Your store needs to be designed with your customers in mind. While increasing your traffic can generate more sales, focusing on converting your current traffic into paying customers is no less important. At every step of your customers’ buying journeys, 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 aimed at increasing the percentage of visitors to your website who complete a desired action. Conversion rate optimization often involves applying design persuasion techniques to encourage people to take a desired action. It frequently includes multivariate testing and A/B testing.
How to Calculate Conversion Rate
An essential part of keeping the conversion rate optimization process actionable is ensuring you track conversion rates across your channels. To do this, you need to know how to calculate CRO.
This is what the common conversion rate formula looks like:
Conversion Rate = (Total Number of Conversions / Number of Visitors) × 100
Let’s say your store had 50 sales and 1000 visitors last month. Your conversion rate is 50 divided by 1000 (0.05), then multiplied by 100, which equals 5%.
What is a good conversion rate for your store? The latest benchmark indicates that the average conversion rate for e-commerce sites is 3.65%.
As a new store owner, a good target conversion rate to aim for is between 2% and 3%. The following conversion rate optimization strategies will help you improve your conversion rate over time.
Where to Start Improving Conversion Rate?
There are several different ways to improve conversion rates. This guide will focus on one we know works. It’s a kind 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 two similar groups of visitors at the same time. Ultimately, the version that performs more effectively and generates a higher number of conversions is considered the winner.
If you’re going to start running conversion rate optimization experiments for your store, you’ll want to build a repeatable process. Here is a five-step conversion rate optimization process you can follow for each experiment you conduct:
1. Research. Identify areas for improvement at this stage. Learn what visitors are doing on your store and understand how different web page features impact behavior. You can gather data through Google Analytics, customer surveys, usability tests, and user interviews.
2. Hypothesis. Based on the data gathered, decide on the changes you will make to your pages. For example, the hypothesis could be, “We believe that adding a global search bar will double conversion rates because it helps people find the desired products.”
3. Prioritize. Decide which hypotheses to test first. Look for pages that significantly impact growth and work on fixing those first. Identify underperforming pages or those with easier fixes that can increase conversion rates faster.
4. Test. Test different hypotheses on different pages to see which works best. Implement changes in a controlled manner, such as running A/B tests or split tests.
5. Learn. After testing, analyze the results and decide whether a permanent change should be made. If not, consider why it didn’t work and use that to inform future experiments.
Before
any CRO test, you’ll need to know 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 anything from your results, as they won’t accurately reflect how a larger number of people use your site.
If you want to calculate the sample size you’ll need to conduct an A/B test, simply enter the current conversion rate of the webpage you want to test into this calculator.
14 Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies
Improving your online store is not a one-time solution for e-commerce, but a continuous process that will help you continuously learn about your target audience and how you can serve them better. It’s not a tactic that ends at a certain point – it’s something you should always do to improve your performance. 1. Simplify the user experience when it comes to designing an effective landing page, simplicity is key. It takes only 50 milliseconds for a customer to form a first impression of your website, so you should do everything possible to make those moments count. Avoid overwhelming potential customers with excessive images and text. Instead, stay on brand and message with a simple and visually appealing design. Just take a look at the Government of Canada. For its landing page, it used two hero images that take up most of the space above the fold. The text is simple and direct, with a clear call to action (CTA) that drives visitors towards the group.
Show Coupon Codes, Real-Time Purchases, and More
Once your customers land on your homepage, you have the opportunity to start building excitement and driving them towards 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, offers, and more with your customers as soon as they arrive at your site. These apps add a non-intrusive floating bar at the top of your homepage that will immediately catch your customers’ attention and guide them where you need them to go. Pop-Ups. Pop-ups and slide-ins are great for building your email list. Try using an app like Privy or Popup to add a quick pop-up to your homepage 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, showing purchases being made in real-time by other customers. These apps stimulate a sense of urgency and give customers social proof that there are other people buying your products at this moment.
Adding Trust Badges to Build Trust
Have your products been featured in major publications? Are your products used by any well-known influencers?
Add certifications, customer reviews, and badges to your homepage under the main content to build trust and show credibility. After all, 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they trust recommendations from friends and family.
Using Smart Search
If your customers are searching for a product on your website, they might not 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 homepage, allowing your customers the opportunity to go directly to where they want instead of sifting through categories.
Using
Applications like Smart Search & Instant Search can enhance your search bar with predictive results that help your customers find what they’re looking for.
Alo uses the search bar to help its yoga clients find exactly what they’re looking for.
Effectively Organize Your Categories
For your customers, browsing your e-commerce site should be easy, simple, and above all, clear. Try to avoid splitting your products into too many different categories. Instead, choose four to six main categories that contain more specific subcategories as a dropdown list.
Arrange your categories in your navigation bar based on their popularity, with the most popular category at the front.
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 products.
As a bonus, include a video showing your product in action. For example, if you sell shirts, give customers a better idea of what your shirts look like in motion and add a video to your landing page of a model walking around wearing one.
Be Transparent About Prices, Delivery Times, and Out-of-Stock Products
The worst thing you can do is mislead your customers. According to the latest statistics on cart abandonment, 69.99% of online shopping carts are left behind. The main reason? Excessive hidden 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 of selling your products and clarifying their value, your customers won’t mind paying a little extra for shipping or waiting longer for delivery.
If you have 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 back to your store.
Show Product Reviews to Establish Trust
Product reviews are a great way to alleviate the doubts of hesitant shoppers and provide them with the social proof they need to click the “Add to Cart” button. In fact, 9 out of 10 purchase decisions are influenced by reading online product reviews.
Positive reviews can make all the difference in convincing shoppers that a product really works and is worth purchasing. Reviews also help in making more informed decisions about size, color, and more.
Shopify store owners can use apps like Product Reviews and Yotpo to embed customer reviews directly on their product pages.
Use Heat Maps
Heat maps are a popular tactic for improving conversion rates for online brands as they take large amounts of behavioral data and turn it into a simple visual representation.
A heat map shows interaction points on your website and usually displays in “warm” and “cool” colors. If an area on the heat map is warm (red, orange, or yellow), it means that there is a high level of activity there. Cool shades indicate low activity.
Heat maps provide you with information about which elements your website visitors interact with the most. They reveal the areas they click on, hover over, and move within. Scroll maps show how far visitors go before leaving the site. Apps like Lucky Orange offer engagement patterns from dynamic elements like pop-ups, dropdowns, and forms as well.
Lucky Orange also provides other conversion rate optimization tools to help reduce cart abandonment and increase sales, including: screen recordings, which allow you to watch people browse your website and see how they interact with your store. Live view, which lets you see visitor activity in real time – if you see hesitation, you can open a live chat conversation with that person through the app. Segmentation and filtering, which filter heat maps and recordings by traffic source, device type, browser, and more, so you can target more specific customer groups.
Heat maps
Heat maps are a great way to see your store through the eyes of your customers. You can find out what works and what doesn’t, assess new ideas, and improve elements of your site to increase conversion rates.
Pre-fill Customer Information
You can make it easier for your existing customers to repeat their purchases by pre-filling shipping and billing information using customer accounts.
The less information customers need to enter, the better. A study from Google states that customers fill out forms 30% faster using autocomplete, which can lead to more conversions at checkout.
You can also install Shop Pay, Shopify’s checkout solution for merchants. Shop Pay remembers customer details and encrypts them so they can check out quickly and securely.
Customers can pay using their preferred payment method and even choose how they want to pay, whether that’s in full or in installments.
Send Abandoned Cart Messages
Unfortunately, customers sometimes fill their shopping carts with products and then leave your store with no intention of coming back.
With abandoned cart messages, you can remind those customers of the items they showed interest in and give them a little nudge to return to your store to complete their purchase.
Create a Comprehensive Contact Page
If your customers want to get in touch with you, they should be able to do so easily.
For customers, the inability to share their thoughts and feelings – whether positive or negative – is an extremely 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 you should include on your contact page:
- Email address or contact form
- Your physical location, along with a map and directions
- Your retail store hours, along with links to your social media profiles
- Specific contact options for support, including a phone number or email
Ensure Your Site is Mobile-Friendly
Mobile compatibility should be a priority for your business. According to Statista, over 59% of web traffic comes from smartphones and tablets. You want to provide a great customer experience for mobile visitors to your site.
It’s easy for every Shopify feature to be automatically displayed correctly on every device.
If you want to check if your website is mobile-friendly, just enter your URL in Google’s mobile-friendly test tool.
Optimize Your Website Loading Times
As mentioned earlier, people will leave your website if it’s slow. Faster websites not only provide a better experience but are also good for improving your site’s ranking on search engines. The longer people stay on your site, the lower your bounce rate, which signals to search engines that your site is trustworthy and worth visiting.
The easiest way to find out 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 website loads, along with any issues you can fix to improve your loading times.
When optimizing your store’s loading times, there are a few things to always keep in mind. Image size can have a significant impact on your website’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 any noticeable visual difference.
In addition
to that, for Shopify store owners, try uninstalling any apps you no longer use, as these apps can put an additional strain on your website, even if they are disabled.
Top Conversion Rate Optimization Tools
Here are some of the best apps for Shopify to improve your site’s conversion rate, in no particular order:
- Privy: A single tool to increase sales with pop-ups, email, and SMS marketing.
- Smile: A customer loyalty app that supports referral and VIP programs to boost purchases.
- Blyp: An AI-powered CRO app that tracks and uncovers hidden sales opportunities.
- Firepush: A retargeting app that helps recover abandoned carts and multi-channel campaigns.
- Yotpo Product Reviews: A social proof app that collects and displays user-generated content like ratings and reviews.
- Hotjar: A set of web analytics tools that help 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 a marketer or a business owner, you have one goal: to get people to click the CTA button. Clearly, every eCommerce marketing strategy should include conversion rate optimization and web page improvement. Running the experiments above will help you create better experiences for your visitors and encourage them to take the desired action – whether that’s subscribing to email, adding to cart, or making a purchase. Are you ready to build your business? Start your free Shopify trial – no credit card required.
Conversion Rate Optimization FAQs
What are some conversion rate optimization tactics?
– Improving website speed: A slow website can lead to a high bounce rate. Improving website speed can enhance user experience and increase conversion chances.
– Streamlining 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 asking only for necessary information to increase conversion rates.
– Using high-quality product images: High-quality product images can help customers visualize the product and make informed purchasing decisions.
– Providing detailed product descriptions: Detailed product descriptions can help customers understand the product and its features, thus making more informed purchase decisions.
– Offering free shipping: Offering free shipping can help reduce shopping cart abandonment and increase conversion rates.
– Using customer reviews and ratings: Customer reviews and ratings can help build trust and credibility with potential customers, leading to higher conversion rates.
– Using targeted offers: Targeted offers can help incentivize customers to make a purchase and increase conversion rates.
– Using retargeting ads: Retargeting ads can help recover potential customers who left their shopping carts or left the site without making a purchase.
– Providing a guest checkout option: Offering a guest checkout option can help reduce friction in the checkout process and increase conversion rates.
– Optimizing for mobile compatibility: With the increasing number of customers using mobile devices to shop online, optimizing eCommerce sites for mobile can improve user experience and increase conversion rates.
Is conversion rate optimization hard?
Conversion rate optimization can be challenging and time-consuming as it requires a lot of testing, analysis, and adjustments to make a website or app more appealing to customers.
How can I improve my conversion rate?
Conversion rate improvement can be achieved through various strategies and continuous refinement based on user feedback and analytics data.
Improving site elements and enhancing user experience can help increase conversion rates, such as developing better CTAs, speeding up your site, and writing compelling content. You can also use A/B testing strategies to find out what works and what doesn’t.
Source: https://www.shopify.com/blog/120261189-conversion-rate-optimization
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