When it comes to your eCommerce store, traffic is not the only solution, you have to also make sure that traffic is handled well and your product page is optimized for conversion. eCommerce conversion rate is affected by just about every digital interaction you have with your customers and the general rule of thumb is that the smoother and easier the consumer journey the more likely is for visitors to convert to paying customers.
Conversion is essentially transforming your site visitors into buyers and the best way to do that is by promoting trust and reliability. The biggest drivers of trust are consistent user experience, quality content, and adequate product images. Your images are the first thing that grabs your visitors’ attention, creating their first impression of your store. Optimize them and keep mobile mind, as about half of eCommerce traffic is on smartphones and if your images are too blurry or too slow to load you are losing customers.
90% of information transmitted to our brain is visual, according to Visual Teaching Alliance.
You should test every aspect of your product page including images, buy button, and checkout page in order to optimize the consumer’s buying journey. Simplify, adjust colours and engage your customers with individualized messages so your store stands out and you gain their loyalty. Let’s take a look at the key factors that can boost your eCommerce conversion rate.
People form their first impression in a stunning 50 milliseconds, according to Inc.
1. Know Your Audience
In order to create the optimum design for your eCommerce store with the right images, colours, and graphic elements that resonate with visitors, you have to know your audience. Use your data from previous purchases or any PPC campaigns you have run on Google, Facebook or other channels to understand who comes to your eStore and on what stage of their decision-making process they are. You can pull your data inside platforms like Google Data Studio and visualize trends and consumer behaviour in order to optimize site content, images, and design.
2. Promote Customer Trust and Loyalty
One of the biggest drivers of a healthy eCommerce conversion rate is your consumer retention. You start building your relationship with your customers from the first interaction and every touch point has to strengthen it. Touch points include your site, social media, the quality of your deliveries, customer service, and return handling. The smoother each interaction is the more you build up trust with your customers. Go a step further and offer loyalty programs, with points, VIP discounts, and referral programs to turn your most loyal customers into brand promoters and further boost your conversion rate optimization efforts.
3. Make a Good First Impression
Your product images are the first to grab consumers’ attention and form their first impression so their quality can make or break your eStore’s success. Your images should be polished and professional on white background, offering as many angles of the product as possible. You should also offer some in context photos to create lifestyle associations with your product. It is also very important that your images have a uniform look across your site so your store looks professional and trustworthy. That includes consistent white background and item scale within the image.
4. Optimize Product Page Design
38% of visitors leave a website if the layout is unattractive, according to Adobe.
All your efforts culminate into bringing your customers to your product page from PPC ads, social media, blog posts etc. So you have to employ eCommerce optimization techniques for every aspect of your product page. This includes making it easy to navigate with clean-cut product images that show your product in its best light. Your images should be supported by product titles and unique and engaging descriptions.
Visual aids in online retail raise average eCommerce conversion rates by 5-7%, according to Annex Cloud.
Do not underestimate your product page SEO, including keywords, descriptions, alt text, and the metadata of your images. They can generate organic traffic for your site and bring high-quality leads. Simplify product filters and reduce choices so your customers stay focused and get closer to making a purchase. Have a clear and distinguished ‘Buy Button’ to ease navigation.
Use customer reviews and ratings as powerful tools to boost trust. Include links with additional info about shipping and delivery to answer any last minute questions. Employ chatbots and timely pop-ups to engage visitor or invite them back with discount offers or other incentives if they abandon their carts.
5. Optimize for Mobile
Mobile sessions account for 59% of all eCommerce site sessions, according to Smart Insights.
Over half of eCommerce traffic is on mobile and that number is only going to grow. The mobile experience is all about simplicity and ease, even more than desktop, and shoppers rely more on visual stimuli and images. They are reluctant to fill out long forms and enter their credit card info on mobile and that leads to high cart abandonment. Load times also play a critical role so it is vital to optimize your image size for mobile. Mobile shoppers are quicker to leave the page if it takes too long to load and you might lose them forever.
Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to measure your store’s responsiveness on mobile and see what you can do to make it better and faster. Go a step a further and browse through your store on your smartphone and see if there are any aspects that bother you and address them.
6. A/B Test Everything
A/B testing often seems like a tedious process that leads to minor tweaks but those minor tweaks add up and nurture your site visitors ever better, boosting our conversion. So test everything including your images, product titles, and overviews, buy buttons, and other aspects of your product page like suggested products and navigation options. You will often be surprised what you will find and be able to make improvements that will affect your bottom line. You can use tools like Optimizely to test just about anything.
7. Offer Free Shipping
eCommerce is ever growing and the industry leaders like Amazon are pushing the boundaries of the customer experience. Consumers have grown accustomed to the new norms in online shopping and free shipping is one of them. Offering free shipping removes an important psychological barrier that nurtures buyers along to checkout.
Consumers are 4 times more likely to make a purchase if you offer free shipping.
8. Streamline Checkout
Overly complicated checkout can lead to frustration and cart abandonment so you have to always optimize and simplify. Now that Amazon’s 1-click patent has expired a lot of major eCommerce operators are taking the technology to their pages.
The 1-click buying does just that, packs the lengthy checkout process into a single click for return customers that already have saved payment information. It has proven to work well for Amazon and even Apple licensed the technology from them back in 2000 for the iTunes store. This is an example of removing all the hassle from checkout and that is what ultimately the consumers want, a fast easy ride.
9. Employ Apps and Plugins
Employ in-store apps like Facebook Chat that help you interact with your site visitors in key moments and influence their decisions. This can include chatbots like Gobot or pop-up apps that appear early in the browsing stage and offer similar products, capture emails, or offer surveys.
You can Countdown Timers timers on your product page that create a sense of urgency for the buyers alerting them on expiring deals or on how many people have bought the item. When your customers abandon their cart a timely pop-up with a discount code can change their mind. Alternatively, you can integrate with Mailchimp to send abandoned cart emails and offer incentives.
Do not let customers navigate away disappointed if an item is out of stock, use apps like Back in Stock to capture their email and send them a notification when the product is back. Use apps cautiously and test how your audience reacts to them before you implement them storewide to boost your conversion rate optimization.
10. Personalised Offers
Always use data from your store and other channels to remarket to segments of your audience with highly personalized messages and product offerings. Consumers are willingly giving away their data and in return, they expect tailored reminders and suggestions. Platforms are getting ever more integrated and you can link your store activity to say your Facebook ads. Say an online store visitor saves a pair of red shoe to their cart but then gets distracted and leaves the page. Retarget them with a Facebook ad in their feed with a picture of those same red shoes.
Conclusion
Your eCommerce conversion rate is one of your most important metrics and keeping a close eye on what affects it is vital. Online shoppers are growing used to ever more seamless buying journeys and you should be able to offer them a smooth ride. All your marketing channels from social media to email and to your product page should be optimized with your audience in mind in order to boost conversion.
You product images both on your product page and on social media should speak uniformly in your brand voice and nurture consumers along, offering trust and reliability. Analyze each interaction and A/B test your strategic elements in order to get an ever better conversion.
