In eCommerce, nothing has a greater impact on your bottom line than your conversion rate.
When even a minor bump to conversions equates to a massive bottom-line growth, it’s astonishing to watch the effect that major ones have. More mind-boggling is the startling ease with which these improvements can often be made.
It’s not unreasonable to expect to double or even triple conversions rates with only a few hours work.
With the right strategy, you can significantly boost your conversion rate immediately, and watch in delight as it continues its climb all year.
In addition to driving purchases, the right conversion tactics can also expand profit margins!
Mix-and-match the following methods to find the conversion recipe right for your business, and access all the benefits that a strong conversion rate can provide your eCommerce store.
1) Cultivate Reviews and Testimonials
85% of consumers read up to 10 reviews before feeling that they can trust a business or product. (SearchEngineLand)
90% of those who recall reading online reviews claim that positive reviews influenced buying decisions. (ShootingBusiness)
Most eCommerce business owners understand the importance of testimonials and product reviews. A powerful tool to eliminate customer doubt, the simple task of integrating product reviews produces an average 18% lift in sales!
How To Generate Hundreds of Reviews In Days
Allowing customers to leave reviews and testimonials on products is not difficult.
Getting them to leave them is.
The best results from reviews and testimonials generally require 50+ reviews per product, as it’s harder for a customer to doubt a product with a 9/10 rating from 50 people than 1.
Cultivating reviews to reach 50+ reviews per product remains a major challenge for eCommerce businesses big and small. Fortunately, there are tactics and techniques available to help with this. To learn more about them, check the WebMarketers blog tomorrow for our in-depth guide!
2) Implement Exit Offers
Exit offers are pop-ups that fill your visitor’s browser when cursor movement indicates a likely bounce. By providing something as simple as 10% off a visitor’s next order, you can watch in real time as your conversion rate climbs
Exit offers work best when they match the aesthetic of your site, compel viewers with a solid CTA, and provide legitimate value when used.
Free And Easy Tools To Drive Conversions
Providing all of these things is effortless and completely free with HubSpot Marketing. Whether you opt for the full-featured paid version or the powerful free version, this tool will allow you to craft and implement exit offers (among other things) in seconds.
Including a powerhouse of an analytics engine, Hubspot Marketing also provides deeply valuable insight into the behaviour of your visitors.
Use these insights to craft exit offers that address the pain points compelling your visitors to bounce, and you’ll enjoy a significant and immediate boost to your conversion rate.
3) Don’t Forget Intro Offers
Intro offers, like exit offers, work by incentivizing visitors to get to the end of your sales funnel. Unlike exit offers, they occur when your website recognises a new visitor.
New to your store and unlikely to have established trust with your brand; brand-new visitors are presented with a discount on their first order.
Working off of the principle of reciprocity, by unconditionally providing something of value, intro offers compel visitors to return value in kind. Something as simple as a 10-20% discount feels like a gift, and most will seek to reciprocate in appreciation.
The Hidden Value of Intro Offers
People who have already purchased from your store convert at a far higher rate than those who are new.
Having made an account, done business with you, and established a relationship with your brand; fewer doubts and barriers separate them from conversion.
Intro offers make it easier for brand-new viewers to become first-time customers. More first-time customers mean a larger pool of high-converting visitors, and more of those means a higher conversion rate!
Intro offers passively help to cultivate repeat customers; providing an immediate bump and long-term climb to conversion rate!
4) Provide Free Shipping
9 out of 10 customers say free shipping is the number 1 incentive to shopping online. (MarketingLand)
This revelation cannot be ignored for those looking to make money in eCommerce.
Shipping makes customers feel that they have to pay two additional costs to do business with you. The first is the separate fee they pay for shipping, and the second is the time they have to wait to receive their product. The price of your product, plus the price of shipping, plus the intangible cost of waiting can decimate your advantage over brick-and-mortar competition.
Eliminate the shipping fee, and in one move you can make yourself the obvious choice to customers.
Of course, this is easier said than done. The value free shipping is well known, but how to provide it is a massive challenge. Free shipping can kill profit margins if not implemented strategically, so a nuanced approach is required to address the unique circumstances of your business.
How To Manage Free Shipping While Protecting Profits:
It might seem like the best a business can do is not cut into margins when offering free shipping.
Done strategically, you can significantly expand them. Here are a few techniques you can mix and match to find the free shipping recipe that works for you
-
Minimum Order Thresholds:
Implementing a minimum order value required to access free shipping increases profits by raising Average Order Value.
With a higher AOV, you capture more revenue and reduce the relative shipping expense from each order.
-
Price Increases
Generally speaking, price increases lower conversions.
If increasing price at the cost of some conversions ultimately produces a boost to profit, you’ve made a wise move.
If increasing price doesn’t come at the cost of conversions, you’ve made an expert one.
Depending on your circumstances, it might be the case that boosting prices a little, globally is your best bet. Maybe it’s better to raise the price of specific products a lot.
Determining which mix is right for you is a matter of testing. Standard A/B testing software like Optimizely or it’s many alternatives can help make this easy. Test different prices across your product catalogue, and you can refine your recipe to find the one the perfectly optimises net profit per visitor
-
Restricted Shipping
Some products cost a lot to ship. Others less.
If you’re not in a position to be providing free shipping across your entire store, you can still offer free shipping. Identify the products that you can support shipping for free, and you can still access the value free shipping provides!
5) Optimise Load Speed
Your site’s load speed affects your bottom line.
According to Kissmetrics, almost 50% of web users expect a site to fully load in under 2 seconds, and most abandon sites that take more than 3.
79% of shoppers that struggle with site performance claim they won’t return and 44% of these would tell a friend if they had a bad experience.
Test Your Load Speed And Find Out How To Optimise It In Seconds
Loading your website on your PC or mobile isn’t enough to properly assess load speed. Not every visitor uses the same device as you, and none of them will be using the same connection.
Instead, head to Google’s PageSpeed developer tool, and plug in your URL.
This service will analyse your site’s load speed across a massive range of devices and circumstances, for free!
In seconds, you’ll be provided with a comprehensive report detailing every threat to load speed, as well as detailed insight on how to address them right away!
While the list might be intimidating, simply tackling some of the biggest items can have a significant effect on load speed, take a big chunk out of your bounce rate, and drive conversions!
More Methods To Drive Conversions
There are more than 5 ways to improve your conversion rate, all of which can be better or worse depending on the circumstances faced by different businesses.
Learning the ones that are optimal for your situation is a matter of knowledge, but fortunately accessing it is only a click away. To learn more find about the conversion opportunities available for your store, send us a link, and let’s talk!