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Home / Our Top Tips to Increase eCommerce Conversion Rates
The eCommerce arena is an increasingly tough one to compete in. Back in the 2000s, when eCommerce was a new and emerging trend, simply being first to market with a new product was often enough to guarantee success – but things are different now.
The internet is becoming more and more saturated with eCommerce sites every single day. By the end of last year, it’s estimated that there were more than 30 million of them – a number that continues to grow year-on-year.
So, what’s the secret to success in a marketplace that’s more crowded than it’s ever been? Well, driving traffic to your site is important. After all, if you’re not visible, you’re not going to be selling anything.
But anybody can buy traffic – the real key to sustained success in eCommerce is learning how to convert all those users into customers, and keep them coming back for more. We’d argue that no metric is more important than conversion rate, and in this guide we’re going to offer some tips to help you increase yours.
The ‘conversion rate’ metric is a pretty simple one. Delivered as a percentage, it tells you what proportion of site visitors buy something (as opposed to just bouncing off your site and looking elsewhere).
The higher this percentage, the more effective your site is at convincing people to buy your products.
That said, conversion rate doesn’t have to just measure purchases. A variety of different on-site actions can qualify as a conversion, including email newsletter sign-ups, shares on social media or when products are added to the basket. You can define which conversion actions you’d like to keep tabs on in Google Analytics or other similar tools.
On average, eCommerce conversion rates tend to hover somewhere between the 2.5 to 3% mark, but there are some stores with a conversion rate of 5% or higher.
If your conversion rate is currently less than the 2.5% average, there’s potentially work to be done – but anything above 3% is pretty respectable. That doesn’t mean you should rest on your laurels though. Your rivals will catch up at some point!
What doesn’t? Honestly, that would be an easier question to answer. Pretty much everything you can think of can influence your site’s conversion rate, but we’ve listed a few examples below.
Conversion Rate Optimisation, commonly abbreviated as CRO, is the practice of altering a website to positively influence its conversion rate.
CRO is all about identifying customers’ pain points and addressing them. If there’s something that’s stopping people from adding products to their basket and checking out – be it a lack of trust signals, poor quality content or missing CTAs – CRO aims to resolve these issues to give customers a clearer path to conversion.
All the big brands are offering things like PayPal Pay in 3 or Klarna nowadays, so you should too – particularly if you stock a lot of high end, expensive products. If a customer wants to spread out the cost of their purchase and they can do so elsewhere, they probably will.
The words on each page and the images and video you place next to them can dramatically impact your site’s conversion rate. If your content is unclear, inconsistent or littered with spelling and grammatical errors, that’s a problem – as are blurry, pixelated images.
CTAs are all about balance. If there are too many, or they’re too pushy, they can easily put customers off. But if there aren’t enough of them on your site, users might not know where to go next.
There’s no substitute for testing. Spend plenty of time taking the same journey your customers would, looking for issues that could prevent them converting. You could also try A/B testing different page layouts to see which performs best.
There must be something your competitors are doing better than you – you’ve just got to find it. It’s worth taking the time to check on the competition regularly and take inspiration from what they’re doing – you could learn a lot.
Use scarcity to your advantage. Limited-time offers and sales can be a great way to give your site’s conversion rate a short-term boost, and if they’re impressed enough by the service you offer, they may well return to shop again.
We’re talking things like site security (SSL and encrypted payment options), as well as information about your company and the story behind it. In eCommerce, a lack of trust signals can easily cost you conversions – nobody wants to spend their hard-earned money on a site they don’t think is safe or secure.
The layout of your site’s menus could be making it harder for visitors to find the products they’re looking for. Take another look at the structure of your site and try to simplify it as much as possible.
If shoppers can’t find the answers to their questions on your site, they might get in touch to ask you – but they might also head to a competitor’s site and find the answers there. Create FAQ content and add live chat functionality to your site to avoid losing customers.
Email marketing software allows you to target customers that add items to their basket but don’t complete the checkout process. Structure your email well and you could not only win the sale, but win yourself a repeat customer.
We’ve been helping eCommerce brands succeed since 2000, and yours could be next in line. As an award-winning eCommerce marketing agency, we have the tools and talent to drive your conversion rate through the roof – just like we did for our garden furniture client, Kettler. Intrigued? To get started, request a free bespoke audit today to learn what you’re doing right and where you’re going wrong.
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