Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) for Ecommerce

When tracking metrics and crafting user-centric strategies for your ecommerce business, it is essential to monitor the conversion rate. While traffic lets you know that potential customers are able to find your website, your revenue won’t reflect those numbers if customers aren’t actually buying anything. This is where ecommerce CRO sales strategies come in.

In user-centric marketing and ecommerce, a conversion is typically represented by a purchase—simply put, the conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website who complete a transaction and become paying customers. 

If you’re putting in the energy to optimize your ecommerce website and learning how to boost your online sales, the conversion rate will let you know if your efforts are effective or if you’re just spinning your wheels. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) for ecommerce involves taking strategic measures to tweak various aspects of your website in order to increase the number of paying visitors to your website. 

You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking for ecommerce CRO tips and strategic user-centric sales techniques. We’ll cover a few of the most essential points to consider, including:

• What is a reasonable conversion rate?
• What drives conversions?
• What measures can you take to boost your conversion rate?

When you approach CRO for ecommerce armed with the right tips and strategies, you can adjust your website to convert customers and increase your sales and revenue.

Conversion Rates: Optimal vs. Average

Across all ecommerce industries, the average CR sits just under 2%. Some industries see predictably higher conversion rates (health and wellness stays between 3-4%) while some stay lower (fashion hovers around 1%). A standard ecommerce CRO tip is that your goals should reflect your specific industry and your current conversion rate. If your numbers sit well below the average for your industry, you’ll want to pinpoint any fundamental issues that may be dissuading customers from making a purchase. 

If you’re wondering how to boost your online sales and your CR is already average or above average, there is still plenty of room for growth. Ecommerce CRO sales strategies can increase your ecommerce conversion rate—businesses in the top tier see numbers as high as 10-15%!

Understanding the Consumer: Ecommerce CRO Tips

Wherever your goals begin, leveraging CRO for ecommerce starts with a deep understanding of your specific target customers. After all, if you don’t know what your customers need, how will you know how to design and populate your online shop? 

While your audience will be unique to your industry and specific ecommerce niche, there are a few basic user-centric marketing optimizations that can help move your customers through the sales funnel.

Explain the Product

It may seem overly basic when it comes to user-centric strategies, but customers won’t feel safe making a purchase if they can’t fully envision how the product will fit into and improve their lives. Here’s an ecommerce CRO tip: If you’ve prioritized quantity over quality of product listings, it could negatively impact your ecommerce business CRO. 

The downside of online shopping is that customers can’t see and feel a product for themselves. Important selling points like color, durability, size, and texture are much harder to experience through a screen. Dealing with these challenges is a key part of learning how to boost your online sales.

Optimizing your product descriptions to offset these disadvantages is an excellent ecommerce CRO tip. Make sure that you include high-quality photographs that represent multiple angles of your product. Even better, incorporate short videos that dive into your product’s unique selling points or give a more comprehensive idea of how the product will enhance the customer’s life. Strategic user-centric sales techniques can only do so much if your customer doesn’t understand the product.

Surveys & Analytics: Let Your Customers Help!

Trial and error is expensive and rarely pays off, unlike a great ecommerce CRO sales strategy. Try to observe customer behavior and understand what drives every purchase. You can also use an easy on-site survey to find out what works and what doesn’t. Here are a few ecommerce CRO tips to help you get started: 

• Ask The Right Questions: What motivated your customers to click on your store? Which factors were decisive in their purchasing decision? We’re in an era of omnichannel ecommerce, and there are so many ways a customer can end up on your storefront. Asking customers how they got to your store can help you refine your funnel and optimize your website to engage new visitors even more effectively.
  
  For instance, if a majority of customers click on your page after doing extensive research, your page should ideally contain information that caters to that well-informed audience.
  
  
• Observe and Improve: Pro ecommerce CRO tip: Navigation is the key to understanding how to boost your online sales. New visitors should be able to immediately navigate to the right product and complete their checkout seamlessly.
  
  You can use analytics here to discover where you’re losing your customers. It could be something as simple as a poorly placed CTA or misleading anchor text sending your visitors to the wrong page.
  
  
• Smoother Checkout: Ask your customers about your checkout process and use analytics to validate that data. You’ll want to keep the checkout process as simple and fast as possible. As a simple ecommerce CRO tip, consider implementing quick-view pop-up windows to category pages. These windows allow customers to add items to their cart just by hovering over them, making checkouts even faster and a convenient way to continue shopping.

Some checkout processes are just too long. Asking customers to jump through too many hoops to buy a product is a cardinal sin in user-centric marketing. For example, checkout pages often contain too many forms or ask buyers for unnecessary information. Keep your ecommerce CRO sales strategy simple and move things along.

• Review CTAs: Sometimes, a well-placed call to action is all that stands between you and a lifelong customer. Check to see if your CTAs are visible to visitors across all devices.
  
  Strategic user-centric sales techniques won’t help if your website is unoptimized. For example, a CTA button might be visible to desktop users, but someone on the phone might have to scroll too far to find it.
  
  Ask your customers if you’re wondering how to boost your online sales. Customer insights are a great source of ecommerce CRO tips. You can also listen to them to find ways to improve the copy in your CTAs. It’s possible your copy just isn’t getting through to your visitors.

Common Roadblocks & Mistakes To Avoid

An important aspect of user-centric marketing for ecommerce involves clearing the sales funnel of any obstructions that could prevent customers from making a purchase. 

The following roadblocks are common issues in user-centric strategies that might prevent a customer from converting. Consider how implementing some of the following CRO tips for ecommerce could help increase conversions for your website.

The price is too high:

• Promote an installment payment plan option.
• Offer a discount for engagement, like leaving a review, signing up for the newsletter, or following on social media.

The customer is unsure of certain product details like sizing or compatibility:

• Offer free/easy returns.
• Incorporate sizing/compatibility guidelines.
• Make customer service easy and instantaneous to access with either a Live Chat or Chatbot option.
• Add reviews and user-generated content to product pages. Build trust with shoppers by showing them what a particular size/SKU would really look like in their hands.

The customer thinks they saw a similar product elsewhere for a better price:

• Include and feature customer reviews—positive reviews add clout and can increase the perceived value of your product.
• If a price match guarantee isn’t a good fit for your industry and you’re looking for how to boost your online sales, consider the more vague “satisfaction guarantee.”
• Unexpected shipping prices are a customer stumbling block in the final stretch of the sales funnel. If you can’t offer free shipping, consider offering a flat rate or free shipping promotions (with membership, newsletter signup, etc.)

A major tip for ecommerce CRO: You’ll need a systematic approach to handle these issues properly. Define clear KPIs when you set out to improve your conversion rate and build a definite roadmap that will help you tackle these user-centric marketing challenges. 

Testing is vital to any ecommerce CRO sales strategy, so avoid overhauling multiple elements at once. A/B test after each change to see what works.Carefully listen to your customer base before implementing strategic user-centric sales techniques. They’re likely already communicating the stumbling blocks that are specific to your business. Make sure your existing customers feel heard, and work to target their complaints and concerns as you address CRO for your ecommerce business with user-centric strategies.

Final Ecommerce CRO Tip: Close the Deal!

Regardless of your industry, an increase in ecommerce conversion rate means more sales and revenue for your business. Focusing on CRO for your ecommerce business can help turn window shoppers into paying (and repeat!) customers. However, many of the most important tactics, like optimizing product descriptions, can be time-consuming to implement on a large scale when you’re wondering how to boost your online sales.

At Coalition Technologies, we’re experts at pinpointing and resolving specific issues that could lower conversion rates for our client’s online businesses. Contact our sales team to see how Coalition can help boost your business with our extensive experience in CRO for ecommerce.