21 Insanely Actionable eCommerce conversion optimisation methods (That Really Works)

by Comments closed In: E-commerce, Magento

Imagine if a single change in your eCommerce website and see an immediate improvement in your conversion rate.

And what if:
There are 21 such boost eCommerce conversion optimization methods

…and each one of these strategies could generate more sales on your online store.

These strategies are all based on our own research and the results we have achieved in our agency. With these, we have seen a conversion boost of up to 157% for certain clients.

Improve your website speed

So let’s start with the speed of your website.

Do you ever wait on a website that is loading slow? The same goes for your customers as well.

1 second of load time = 20% off of your conversion rate.

Don’t take my words for it.

Check out these 12 case studies showing the impact of page speed on conversion.

…And google also loves faster loading websites. So you are sure to get an added advantage in form of improved search engine visibility.

Test your website speed with Pingdom or GTmetrix or Google website speed testing tool. Work on all the possible improvements you or your developer can do.

Apart from on-site factors, website speed greatly depends on your hosting server. A dedicated cloud hosting server works perfectly.

High-quality product images

One of the major differences in buying online is the absence of touch and feel of the experience of the product you are looking to buy.

With high-quality product images, you can remove this barrier.

In certain categories like apparel, shoes, etc. it’s really important to have top-quality zoomable images from various angles so customers can clearly see the very last details of the product.

A good image can lead to purchasing while a poor quality image can lead to abandonment.

Read more about the importance of presentation and context of product photos.

Highlight your core offer and USP prominently

What are the benefits of buying from your store?

is it free shipping, best pricing, express shipping, quality assurance?

Whatever it is. It should be clearly visible on key areas of your website.

One of our customers was offering free shipping on orders over $50 but nowhere highlighted it.

We added the relevant information prominently on the header, just below the add to cart button, just below the checkout button, and guess what? Conversion rate improved by 28.59% within a week.

See is an example from our own work on various websites –
eComerce USP

Finding the right product/information with bare minimum efforts is something we all love.

Onsite search plays an important role in helping customers finding the kind of product they are looking for. I have seen plenty of online stores where onsite search produces really strange results.

On a jewelry store, while searching for rings, I could see the result page dominated with earrings. This can be really annoying from a customer’s perspective.

Test your website search and make sure customers are not having this type of experience. On platforms like Magento, you can monitor search terms used by customers in your store.

Instant Search Suggestion
Another great thing can do to improve customer experience is by adding an instant search suggestion as soon as the customer starts typing something in the search box.
Instant Search Suggestion

Clear category navigation

The home page on any website receives a big percentage of visitors but can you show all your products on the home page? In most cases, the answer will be no.

Anyone coming to the store might be interested to check some specific type of product based on their gender, age group, interest, etc.

Category navigation helps customers reaching directly to the type of product your customers are interested in.

Even if you have a very limited number of products on the store, you should not ignore categorization of products.
Clear category navigation

Start generating customer reviews

Don’t you yourself check for reviews of products you are looking to buy?

As a human, we are interested to know the opinion of others about something we have thought of purchasing. Even in offline shopping, we take the opinion of our friends or known ones before buying a product or service.

Reviews from previous buyers about a product in your store can be really helpful. Your customer can be your advocate online. Positive feedback can lead to purchasing decisions.

So as a store owner you should start focusing on generating customer reviews from the very beginning. Encourage your customers to leave feedback. For our client, we many times run a special discount campaign just for leaving feedback on past purchases.

For our client, we mostly use Yotpo, a tool that sends out an email automatically after certain days of order requesting a review from the customer.

Imagine the impact of having 100s of store-wide positive feedback a couple of months later.

How Customer Reviews Helps with eCommerce conversion optimisation

Bonus Tip – You can use these reviews in form of rich snippets showing the star ratings in search engine results. This can give a good boost to the click-through rate of your website search impression. I am sure you get the point.

Abandon Cart Email

This is one of the instant conversion rate boosters.

There can be lots of distractions and reasons for cart abandonment. Find and fixing any problem can be your other priority but what we are discussing here is an automated abandon cart email.

Remind your customer about their cart abandonment via email. An email within one hour of customers leaving their cart can be most effective.

Efforts of implementing this vary depending on the platform of your store. With all popular platforms like Shopify, Magento, wooCommerce, BigCommerce, etc, you can easily find an app to do this.

In our agency, we use an email marketing tool called Klaviyo for abandon cart and many other email marketing automation.

Pro Tip – Instead of a single email reminder use a series of emails. One email sent out after an hour, a second email sent out after 24 hours, and also offering a discount if complete the purchase within the next 24 hours. Send a third email reminding them of the discount offer expiring soon.

Facebook retargeting ads

Even at best, almost 95% of visitors will leave your site without buying something. Most of them will check your products and a good percentage of them can even put the items in their cart.

With abandon cart email, you can only reach out to a fraction of them. The only one who has shared their email address with you.

What are your options to re-connect the rest of them?

The answer is Facebook Dynamic Product Ads.

This is a great way of reaching out to customers who either viewed product(s) on your store or added product(s) to their cart.

Here is what all you need to run a dynamic ad campaign on Facebook –

  • One Facebook ad account
  • A Facebook business page
  • One Facebook Catalog – consisting of products on your store.
  • A Facebook pixel installed on your site tracks all the important events like view product, add to cart, initiate checkout, etc.

Once you have the above things in place, you are allowing Facebook to track the actions of visitors on your website.

…And you are good to create a dynamic ad campaign.

If done effectively, Facebook dynamic ads can be your money-making machine. See below results from one of our clients.

Facebook Dynamic Product Ads Results - A big booster in eCommerce conversion optimisation

Exit Intent and Welcome Popups

If your current conversion rate is 2%, which means 98% of your store visitors are not purchasing from you.

And as a store owner, it should be our goal to try and develop ways to retarget to a maximum number of visitors.

An email list can be a great way to promote your products.

Yes, you get the point. Using popup boxes to build an email list.

Hate it or love it but the popup works. For some of our clients, we have seen a signup conversion rate of 10%.

That means you get an additional 10% of your website visitors who can be your possible buyers in the future. By signing up to your list they have already shown their interest.

We generally use two types of popups.

  • Welcome popup – which shows up after a visitors spends certain seconds on the website
  • Exit Intent Popup – shows up when a visitor is about to leave your website

Offering a discount deal in exchange for signup can be a great lead magnet for an eCommerce store.

If you want to explore more ways of list building, Brian Dean from Backlico has shared some of the greatest strategies.

Email marketing automation

Really? Is it something not meant for bigger players?

Yes, this is how small to medium size store owner reacts when I suggest this.

My answer as usual is NO

At maximum, most store owners can think of abandoned cart automation. But there are many more.

For example, welcome series automation has been contributing over 10% in the monthly sale for many of our clients.

If you are interested to explore more on this, I have shared a complete strategy for eCommerce email marketing automation.

Remove distraction from the checkout page

Have you ever closely noticed the checkout page on Amazon? If you did, you just get the hint of what I am talking about.

Amazon rules out distraction completely once a customer reaches the checkout page. Players like Amazon do every single thing based on deep research.

If they have done it surely means it’s beneficial.

Following the same logic, we applied this to a few of our clients.

…And what we saw is an amazing 12.03 to 17.68% of boost in conversion rate.

Here is how a new checkout page looks like for one of our client –
One Step Checkout and eCommerce conversion optimisation

Live Chat

What if a customer has any doubt or question about a product, shipping, or anything else?

Requesting help via a traditional contact form does not work for an eCommerce website. In a fast-paced world, everybody loves the immediate help option.

Live chat comes really handy in cases like this. If your support team is able to answer a customer’s query immediately, You have saved one customer abandonment.

Forrester found that 44% of customers think that having a live representative to talk to is the most important feature.

Econsultancy found that live chat has the highest rate of customer satisfaction, sitting at 73%.

..And why ignore this when there are so many good free options available and when it can be such a helpful tool for eCommerce conversion optimization.

Try Zopim by Zendesk, Drift, or many other free options available.

Assure customer about the safety of transaction in your store

When we hear the news of data theft every now and then, it’s really important to assure about safety and privacy of transactions in your store.

The first step towards this should be to implement a store-wide SSL.

Google Chrome has started showing alerts to customers for non-SSL websites. Google itself loves websites using SSL in their search result.

Now you know how important this is. So go ahead and add HTTPS to all pages of your website.

The second step towards this is to conduct a security audit of your website. Especially when you are running a website on an open source platform like Magento & wooCommerce.

Once you have assured the security of the store, it’s time to let customers know about it.

Put it on important action points like below the Proceed to Checkout button on the cart page, below the final Place Order button on the checkout page. Also, keep it somewhere in the footer.
Checkout security
This will be a good confidence booster. And a confident customer will lead to an improved conversion rate on your online store.

Write detailed product description

The more details you share about your product the better you are educating customers about your product.

A well-informed customer will be a better candidate to buy your product.

Product photos and video do a good job showcasing your product but still, there can be an untold story.

While buying online customers cannot ask you questions they might have. Product description helps you answer all potential questions a customer might have.

The product description also gives you an opportunity to outline the values and benefits of your product.

Don’t hesitate to write a longer product description. It helps you with SEO as well.

Pro Tips: 1) Include long-tail semantic keywords in your product description. You will see great improvement in your search engine ranking. 2) This is based on my own experiment. Format your description in form of bullet points instead of long paragraphs.

Optimize for mobile devices

I think nobody can dare to ignore the mobile user experience these days.

Google has started rolling out mobile-first indexing which means that Google is starting to use the mobile version of your page as a base for indexing and ranking.

What google is trying to do is; improve its mobile user experience.

What exactly you need to check & fix?

Check out your mobile website for usability and performance. Speed is even more important for mobile devices.

Usability

Check your online store in google’s official mobile-friendly testing tool to find out usability issues.

My personal favorite tool for finding issues with a mobile website is Google Analytics.

In your google analytics account find Mobile under the Audience tab and click Devices

Check out with data of the past three months.

Sort the result by Bounce Rate column.

A higher bounce rate can be an indication of a possible problem in that particular device.

Your next step would be to conduct usability testing and fix any existing problems with these devices.

analytics mobile usability

Speed

Mobile website speed score is another important thing you need to check.

The first step is to test your website performance in google page speed insights

Enter your website URL and check the speed score in the mobile section.

The next step is to do a comprehensive speed analysis of your website using Google Analytics.

Under Behaviour go to Site Speed > Page Timings

Choose Browser in Primary Dimension and Device category in Secondary Dimension.

Now see the report.
analytics mobile performance
Similar way you can check your desktop website as well. You can also use page timings to see any particular page being slow.

Now you know the issues. It’s time to fix all of them one by one.

Optimize your calls to action

Add to Cart on the product page, Proceed to checkout on cart page & Place Order on Checkout Page are the most important CTA on any eCommerce website.

Using a clear color contrast for these CTA buttons is really important. These buttons should not blend with the rest of the color scheme of the website.

Optimize your call to Action

A good return policy

What if the product doesn’t fit or doesn’t fulfill my requirement? Every customer has this question and this is a quite genuine question.

As we know the absence of touch and feel the experience in online shopping. A good return policy can play a key trust-building role here.

This does not mean you over-promise. Important thing is that you give your customer an easy way to return products when valid reasons are present.

This is also a good business practice in general and many brick and mortar store also gives options to return a product.

A special sale section

Don’t we all love deals and discounts?

And from time to time every eCommerce store runs various promotional offers & discount deals. So it’s always a good idea to have a special Sale section in your store.

It will help customers to find discount deals on a single page.

Allow guest checkout

“I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.”

Yes, this was a response from a real customer on a survey conducted by a big eCommerce store.

Read this interesting story of a “$300 million dollar button” and you will surely introduce a guest checkout option on your store.

Simply highlight the benefits of registering but its not good to force people to register

Allow customer questions & answers on the product page

A Customer might have further questions even if you put detailed descriptions and specifications about a product.

Introducing a Question & Answer section can be really useful.

  • Slowly it will build a good bunch of questions/answer which will help your future buyers.
  • More user-generated content will help you with SEO

Focus on the relevancy of traffic instead of volume

Is it worth calling it abandonment if you are trying to sell a swimming costume to a resident of desert land where water is so hard to get for daily life activities?

Your conversion rate will reflect real data only when you have relevant and interested visitors coming to your store.

Quality of traffic is important, not quantity.

Watch your traffic driving sources closely and figure out how they are coming on your eCommerce website.

For example, if you want to ensure the quality of your search traffic, check out the search term used by customers to reach out to your store.

My personal favorite way to do this is using Google Webmaster Tool.

Login to your google webmaster tool and under Search Traffic click on Search Analytics
search analytics
This will show you a complete list of google search queries sending traffic to your website. Evaluate the relevance of these queries with your products. This will help you understand and re-shape your organic search campaign.

Similar way you can check out your other campaigns.

Conclusion

A slight improvement in the conversion rate can give a good boost to the revenue of your online store. These actionable eCommerce conversion optimization methods are based on our practical implementation with various clients.

What is your experience with conversion optimization? Did you used or changed something in a store that improved the conversion rate?

Please share in the comments below.

Share these tips with your friends on social media or email. Maybe they are exactly looking for the same 🙂