There are plenty of ways to get someone to your e-Commerce site, but the real battle is just getting started: converting site visitors into paying customers. The average e-commerce conversion rate for a site is 1.6% and 92% of customers who visit the first time don’t make a purchase.
Unlike driving traffic, there is no way to pay to directly boost conversions. You have to create an experience on your site that sells. There are so many factors that go into an online customer’s buying decision. You need to be intentional and strategic in how you set up the buying process and interface so it converts.
Once you do this, the results can be exponential sales.
Get some inspiration from our 10 best ways to increase e-Commerce conversion rates:
1. Recommend products based on user behavior.
If you had a salesperson in store, they would never suggest products that were totally irrelevant to their conversation with a customers. Interactions with your website are like a conversation with your customer and you can use tools like Unbxd to auto-recommend products to customers based on their past experience on their site. Unbxd uses AI to analyze actions users have taken on your site and suggests the best products in the footer and sidebar for them automatically.
2. Speed up your site.
According to research, if your page takes longer than three seconds to load, it could be costing your half your visitors. Faster pages can deliver up to 7-12% higher conversion rates than slower ones which is huge. It’s one, non-visual factor that can be easily fixed with a few different options to make you more money. One really simple thing you can try is adding plugins like W3 Total Cache which will help you minify HTML, CSS, etc. and use a CDN to speed up your site.
3. Include reviews and peer generated content.
Reviews are a huge part of the buyer process online. 95% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase. Including reviews can help sell products to your customers in non-saley ways and help them make a decision on your site rather than searching elsewhere. Another way you can use other shopper to boost conversions is to include peer generated content. Amazon does this with customer photos of products available in each product page.
4. Offer customer support.
Back in the day, there was sales staff to help guide customer decision making, make suggestions, and close the sale to increase conversions. Now, customers more or less do that all on their own. All they have is your interface to figure it out and weigh their options. Your customer experience has to drive sales for you. Undoubtedly, customers have questions during the buyer process. Any questions that go unanswered can cause you to lose a sale. Offer customer support in the form of a FAQ section or Live Chat. 92% of customers feel satisfied when a website uses a Live Chat feature. It’s a great way to show customers that you are legitimate, there to offer support, and it helps sell your products.
5. Include exit offers for visitors.
Over 90% of customers coming to your site the first time are not coming back or making a purchase. That’s traffic you’ve likely worked hard for or paid for that is not making you money. Use exit offers to get customer information so you can communicate with them and convert them in the future. OptinMonk uses AI to determine the exact second someone is leaving your site and creates an offer tailored to their behavior on your site before they go. You can offer someone a discount on a item they browsed and get their email to make the sale later!
6. Test various landing pages.
Not all your target customers are the same so what’s currently on your homepage may not be the best way to capture their attention and make a conversion. Use a tool like Unbounce to quickly create and test different landing pages directed at different target audiences. Unbounce has lowered cost per lead for customers by 70%. Giving customers a more tailored experience to their wants and needs helps take the guesswork of whether your products are right for them.
7. Announce new products and sales in an engaging way.
To boost conversions, make sure customers actually know when you release new products or are running a sale. You can create a more engaging customer experience that does this everywhere on your site using Beamer. Beamer is an in-site newsfeed that opens on any page when a customer clicks “What’s New” or an icon in your interface. You can announce new products or sales in updates with photos, videos, GIFs, and include CTAs to get customer exploring your site from any page. You can also configure push notifications to go out to customers who have opted in so they can immediately shop new products and take advantage of sales.
8. A/B test everywhere you can.
Like a brick and mortar store, every little detail can either make customers want to stay or go; it either sells your brand or it doesn’t. Luckily, on your e-Commerce site it’s very easy to make little changes and test different options on anything from headers, content, CTA buttons, colors, etc. You can constantly test A/B different options for these using Optimizely. E-Commerce sites testing different elements via Optimizely have seen an increase of 33% in revenue. It’s worth it to be always testing so you can consistently improve the little details that could be helping or hindering your conversions.
9. Remove checkout friction.
Amazon, whose success doesn’t need to be qualified, has mastered a frictionless checkout process. The more hoops you make customers jump through to checkout, the more likely their cart is to go abandoned. You can add a one-click checkout option using YITH one-click checkout plugin so customers can jump straight to checkout and return customers’ information will already appear so they can truly “one-click checkout”. Other options you can try are having product previews open in a pop-up rather than a new page so customers can add items to cart while scrolling through your store.
10. Offer multiple ways to pay and free shipping always.
Free shipping used to be a perk but now customers are coming to expect it, again, thanks to Amazon. Customer don’t like seeing the total on their shopping cart go up when they go to checkout entirely. It’s just another opportunity to go back on their purchase. Instead, build free shipping into your pricing and avoid this extra thought all together. When they do checkout, offer multiple payment options like all credit cards and PayPal just incase one doesn’t work!
Taking a few extra steps to make sure your customer experience is well designed and covers all the bases in your customer’s buyer process can really increase conversion rates. Once you get a formula down and perfect shop designed, the growth can be exponential. Try Beamer for an easy way to engage and better sell to your e-Commerce customers today; no coding or redesign required!
