.
So, don’t hesitate to play around your store and optimize its vital elements and segments that will get it to start converting!