Your store needs to be designed with your customers in mind. While increasing traffic can generate more sales, focusing on converting current traffic into paying customers is no less important. At every step of your customers’ buying journey, there are new opportunities for you to make their paths shorter, easier, and more enjoyable.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a set of marketing tactics to increase the percentage of visitors to your website that complete a desired action. It uses the science of persuasion in design to encourage people to take a desired action. CRO often involves multivariate testing and split testing or A/B testing.
How to Calculate Conversion Rate
An essential part of keeping your conversion rate optimization process applicable is ensuring you track conversion rates across your channels. To do this, you need to know how to calculate CRO.
Here’s what a common conversion rate formula looks like:
Conversion Rate = (Total Conversions / Visitor Count) × 100
Let’s say your store had 50 sales and 1000 visitors last month. Your conversion rate is 50 divided by 1000 (0.05), multiplied by 100, which equals 5%.
What is the Ideal Conversion Rate for Your Store?
The latest benchmark shows that the average conversion rate for e-commerce sites is 3.65%.
As a new store owner, the ideal target conversion rate is between 2% and 3%. The following conversion rate optimization strategies will help improve your conversion rate over time.
Where to Start with Conversion Rate Optimization?
There are several different ways to improve conversion rates. This guide will focus on one we know works. It’s a type of experiment called A/B testing, also known as split testing.
A/B testing is a method of comparing two versions of the same page to see which one performs better. With A/B testing, two different versions of a page are shown to similar groups of visitors at the same time. Ultimately, the version that works more effectively and produces a higher number of conversions is considered the winner.
If you’re going to start running CRO experiments for your store, you’ll want to build a repeatable process. Here’s a five-step CRO process you can follow for each experiment you run:
Research
Identify areas for improvement at this stage. Learn what visitors are doing on your store and understand how different page features affect behavior. You can collect data through Google Analytics, customer surveys, usability tests, and user interviews.
Hypothesis
Based on the data collected, decide what changes you will make to your pages. For example, the hypothesis could be, “We believe adding a global search bar will double conversion rates because it helps people find desired products.”
Prioritize
Decide which hypotheses to test first. Look for the pages that will have the biggest impact on growth and work on those first. Look for pages that are performing poorly or have easier fixes that can increase conversion rates faster.
Test
Test the different hypotheses on various pages to see which works best. Implement the changes in a controlled manner, such as running A/B tests or split tests.
Learn
After testing, analyze the results and decide whether the change should be made permanent. If not, think about the reasons it didn’t work and use them to inform future experiments.
Before conducting any CRO tests, you’ll need to determine if your website is getting enough traffic to generate statistically significant results. If your sample size is too small, you won’t be able to draw any conclusions from your results, as they won’t accurately reflect how a larger population would use your site.
If
If you want to calculate the sample size you will need to conduct an A/B test, simply enter the current conversion rate of the webpage you want to test into this calculator.
Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies
Improving your online store is not a one-time fix for e-commerce; it’s an ongoing process that will help you learn more about your target audience and how you can serve them better. It’s not a tactic with an end – it’s something you should always be doing to enhance your performance.
1. Simplify the User Experience
When it comes to designing an effective landing page, simplicity is key. It takes just 50 milliseconds for a customer to form a first impression of your website, so you need to do everything you can to make those moments count.
Avoid overwhelming potential customers with excessive images and text. Instead, stay on brand and message with a simple, visually appealing design.
Just take a look at the Province of Canada website. For its landing page, it uses two prominent images that take up most of the space at the top of the screen. The text is simple and to the point, with a clear call to action (CTA) that drives visitors to a product range.
If you are unsure what your main image should be, it’s usually best to go with either your best-selling or most profitable products, or collections like new arrivals or current promotions.
2. Display Coupon Codes and Real-Time Purchases, and More
Once your customers reach your landing page, you have the opportunity to start building excitement and guiding them toward your products. If your goal is to increase traffic to your products, there are many great apps for Shopify store owners that can help drive demand and stimulate purchases:
- Welcome bar. Apps like 20+ Promotional Sales Tools allow you to share sales, coupon codes, promotions, and more with your customers as soon as they land on your site. These apps add a non-intrusive floating bar at the top of your landing page that immediately grabs your customers’ attention and directs them where you need them to go.
- Pop-ups. Pop-ups and sidebar windows are great for building your email list. Try using an app like Privy or Popup to add a quick pop-up to your landing page offering a coupon code in exchange for signing up for the newsletter.
- Real-time purchases. Apps like Fomo Social Proof add a small notification in the bottom corner of your store, displaying real-time purchases being made by other customers. These apps create a sense of urgency and provide customers with social proof that other people are buying your products at this moment.
For example, take a look at Our Place. They used a welcome bar to promote a BOGO offer and free shipping and returns.
After a few seconds, this great pop-up appears, encouraging visitors to participate in Our Place’s promotion to get a free pan.
3. Add Trust Signals to Build Credibility
Have you been featured in major publications? Are your products used by any well-known influencers?
Add testimonials, customer reviews, and badges to your landing page beneath the main content to build trust and show credibility. After all, 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family.
4. Use Smart Search
If your customers are searching for a product on your website, they likely don’t know exactly where to find it.
If you have a store with a large number of products, you might want to consider prominently highlighting your search bar on your landing page, allowing your customers to go directly to what they want instead of sifting through categories.
With
applications like Smart Search & Instant Search, you can enhance the power of your search bar with predictive results that help your customers find what they are looking for.
Alo uses the search bar to assist its yoga clients in finding exactly what they are looking for.
Even after typing just a few characters, the search bar starts guiding visitors to relevant categories, products, and results (which is effective for increasing cross-selling and upselling).
5. Organize Your Categories Effectively
For your customers, browsing your e-commerce site should be easy, straightforward, and, above all, clear. Try to avoid splitting your products into many different categories. Instead, choose four to six broad categories with more specific subcategories in a dropdown menu.
Arrange your categories in your navigation bar based on their popularity, putting the most popular category at the front.
6. Use High-Quality Product Images
High-quality product images are the most important part of an effective product page. Try to include images that show your products from all angles and accurately represent the look and feel of your offerings.
As a bonus, include a video showcasing your product in action. For example, if you sell shirts, give customers a better idea of how your shirts look in motion by adding a video to your landing page featuring a model strolling and wearing one.
Love Hair has some great examples of well-executed product pages. Check out the page above for the nourishing hair oil, which features several high-quality images, engaging product descriptions, and short videos that truly highlight the product.
7. Be Transparent About Pricing, Delivery Time, and Out-of-Stock Products
The worst thing you can do is mislead your customers. According to the latest statistics on shopping cart abandonment, 69.99% of online shopping carts are abandoned. The main reason? Too high additional costs.
Don’t be afraid to inform them of the full extent of things like pricing, delivery times, and stock availability. If you do a good job selling your products and clarifying their value, your customers won’t mind paying a little extra for shipping or waiting a bit longer for delivery.
If you own a Shopify store, you can also use an app like Back In Stock to give your customers the option to receive a notification when out-of-stock products are added to your store.
8. Display Product Reviews to Build Trust
Product reviews are a great way to alleviate hesitant shoppers’ doubts and provide your customers with the social proof they need to click “Add to Cart.” In fact, 9 out of 10 purchase decisions are influenced by reading online product reviews.
Positive reviews can make a significant difference in convincing shoppers that a product really works and is worth buying. Reviews also help in making more guided decisions regarding size, color, and more.
Shopify store owners can use apps like Product Reviews and Yotpo to include customer reviews directly on their product pages.
Product reviews can be particularly helpful for businesses in the beauty and skincare industry. For example, Beardbrand showcases reviews on every product page.
9. Use Heat Maps
Heat maps are a popular tactic for online brands to improve conversion rates as they take vast amounts of behavioral data and convert it into a simple visual representation.
A heat map shows interaction points on your website, usually displayed in “warm” and “cool” shades. If an area on the heat map is warm (red, orange, or yellow), there is a high level of activity there. Cooler shades indicate low activity.
Heat maps provide you with information about which elements visitors are interacting with the most. They reveal the parts they click on, hover over, and scroll through. Scroll maps show how far visitors go before leaving the site. Apps like Lucky Orange allow you to study interaction patterns from dynamic elements like pop-ups, dropdowns, and forms as well.
Provides
Lucky Orange also offers other conversion rate optimization tools to help reduce cart abandonment and increase sales, including:
- Session recordings, which allow you to see how people browse your website and how they interact with your store.
- Live view, which lets you see visitor activity in real-time – if you see hesitance, you can open a live chat conversation with the person through the app.
- Segmentation and filtering, which filters heatmaps and recordings by traffic source, device type, browser, etc., so you can target more specific customer groups.
Heatmaps are a great way to see your store through your customers’ eyes. You can learn what works and what doesn’t, assess new ideas, and optimize elements of your site to increase conversion rates.
10. Pre-fill Customer Information
You can make repeated purchases easier for your current customers by pre-filling shipping and billing information using customer accounts.
The less information customers need to input, the better. A study from Google states that customers fill out forms 30% faster using auto-fill, which can lead to more conversions at checkout.
You can also enable Shop Pay, Shopify’s checkout solution for merchants. Shop Pay remembers customer details and encrypts them so they can pay quickly at checkout with one click.
Customers can pay using their preferred payment method and even choose how they wish to pay, whether in full or in installments.
Our study showed that checkouts using Shop Pay have an average conversion rate up to 1.72 times higher than regular checkouts. Learn how to enable Shop Pay in your store by reading Enable Shop Pay.
? Tip: Want to enhance your checkout? Shopify Checkout lets you build a one-click checkout that achieves high conversion rates and customizes its look and functionality to meet your needs – from driving loyalty program signups to upselling and much more.
11. Send Abandoned Cart Messages
Unfortunately, customers sometimes fill their shopping carts with products and then leave your store without the intention of returning.
With abandoned cart messages, you can remind those customers of the items they have already shown interest in and give them a little push to return to your store to complete their purchase.
12. Create a Comprehensive Contact Page
If your customers want to contact you, they should be able to do so easily.
For customers, not being able to share their thoughts and feelings – whether positive or negative – is a very frustrating experience. Your contact page should include ways for your customers to reach out when something goes wrong, as well as opportunities to engage with your brand in fun and exciting ways.
Here’s a quick list of everything that should be included on your contact page:
- An email address or contact form
- Your physical location, along with a map and directions
- Your retail store hours
- Links to your social profiles
- Specific contact options for support, including phone number or email
13. Ensure Your Site is Mobile-Friendly
Mobile compatibility should be a priority for your business. According to Statista statistics, over 59% of web traffic comes from smartphones and tablets. You want to provide a great customer experience for visitors to your site on mobile devices.
It’s easy for your Shopify store to automatically be compatible with the right display on any device.
If you want to check if your website is mobile-friendly, just enter your URL into Google’s mobile-friendly test tool.
14.
Improve Your Website Loading Times
As mentioned earlier, people will leave your website if it is slow. Faster sites not only provide a good experience but are also beneficial for improving your search engine rankings. The longer people stay on your site, the lower the bounce rate, signaling to search engines that your site is reliable and worth visiting.
The easiest way to check how fast your online store loads is by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. PageSpeed Insights will give you a detailed report on how quickly your site loads, along with any issues you can solve to improve your loading times.
Although optimizing your store’s loading times can be a complex process, there are a few things you should always keep in mind. The size of your images can have a significant impact on your site’s loading speed. Try compressing and optimizing every image using a tool like ImageOptim. ImageOptim removes all unnecessary data from each image file, resulting in a much smaller file size without noticeable visual differences.
Additionally, for Shopify store owners, consider uninstalling any apps you no longer use, as these apps can place an added burden on your site, even if they are turned off.
Best Conversion Rate Optimization Tools
Here are some of the best Shopify apps for optimizing your site’s conversion rate, in no particular order:
- Privy: An all-in-one tool for boosting sales with pop-ups, email, and SMS marketing.
- Smile: A customer loyalty app that supports referral and VIP programs to increase purchases.
- Blyp: An AI-powered CRO app that tracks and uncovers hidden sales opportunities.
- Firepush: A remarketing app that helps recover abandoned carts and multichannel campaigns.
- Yotpo Product Reviews: A social proof app that collects and displays user-generated content such as ratings and reviews.
- Hotjar: A suite of web analytics tools that helps you understand user behavior through heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, and feedback tools.
If you don’t want to manage conversion rate optimization yourself, you can hire a Shopify expert to do it for you. We have 110 conversion rate optimization experts and agencies available to help.
More Experiments Mean Higher Conversion Rates
Whether you are marketing or running a business, you have one goal: getting people to click the CTA button. Clearly, every e-commerce marketing strategy must involve site conversion rates and page optimization. Running the above experiments will help you create better experiences for your site visitors and encourage them to take the desired action – whether that’s signing up for an email, adding to cart, or making a purchase. Ready to build your business? Start your free Shopify trial – no credit card required.
Common tactics for conversion rate optimization?
- Optimize site speed: A slow site can lead to a high bounce rate. Optimizing site speed can enhance user experience and increase conversion chances.
- Simplify the checkout process: A complicated checkout process can lead to abandoned shopping carts. The checkout process can be simplified by reducing the number of steps and only asking for necessary information to increase conversion rates.
- Use high-quality product images: High-quality product images can help customers visualize the product and make informed purchasing decisions.
- Provide detailed product descriptions: Detailed product descriptions can help customers understand the product and its features, leading to more informed buying decisions.
- Offer free shipping: Offering free shipping
Source: https://shopify.com/blog/120261189-conversion-rate-optimization
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