How to Quickly Improve Your E-commerce Store’s Conversion Rates
by Pradeep S. Digital Marketing StrategistIf you run an
e-commerce website, you may think your goals are pretty simple. You just need to get people to visit your
e-commerce store, choose some products that they like, and then check out. Your goal is to get as many conversions as
possible in order to generate sales and make money. However, not many e-commerce store owners
actually know how to improve their store’s conversion rates. Many have a ‘build it and they will come’
mentality, but this doesn’t work online.
In this article, we’re going to provide you with some practical advice
that you can put into action and that will quickly improve your e-commerce
store’s conversion rates.
1. Create Fantastic Product Images
When selling products
online, your images are everything. Most
buyers are interested in the visuals, and they want to see exactly what it is
that they are buying and how they can imagine using it. When designing your store, make sure that you
include large images that can be enlarged should the buyer wish to zoom in on a
certain area. Leave plenty of white
space around the product so that it is the product itself that stands out and
not some flashy background. You also
want to show the product from as many different angles as possible. For example, let’s say you are selling
women’s jackets. You’ll want to show
photos of the front and the back of the jacket, any detailing, and ideally, of
someone wearing it too. All you need to
create fantastic product images is a good DSLR camera and some photo editing
software. You could also hire a
professional to take product photographs if you can afford it.
2. Write Your Own Product
Descriptions
A lot of e-commerce
stores use the manufacturer provided product description on their website, and
this isn’t usually the best course of action.
If you do this, not only will your product descriptions be exactly the
same as the majority of your competitors’, but you probably won’t be engaging
them either. Ignore the hype, and focus
on giving your customers as much information about a product as possible. Customers aren’t afraid of long, detailed
descriptions so you shouldn’t be either.
Plus, you can also include a short summary box for those who don’t want
to read a lot of text. On top of this,
when you write your own product descriptions, you will be boosting your website’s on-page SEO, so this has double the benefits.
3. Offer Free Shipping
According to the e-commerce conversion optimization
platform OptinMonster,
67.91% of buyers abandon their shopping carts.
One of the reasons for this is shipping charges that are higher than
expected. Over 50% of e-commerce
companies now offer free shipping, and if you are still charging your customers
a mailing fee, it’s likely that they’ll just back-click out of your shopping
cart and shop with your closest competitor instead. If you don’t think you can afford to offer
free shipping on all purchases, you might want to consider offering free
shipping on orders over a certain value.
Not only are most customers okay with this, but many will also add
further items to their cart if they feel they are getting something worthwhile
for doing so.
4. Think About Your Web Hosting
When you run an
e-commerce store, it is vital that you ensure that it is always online. No customer wants to visit a website and find
out that it’s down. When a website
doesn’t load or is slow to load, a customer will instantly back-click and shop
with one of your competitor’s instead.
It’s unprofessional, and in the age of instant gratification, it’s not
something that any customer will accept.
If you aren’t using the best VPS hosting, look into getting this as quickly as
possible. If your site is quick to load
and always online, you’ll see your conversion rates increase.
5. Include Reviews
GE Capital Bank
conducted a study which found that 61% of shoppers look at reviews before they
purchase an item. Unless you want your
customers to find reviews on your competitors’ websites, and decide to buy from
them instead, you’ll want to allow reviews on your site. Most e-commerce platforms have review plugins
that can be activated within seconds.
Those who host their site on a platform like WordPress will also find
plenty of free review widgets that can be installed. One thing to keep in mind here is that you
want your customers to trust your site.
So never, ever delete negative reviews.
The important thing to do, instead, is to encourage as many reviews as
possible. Positive or negative – both
are beneficial in increasing conversions.
6. Make Your Contact Information
Clear
Adding your contact
information to your e-commerce website may seem like a simple thing to do, but
it’s something that has been proven to increase conversion rates. This is an especially important thing for
small or new e-commerce stores to do, as it’s unlikely a customer will have
heard of your brand before arriving on your website, and they will need to know
that they can trust you. Consider the
different ways that you will allow customers to get in touch with you, and
dedicate a page on your website to this.
Most customers aren’t keen on sending emails or snail mail, but will be
happy if you have a live chat option and a phone number they can call. You could even include this information in
your store’s header to build trust further.
7. Email Those Who Abandon Their
Carts
If you’ve ever added
items to your cart on the Amazon website and then not checked out, it’s likely
that you received an email soon after reminding you of your shopping
basket. This, surprisingly, can
encourage customers to return to the website in question and complete their
purchase. There can be many reasons for a customer to abandon
their shopping cart,
such as distraction, doubt, forced registration, slow site speeds, and higher
than expected shipping costs, but often personalized emails that encourage
business can be all it takes to turn things around. You can even make this process
automated. Even if you only manage to
capture around 25% of abandoned carts, it’s still a
higher conversion rate than you would have originally had.
8. Improve Your Call to Action
Finally, one final tip
is to improve your call to action. If
you take a look at the Walmart website, as one example, you’ll see that they
have a large red or orange button on each of their product pages encouraging
customers to add the item to their carts.
The button stands out, and also invokes a sense of urgency in the
customer. Offering something similar on
your site could also lead to an increase in conversions. Make sure that your ‘add to cart’ and
‘checkout’ buttons are large, easy to find, and prominent on your pages. Doing so will lead to more sales – trust us.
It’s a good idea to
employ all of these tactics if you can, but do make sure to use a conversion
monitoring software to determine how effective they are.
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Created on Jan 11th 2018 10:55. Viewed 1,480 times.