Make More Money Off Of Your Existing Traffic with Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization

So you want to grow your ecommerce store? Who doesn’t!

As we’ve outlined, there are 3 main levers to pull in order to make this happen: traffic, conversion rate, and AOV.

Perhaps you’ve already got more quality traffic than you know what to do with and what you need to do is focusing on making more money off the visitors that you already have.

That brings us to conversion rate: increasing the percentage of visitors that actual make a purchase.

If you have a high level of traffic, this can be the lever to focus on, and is often less expensive than buying even more traffic. Not to mention, increasing conversion rate will make every dollar you put towards driving traffic to your site more effective.

How to Increase Your Conversion Rate

When optimizing your website to increase conversions, it’s best to focus first on the areas where customers make decisions (that is, along your conversion funnel).

Often, you can improve conversions by reducing the number of clicks (or pages) along the conversion path and reducing the number of choices that a customer has (in terms of options, colors, etc).

This may sound counterintuitive…people love options! Well…actually they don’t. We might think we like options, but in reality, fewer choices (no more than 3) trigger more sales.

Now, we’re not recommending that you limit your product line to 3 products. But we are recommending that you think about the product options that you offer, as well as look at how you organize your product line in order to make it as quick and easy for customers to navigate to what they are looking for. Get creative, and if you have a complex product line, make sure that you have advanced filtering as well as a stellar search in place.

What are some things you should test?

Contrary to popular belief, or what you may have read about A/B testing, changing the color of your Add to Cart button or adjust the font size of your prices most likely isn’t going to move the needle in any meaningful way.

But here are a few areas to test that might:

  • More explanation vs. less (this will help you hone in on the right amount of information to include throughout your conversion funnel)
  • Lifestyle images vs. images of product alone (usually lifestyle photos work better, or some combination of both, but the right mix will depends on your specific product and brand)
  • The sequence of elements on core pages (to determine what order of information resonates best with your visitors)
  • An education first approach vs. a selling first approach (depending on your audience, educating them first about your brand and your products might win over more customers than a hard sell)
  • Video explanations vs. just text and imagery
  • Presentation of trust elements (including testing different warranties or guarantees, reviews, and other social proof elements)
  • Homepage hero images (test different offers, photography, and product presentations)
  • Including cart upsells vs. streamlining the checkout process
  • Shipping messaging throughout the store vs. just in the cart flow (and perhaps testing a free shipping threshold)

The right tests for you will depend on your analytics and page performance along the conversion funnel. Take a look at your analytics to identify areas of drop off from the conversion funnel. We recommend starting closest to the checkout with tests, moving back towards the homepage.

Elements of a High Converting Product Page

A high converting product page needs to be simple. It should include all of the information that a customer needs in order to make a decision on your product, but not more.

If you have an overwhelming amount of information on your product pages, your customers will be confused. And simply put, confused customers don’t buy.

This is a pitfall many fall into when they use templates to create their ecommerce sites. Many templates include a spec section with several bullet points so you feel that you need to fill this in for you products as well but perhaps (and mostly likely) your product doesn’t need this level of detail to sell.

Like we said above, this is great thing to test through a CRO platform like VWO, Optimizely, or Google Optimizer.

Don’t Forget Cart Abandonment and Cart Recovery

Preventing cart abandonment, as well as cart recovery strategies, will help increase your conversion rate.

To prevent cart abandonment, make sure your checkout is clean and simple. Reduce distractions and streamline the checkout process.

Poorly designed checkouts are a conversion killer. If there are too many steps, you’re sure to lose people. But the biggest offender causing cart abandonment is surprise, especially when it comes to shipping costs. Don’t hide shipping costs until the 3rd step of checkout and then hit your customers with an outrageous charge. Instead, reveal shipping charges up front either across your entire store or at the first step of checkout.

Also, make sure to have a cart recovery strategy. Customers who do abandon their cart are low hanging fruit. They went all of the way through the process of finding products and adding them to their cart. This shows a super high level of customer interest, so focus on getting these customers across the line.

Conversion rate optimization is something that you should always be doing. The best stores never stop testing in order to improve their conversion rate, and neither should you.

 

Need help implementing a full-fledged conversion rate optimization strategy?

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