3 Key Conversion Rate Optimization Tactics for Ecommerce
Any ecommerce business is called successful when there is conversion, here we will discuss 3 major tactics to be implemented to run a successful ecommerce business.
In today’s digital world, ecommerce has turned out to be an extremely dynamic marketplace. Entrepreneurs are furiously competitive trying to grab more traffic, leads, and customers with one key objective of scaling up their businesses at a skyrocketed speed. What most of them tend to miss out on though, is conversion rate optimization, a critical growth factor.
The concept of conversion rate optimization (CRO) is not new. Whether it is counting the number of customers in a retail establishment or counting the number of appointments in direct sales, the key marketing focus of businesses has always been to get more customers on board.
While the high-level concepts of CRO are generally the same, the practices for ecommerce are specific. The good news is that the metrics are much more measurable, and marketers can use them to bring changes for significant improvements.
More importantly, effective CRO is always driven by an effective lead qualification and an accurate assessment of the Probability of Conversion (PoC), which we have already talked about at length in our previous blog.
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Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion Rate Optimization is indeed crucial for every business. However, it is probably not a great idea to start trying to increase conversion rates until we fully understand what we are trying to do.
A conversion is marked by any time a potential customer takes an action that you have invited them to take. So, a conversion could be marked by a website visitor signing up for a newsletter, downloading a free trial, requesting more information, or even initiating a chat with live support or a chatbot.
We can determine a conversion rate by counting the number of website visitors for example who take a step to engage with you in any form.
For example, let’s say that you are trying to grow your business by increasing the size of your email list. So, on your landing page, you have a clear call to action asking people to sign up for your newsletter. If 1000 people visit that landing page next month and 100 people subscribe to your newsletter, you have a conversion rate of 10%.
Conversion Rate Optimization Tricks that Can Help Scale your Businesses
A 10% conversion rate is excellent, especially since the global average is around 1-3%.
But 15% would be better, right?
That alone won’t make a huge difference. But, think about your entire sales process, sales funnel, and customer journey. If the conversion rate from each touchpoint was to be increased even by a small margin, your overall increase in sales could be exponential.
So, how do we get there? Optimizing conversions is all about analysis, experimentation, testing, and review of your website. Here are the 3 key ways that can help you scale your ecommerce business using Conversion Rate Optimization.
1. Give Importance to Performance
One of the vital elements that most businesses skip while performing the CRO tests is testing their overall site performance. They are usually oblivion of the fact that a poor site performance can inadvertently skew their data and to their CRO test results ultimately useless.
What is the reason behind this outcome?
Load time is an important parameter that can help increase conversion rates. If you let the webpage load time rise above four seconds, you are digging your pit as there will be a huge surge in your bounce rate. An increase in bounce rates eventually leads to a huge dip in conversion rates.
It is common for marketers to unintentionally increase load times by adding images, copy, or any other new element to a page.
For instance, Moz: software as a service company, after an extensive redesign of one of their landing pages, witnessed a huge surge in load time. In order to diminish this effect, they made use of a few tricks to reduce the load time of their page even on a slow connection.
The end results were amazing: optimizations reduced the page load time by 40% and shrunk the size by a factor of 4x, eventually making a whopping impact on their conversion rates
2. Simplify the Checkout Process
Do you know, a complicated checkout process can result in 27 percent of cart abandonment rates for any ecommerce business?
Thus, it becomes important for ecommerce players to simplify their checkout process as much as possible. Remember, on average, the number of steps to check out on an ecommerce website is 5.42.
If you are lying anywhere close to this range, be prepared for the worst: 30% of your potential customers think your checkout process is too long. The more steps a user has to take to complete checkout, the chances increase that they will eventually abandon the cart. Therefore, it is necessary to stick to only essential information in your check out process flow:
- shipping information
- payment information
- email address to send a receipt
For instance, Amazon efficiently reduced friction in its checkout process by reconstructing the traditional online cart process.
Just have a look at their new physical grocery store concept (where there are no checkouts). It delivers a frictionless checkout experience, thereby delivering a seamless user experience, ultimately paving the way for a higher conversion rate.
3. A/B Test for Ongoing Improvements
While dealing with conversion rate optimization, one of the important suggestions that every ecommerce marketer should treat as sacred is:
Continuously forming hypotheses on what may be effective with your target audience and testing the same regularly, paves the way for creating a seamless user experience. A/B testing involves testing for everything from copywriting on your pages, to creating page layouts, to plugging in calls to action.
With A/B testing, ecommerce stores can increase the average order value, optimize their checkout funnel, reduce cart abandonment rate, and so on.
In an ecommerce world, Amazon is considered a perfect example when it comes to conversion optimization. This is because of two primary reasons:
- Partly due to the scale they operate at, and
- Partly due to their immense dedication to providing the best customer experience
One of their biggest innovations that resulted from rigorous A/B testing in the late 1990s is 1-Click Ordering. It lets the users make purchases without having to use the shopping cart at all.
Optimize Conversions and Watch your Ecommerce Business Grow
This is just a brief overview of the ways you can improve the conversion rates for your ecommerce business. Conversion rate optimization is often a vast, untapped opportunity by marketers and you would be immensely astonished to see the huge bounce in your revenues that you can bring by just fine-tuning your website for conversions!
There are plenty of experts and resources out there to help you grab every possible percentage of conversion rate. However, the place to start is simply understanding the importance and the power of CRO in your business and paying close attention to the key CRO tactics discussed in this blog.