Conversion Rate Optimisation Tips to Turbocharge eCommerce Sales

Just because a customer lands on your eCommerce store, this doesn’t mean they are ready to buy.

They might be browsing, comparing prices or just doing their research. Most shoppers on your website are tyre kickers, but the trick is to convert them into paying customers.

In many cases, the unfortunate truth about selling online via your eCommerce store is that most customers will leave your site without buying. 

Also read: eCommerce SEO: A simple guide for beginners.

There are many reasons for this; perhaps the site speed was too slow or too difficult to navigate, which is why CRO or conversion rate optimisation is so essential for the success of your eCommerce website store. It’s all well, and good getting qualified leads to your website, but if they hate what they see and find the whole site too messy and over the top, they’ll simply look elsewhere.

In this blog, I’ll help you understand the importance of bettering your on-page conversion rates and show you how to use CRO to help increase your sales.

What Is Conversion Rate Optimisation and Why Is It Important for Your eCommerce Store

Conversion rate optimisation is the process of improving the number of people who you want to take a specific action on your website. For example, it might be getting them to sign up for a newsletter, leave an inquiry or download a brochure. CRO is all about increasing the chances of someone taking a decisive step on your website. For most businesses, it’s leaving their details for most companies so you can call them back or get them to phone you. In any case, improving conversion rates will help your business grow through more online inquiries or sales, which is vital if you’re in the eCommerce space.

Why it’s CRO important?

CRO is essential because you want people to take action once they arrive at your online store. For example, if you’re using an SEO agency to get better Google rankings and you’re in a competitive niche, you’re probably paying a decent amount of money for this service. And, if you want a decent return on your investment and you want to start making money from your website, you must have these visitors start spending money with you or at least leaving their details, which is the cornerstone of CRO. 

Monitoring and analysing your conversion rates will help you improve your website’s performance and revenue. Let’s say, for example, your websites conversion rate is 5%. This means for every 100 visitors to your website, only 5 will buy from it. CRO’s goal is to increase this rate every month to perhaps 10% or 15%. Of course, having a conversion rate of 100% is near impossible, but you should be aiming as high as possible.

Benefits of improving conversion rates include:

If you can make some simple amends to your website without costing too much, your ROI will increase dramatically. For example, if you spend $1000 fixing your eCommerce site and your conversion rates improve by 5%, this could mean an additional $10,000 in revenue. With this extra revenue, you can put it into buying new products or spend it on marketing.

Once you start improving your conversion rates, you’ll better understand what your visitors are doing online, which will point you in the right direction for future web amends. In this way, you can continually refine your site for better performance and higher conversion rates.

CRO Tips to Boost Your eCommerce Sales

Now you have a clearer understanding of why CRO is so essential, and the following are some easy to understand tips on how to improve your conversion rates.

1) Does your website look trustworthy?

One of the most important factors customers face when shopping online is the trust factor. Unless your an exceptionally well-known brand or a household name, many people won’t trust your site and be reluctant to part with their credit card details when buying the product. If your site looks dodgy, customers won’t buy from you. To make your site look more secure and trustworthy, follow these tips.

• Enable HTTPS ( SSL certificate ) on your eCommerce store, which customers that your site is secure can leave their credit card details with confidence. Your hosting company can install the SSL, and it’s relatively cheap.
• Include a safe checkout badge from payment processors like Visa, Mastercard, or PayPal. Roughly 20% of visitors ay that if they don’t see this sign, they won’t make a purchase.
• Make sure you keep up your social media posts. Post articles, news updates, specials, and interact with people on your social media and definitely make sure you have a Google My Business page where people can leave reviews.

2) Understand what your customers want

Know what products your customers want and prioritise these on the home page with the heading; view our popular products. Tucking them away deep within site and making them hard to find will annoy potential customers who want to make a quick buy. It’s the same as the bricks and mortar stores. They put their best selling items front and centre. As soon as you walk into the shop, you can find them. For the best customer experience, you don’t want to ask a shop assistant where XYZ product is. You simply want to walk into the shop, grab the item and go. It’s the same for your eCommerce store.

3) Display your products 

In any retails environment, you can try on clothes or feel a product. It’s a very tactile experience. Unfortunately, you don’t have this luxury in the online world, so you have to show products from different angles, with detailed descriptions so the customer can almost touch them. Decent resolution images are also advisable. Your goal should be to provide the best possible user experience, which will help make that all-important sale.

4) Use Videos for maximum impact

Videos sell products; it’s as simple as that, and if you can include a how-to or the benefits of buying this product on the product page, this will dramatically boost customer conversion rates. People love watching videos, and f they are informative, you almost guaranteed the sale. Search Engine Watch tells us that Video Helps Persuade 73% of People to Buy a Product or Service.

Also read: Tips to Improve Your Website Conversion Rates

5) Write Descriptions That Sells your Products Hard

Some eCommerce sites have less than, shall we say, less than sales focus descriptions. If you can make your product descriptions as exciting, enticing and detailed as possible, this will undoubtedly help with conversion rates. Make sure you write for your audience and try to write problem-solving solutions about the product. That is how will buying this particular product help improve the lives of the buyer. It doesn’t matter if it’s a ladder, car cover, pair of ski boots or a dining table; the description has to help the purchaser somehow. Don’t just write a long list of details. Add some spics to the descriptions to entice the buyers. You might need a copywriter or content marketing agency for this, but the cost is well worth it, especially if these are big-ticket items.

Also, make the product descriptions easy to read. If they are lengthy, break them into digestible paragraphs with large, bold subheadings to be easy to scan, which is essential for mobile browsers as they are more than likely not prepared to read long reams of text. Incorporate bullet points and ensure the text is not too small.

6) Use Call To Actions Strategically

Just imagine having your primary buy now button at the bottom of the page? This call to action button should be where your web visitors congregate, and that’s above the fold at the top of the page in the main banner area. If you want to increase conversion rates, your critical call to action must be easy to find and bold. Ensure they stand out with bold text and colours and placed around the home page and product pages where users can quickly press click. 

7) A/B Test Your Product Pages

Test your product pages and see which ones are performing better. Once you work out the formula, try to improve on this by tweaking the design till the conversion rates are as high as possible.

8) Ensure you include Customer Reviews

Almost 95% of your customers will read a review, and over 80% of them will place a lot of trust in these reviews, so definitely include them for all products. If your customer is on the fence about buying a product, then a few positive reviews might be the deciding factor that tips them into the buying basket.

9) Become the leader

A great way to get more trust and brand recognition for your eCommerce site are to become a market leader. You can do this via posting blogs, news items and deals regularly to your customer base. The faster you become well known, the more trust you’ll have, and in turn, your CRO hill improve. It’s not rocket science; you have to stay in the public eye, and they will learn to trust your site more. As a result, they will be less inclined to shop around and become more regular visitors to your online shop.

9) Use Heat Maps

Heat maps will show you where customers are clicking on your website. If you see that they focus on one area, look at improving these touchpoints with better graphics or a more enticing call to action. Heat mapping is an excellent method SEO agencies like us use to work out consumer behaviour and then target conversion rates.

We Can Help You Double or Even Triple Your eCommerce Sales.

If your eCommerce website is struggling to make sales or you’re sitting there scratching your head wondering why you’re not making any money ( even though you are ranking on Google ), then it’s all to do with your website’s conversion rates.

At SEO Sydney Experts, we can help your website get out of those sales doldrums by focusing on CRO strategies that will get people to take notice of your website and begin engaging with it. In some cases, it’s a quick fix, but our advice for you eCommerce entrepreneurs is to keep a constant vigil on your site and make sure that these conversion rates are always on the up and up.

Call us today!