Want to Increase Revenue? Here’s Your Strategy For Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization

• Author By Miva    |
• Posted on
• • November 12, 2020

• Advanced Ecommerce
• Ecommerce Resources

In today’s competitive digital landscape, shoppers will not hesitate to jump from website to website. To thrive as a modern seller, you need to do more than just attract traffic. Your ability to capture visitors from the get-go and assist them down your conversion path is key to driving long-term results.

In this article, we discuss the value of ecommerce conversion rate optimization and share key tactics for you to enhance your site and get the most out of your website traffic. 

What is Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization? 

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of increasing the percentage of website visitors that take a specific action on your website—be it making a purchase, requesting a product demo, or signing up for an email newsletter. The process involves enhancing your website content to connect better with your audience and improve the online experience. In doing so, you’ll be able to boost the number of qualified customers for the same amount of traffic, helping you to increase revenue, lower costs, and ultimately grow your business. 

What is a Good Ecommerce Conversion Rate? 

Like other website metrics, what qualifies as a “good” conversion rate varies widely from industry to industry. While the average conversion rate of ecommerce websites is around 2.86 percent, it will depend on the products or services you provide and the type of conversion that you are measuring. While this provides a starting point, you’ll also want to evaluate your current conversion rate as an important benchmark for ongoing improvement.

How Sellers Benefit From Ecommerce CRO

Successful CRO is a huge win for online merchants. By getting more customers to convert, you’re able to increase your profits, get more value out of your website, and open new paths for fostering customer relationships. In addition, CRO provides valuable insight into the messaging, design, and content that resonates most with your customers. This insight helps you to create better user experience, generate more trust, and put your business in a better position to scale. Users who feel empowered by your site are more likely to become advocates that will support the long-term success of your business. 

How to Increase Conversion Rates

A CRO strategy should include improvements to areas like landing pages, website copy, calls-to-action, and site navigation, and involves working with tools like heatmaps, analytics, A/B testing, and recordings. You’ll want to focus on your visitors’ purpose for coming to your site, what persuades them to move forward, and the barriers that stop them from taking action. Here are some tactics to optimize your site and drive up conversions. 

Optimize For Visitors

CRO is a user-centric process. You need to have clear buyer personas that allow you to understand the needs and motivations of your website visitors as they interact with your business. Evaluate where and why these visitors enter their site, the features that they engage with, which channels brought them there, and the exit points where they leave your site. Use this insight to add greater detail, convenience and incentive to your website and establish a clearer path to conversion. Use tools like surveys and heat maps to better understand how users perceive your site and what they are looking for and expecting as buyers. 

Add Variety to Calls-to-Action

Calls-to-action (CTAs) help entice visitors to take the desired actions on your website. The stronger and more compelling your CTAs are, the more conversions they’ll be able to generate. Consider a variety of banner images, hyperlinked texts, button colors, written copy, and different placements on your website to tap into the psychology of your users. Your CTAs should be informed by your buyer personas and target the things that they are looking for, care about, and prioritize. You can also leverage tools to make the CTAs dynamic, allowing you to better target your audience with the right CTA.

A/B Test Landing Pages and High-Impact Webpages

At their core, landing pages are designed to deliver focused content and provide everything visitors need to take action with no distractions. The ability of landing pages to influence visitors makes them an important component of any CRO plan.

One effective way to optimize your landing pages is to run A/B tests. A/B tests can reveal the content features, details, and design that align most with your target audience. You can test variations of your website copy, content offers, imagery, and CTAs to determine the components that encourage users to take that next step with you.  

After fine-tuning your landing pages, consider testing high-impact webpages throughout your site, like your homepage and product listing pages. Changes to these pages can help capture the attention of these new visitors, create a positive first impression, inform buying decisions, and further lead them toward the conversion path.

Optimize High-Traffic Content

The content on your website can serve as effective gateways to your readers. Create opportunities to convert your readers by publishing unique and insightful blog content, providing detailed and informative product copy, and showcasing effective user-generated content and media. 

To optimize content, start with content that has high traffic levels but low conversion rates. Experiment with adding pop-ups, new offers, refreshing the copy, and swapping out the CTA to improve results on these pages. You will also want to consult with your search engine optimization team to ensure your content matches the search intent and expectations of your target visitors. 

Get Started with Optimizing Your Website Conversion Rate 

Use our interactive website assessment tool to assess how good your conversion rates are and learn how to improve. This free do-it-yourself tool also assesses other areas for improvement, including your on-site experience, back-end capabilities, and checkout process.