We’ve all been there: People are flocking to your website, maybe thanks to a well-executed Paid Social Campaign but few convert. You have done your research, you know The average eCommerce conversion rate is 2.5% to 3% but yours is lagging behind. What are you doing wrong? And how can you increase your eCommerce conversion rate?
1. Performance, Performance, Performance
Ever clicked on an ad or a link to buy something online and left because the page was loading too slowly? If your website takes longer than 2 seconds to load, I have news for you: You’re losing a lot of potential conversions. 53% of users will leave a mobile website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
Before you move on to any of the other ways to increase your eCommerce conversion rate, check your website loading times and speed, you can use tools like GTMetrix to identify what needs to be improved. When we help brands build or re-platforming their websites, we use a combination of image optimization, minified scripts and styles, CDN implementation, and caching to deliver websites that load lightning fast.
The chart below shows how eCommerce conversion rates drop at every additional second of loading time:
2. Optimize Your Traffic
We all love seeing those unique visitors and sessions numbers going up and sometimes we forget that, like with most things, when it comes to website traffic quality is more important than quantity.
Your conversion rate hinges on the quality of your traffic. If you’re flooding your website with the wrong people from the wrong channels you can’t expect them to convert. Being able to tell good traffic and bad traffic apart is crucial. After all, bringing people to your website is costing you money and/or time. So don’t worry about bringing visitors down and prune bad traffic, figure out what makes a visitor a good visitor and double down on finding and winning more of those.
3. Retarget Your Users
You might be leaving a lot of conversions on the table simply because you don’t give your shoppers that few extra touches they need to make up their minds and buy your products. A great way to increase your eCommerce conversion rate is to build a solid retargeting strategy. By retargeting your users, you’ll constantly remind them they once were about to shop for your products and stay top of mind while they browse on the web.
All it takes is installing a pixel on your website to analyze your users’ behaviors and be able to serve them the right ads based on that. Remember, using dynamic ads and user segmentation will exponentially increase your chances of succeeding when retargeting your visitors. Dynamic ads will display banners based on the users’ behavior on your website. Segmentation will help you understand which users to prioritize based on their actions. So for example you’ll be prioritizing more ads to someone who has looked at the same product several times and showed an intent to purchase, over someone who just had a look at your homepage and left
When deploying retargeting strategy remember to keep in mind users’ fatigue. I am sure you’ve felt annoyed in the past when seeing always the same banners all over the internet. That’s why it’s always good to have some sort of frequency capping to ensure you don’t become the internet equivalent of an insistent mosquito.
The diagram below shows how retargeting can bring users who have previously left your site back and increase your conversion rates:
4. Craft Pages Designed for Conversion
A huge part of the work we do with clients is to look at their websites’ User Experience and make all the changes necessary to improve it. Many confuse UX with web design, so it’s important to clarify how behavioral science and emotional intelligence are actually the foundations of a good UX, and design is just a way to apply those principles. The goal of an eCommerce website is to elicit certain responses and behaviors in users. Landing, home, product pages, cart, and checkout experiences are all part of the user’s journey and an often overlooked way to increase the conversion rate for your eCommerce is to craft pages and apply UX best practices and remove as much friction as possible from consideration to purchase. The more seamless, intuitive, and pleasant using your website is, the more likely users are to go ahead and get to the end of the journey and come back to buy more!
Below you can find the 7 core principles of a good User Experience.
5. Optimize Checkout
Among the above-mentioned part of the user’s journey that needs to be optimized to increase the conversion rate of your eCommerce, Checkout deserves a category on its own.
Checkout is when for the first time in the user’s journey you’ll ask them to give you their hard-earned dollars and sensitive personal and financial information. At this stage, the users’ perceived risk is at its peak and any little sign of trustworthiness or unnecessary friction will stop them from going ahead and leaving the store.
Some things you can do to improve your checkout experience are:
- Simplify: Avoid forms that have unnecessary fields or are too long to fill up.
- Inspire Trust: Show badges of secure and encrypted payment systems and logos of major payment processors. A very easy UX tweak that can immediately add trust is changing your “Buy Now” or “Checkout” Button to “Secure Checkout”
- Offer Guest Checkout: Many people care a lot about their online privacy and don’t want to sign up or register to a website whenever buying something, make sure to offer the option to checkout as a guest and make it easily accessible.
- Give them Options: Offer several payment methods. Some of us feel like PayPal is more trustworthy, others just want to pay with their Apple Pay or Google Pay, and some have their card details saved on their browsers and prefer to pay via card. Make sure you’re catering to all buyers and offering payment options they feel comfortable using.
Conclusion
If you want to immediately increase your eCommerce conversion rate, these 5 strategies will certainly help! We have helped a lot of D2C brands to increase their eCommerce conversion rates, with our holistic approach. If you’d like us to have a look at your eCommerce and give you some tips on how we could help you increase your sales don’t hesitate to book a Free Consultation with us. It’s just 20 minutes, no strings attached and can seriously help you get more customers!