In 2018, the average conversion rate of the top 25 percent of e-commerce sites was 5.31 percent. Meanwhile, the top 10 percent enjoyed conversion rates averaging 11.45 percent. However, the average rate for e-commerce as a whole was 2.35 percent. As you can see, there’s a significant spread in play there.
So, what is the top 10 percent doing that everyone else isn’t?
Let’s take a look at improving your conversion rate.
What Is a Conversion Rate?
The number of visitors to your site who go on to make a purchase as a percentage of the total number of visitors to your site is your conversion rate. In the case of sales, you’ll want that number to be as high as possible because it has a direct bearing on your profitability.
However, it doesn’t have to be just sales. It can be the number of people who signed up for your newsletter, the number of people who chose to follow your social media presences or any other quantifiable action.
Whatever it is you want visitors to do, getting a handle on this performance indicator is critical to improving the performance of your e-commerce site.
Calculating Your Conversion Rate
The formula for calculating a conversion rate is:
(Conversions/Visitors) x 100
In other words, divide the number of people taking the desired action by the number of people visiting the page upon which that action is requested and multiply it by 100.
Steps to Take to Improve Your Conversion Rate:
1) Optimize Your Site For Speed
People have very little patience for slow-loading websites—especially on mobile devices, which is where the bulk of e-commerce traffic originates these days.
Compressing your images and video, using caching where you can and employing a content distribution network have all be proven to make a site run faster. Speed is a crucial component of your business.
Think about it; what is e-commerce if not an efficient way to acquire goods and services?
2) Provide Peer Reviews
Captivating your audience with content to which they can readily relate is particularly useful. A smart way to do this is with peer reviews of your products. When people see others like them who have had the same problem got good results with your product, they will be more inclined to buy. Customer reviews are one of the most powerful sales tools in the e-commerce merchant’s arsenal.
3) Employ Exit Messaging
Program your site to deliver a popup to encourage users to stay and look again when they try to leave a page or a screen without taking the desired action. You can even use it to offer promotional offers around the product they were considering. This can also be done via email if the shopper has registered with your site
4) Hone Your Calls to Action
Place your CTA buttons where they can be found without looking for them and make sure they contain compelling messaging.
Strong results have been achieved by leading CTA button copy with affirming words.
“Yes, I want to save 50 percent off the regular price!”
You’ll have to do a bit of A/B testing to see what works best for your audience, and it’s well worth the effort.
5) Mount a Retargeting Campaign
A strategically crafted retargeting effort will remind shoppers they spent time looking at the product on your site, even as they visit other sites looking for more information. Just be careful to vary it up and switch it off after the shopper converts so they don’t get annoyed or feel as if they’re being stalked.
These five approaches to improving your conversion rate have proven successful time and time again. However, they are just a few of many techniques currently in play.
What other tips do you have to improve conversion rates?
Feel free to share them in the comments below.
