Improve Conversion Rates With 3 Simple Tips
You’ve worked hard on your eCommerce business. You’ve got a great inventory, an awesome Magento website, a few amazing business partners, and big beautiful pictures of every product. However, as important as all these things are for running an eCommerce business, there’s one factor that makes all of it worthwhile: conversions.
The process of turning interested browsers into paying customers is delicate, complex, and your store’s entire reason for existing. Naturally, with every passing month you’d like to see those purchase numbers go up. The best way to do that is to nurture conversions by optimizing your site and enhancing customer experience. To get started on ways to improve conversion rates, focus on these 3 areas: provide a user-friendly shopping experience, create a streamlined checkout process, and utilize Google Analytics.
1) Provide a User-Friendly Shopping Experience
The shopping experience becomes 80% of the conversion process as a combination of good products, appealing UI, and ease of use come together to make happy or frustrated customers. How easy is it to find something a customer is looking for? What if they don’t know exactly what they need but have a few keywords? Clearly defined and enjoyable-to-browse categories are a good start, but your site also needs an intuitive search function. Recommendations are also another great way to help your customers jump from related item to item. Magento offers several tools to help with up-sell and cross-sell techniques.
2) Create a Streamlined Checkout Process
As everything you’ve done for your eCommerce site guides customers to the checkout, that all-important process is what makes or breaks a conversion. If it’s slow, broken, inconvenient, or confusing, customers are likely to abandon their carts and all your hard work will be for naught. A few helpful tips on streamlining your checkout process include:
- Limit the process to a single page
- Utilize diverse payment options including PayPal
- Remember names, addresses, payment options, and shipping preferences for one-click checkout
- Clear shipping options with prices and arrival dates (no surprise fees)
- Offer free shipping for orders over a certain amount
Also, consider taking a page from Amazon’s massive eCommerce handbook and allow customers to alter their orders until you’ve boxed it. After finding out you’ve made a mistake, it’s an amazing relief to be able to fix it. That gratitude will quickly overflow to positive reviews and referrals. We recently covered this topic in more detail. Read 7 tips to streamline the checkout process for more information.
3) Make Use of Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an incredible tool and one of the most useful in your entire back-end toolbox. Google Analytics gives a lot of information to use for optimization and analysis of your success. In a nutshell, Google Analytics keeps track of who moves through your page, how they move, what the results are, and a whole lot more. Four metrics to keep an eye on should be:
- Conversion Rate – How many customers are buying
- Exit Rate – How many leads are browsing, then leaving for some reason
- Average Session Duration – How much time visitors tend to spend on your site per visit
- Average Page Depth – How deeply into your site the average visitor investigates
Google Analytics will also help you monitor traffic and traffic sources. For example, a change in traffic would typically affect conversion rates – good or bad. In addition, Google Analytics will help you to understand the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, where and who your visitors are, and help to optimize your store for better conversions.
Improve Conversion Rates and Grow Your eCommerce Business
Optimizing eCommerce conversion rates can be a complicated task involving dozens of little changes. Moreover, the changes may or may not improve customer experience and improve conversion rates. It’s a trial and error process but it doesn’t have to be a hassle. Do your best to make the site truly enjoyable to browse, shop, and buy. When your customers find what they want, have a good experience, and the checkout is quick and painless, they will come back again and again.
Contact us for more ways to improve conversions rates, provide a user-friendly shopping experience, create a streamlined checkout process or assistance with Google Analytics.