Whether your business is online or offline, in both cases, customers, conversions, sales, etc., matter which is entirely understandable. Business owners spend lots of finances on marketing strategies for attracting visitors, but if these strategies are not successful in converting visitors into customers, chances of incurring financial loss increases. Another flaw is the risk of cyber-threat in online business, which makes it challenging to gain conversions.
Sometimes the conversion rates are so obstinate that they annoy the business owners. They cannot pinpoint what’s going wrong, nor do they know how to increase the conversions.
Let me help you with this one.
Have you ever heard about Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
In the Conversion Rate Optimization process, your e-commerce site gets optimized so that your site visitors tend to become your site customers. The ratio of visitor visits as compared to transactions taken is the CRO.
Example: A conversion rate of 4% means that 1 in 25 visitors purchase a product/service.
Low conversion rates point to various issues like disinterest in the product, high price, security issues, slow site speed, etc., and other criteria.
In this article, I have penned down some powerful tips which will help you to increase your e-commerce site conversion rates and profits.
Ways to Improve E-commerce Conversion Rates:
1. Install an SSL/TLS Certificate:
Though most visitors desire the quality of product and budget-friendly rates, let’s not forget the security factor.
With credit card frauds and other cyber-threats on the rise, visitors are worried about the safety of their financial transactions.
Research indicates that:
- 75% of the customers are worried about data privacy due to the Covid-19 pandemic
- 97% of the surveyor’s state that data privacy is pivotal for them
- 83% worry about their Social Security Number being breached
Assure your visitors about the security of their monetary transactions by installing an SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate on your website. Approach ClickSSL for securing your website’s domain and sub-domain. This trustworthy SSL certificate provider offers all the global brands of SSL certificates at nominal rates.
SSL certificates encrypt all browser-server transactions, thus ensuring data privacy. Their trust icons, i.e., a padlock and HTTPS (Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol Secure), guarantee a secured checkout process.
Customers trust such sites with their card details and hence are carefree in making purchases and raising conversions.
2. Visually Enticing:
Your website should be enticing with beautiful web design, images, and videos to grab customer’s attention. Research indicates that 42% of the visitors abandon poorly designed sites.
Design your website by implementing successful web design principles, create a solid and positive impression about your brand and products to improve your site conversion rate.
3. Appealing Presentation of Products:
Your product images are not sufficient to give them an idea about your products and their functioning. Create appealing product videos for your target audience, brief them about your product functionalities and their usefulness for them.
Offer video demos of services to gain customer faith for better sales.
4. User-Friendly Shopping Experience:
An e-commerce store that has challenging navigation and is not responsive to small devices is a failure. It hampers the conversion rates and affects sales.
Create a memorable shopping experience for your customers by:
- Creating a user-friendly website
- Ensuring smooth navigation
- Responsiveness to other devices
- Providing a wide range of payment options
These meagre steps will help in blooming your site conversion rates.
5. Flawless Checkout Process:
A quick and straightforward checkout process is the primary factor for acquiring a reasonable conversion rate. If the process is intricate and lengthy, your visitors may abandon the purchase and move over to competitors.
Research indicates that hidden costs lead to 49% of the abandonment rate, whereas 18% of the visitors abandon sites due to lengthy or complex checkout processes.
Tips:
- Minimize the information customers need to enter before purchase
- Ensure that the account creation process is not compulsory during the time of sale
- Ample payout options are available for selection
- SSL security badges are displayed to ensure encryption security
- Keep a simple one-page checkout process
- Avoid hidden charges to avoid cart abandonment
Eliminate the hurdles in the payout process and make the checkout process easy for visitors for easy conversion to customers.
6. Easy Returns:
Online buying is solely based on taking chances. Even after checking size charts and fabrics, you may end up buying the wrong material or size. In worst scenarios, the product may be completely divergent from your expectations.
Customers can approach the physical store in case of physical purchase, but customers expect simple return policies in case of an e-commerce purchase.
Factors to Include in the Return Policy:
- Number of days in which the product needs to be refunded
- How will the refund be processed?
- Contact Details & Customer care number
- Free Shipping
A clearly defined single-page return policy will motivate customers to shop more, with the trust that the company may exchange or refund the amount in case of dissatisfaction. This increases potential customers and referrals, thus boosting sales and ROI.
7. Stick Trust Badges on Your Website:
Apart from gaining trust by positive social media reviews and transparent return policies, displaying various trust badges improves site authenticity and popularity, attracting customers.
The best place to display the safe checkout badges is to place them near the “Add to Cart” buttons on your checkout page.
Various types of badges like:
- Safe checkout badge
- Payment accepted badges
- Money-Back Guarantee badges
- Free Shipping badges
- Discount offers badges
These badges create a significant impact in gaining trust from customers. Using them at various places on your website will raise your conversion bar and make your site desirable.
8. Perfect Pricing:
Ensure that the prices of your products are mentioned clearly, discount offers are transparent, and there are no hidden charges. Many e-commerce stores hide shipping charges, and the same are visible at the time of purchase. This frustrates customers, who abandon purchases due to the same reason.
Research your competition, set accurate prices for your products for customer clarity, and help them go ahead with their purchase decisions.
9. Create Elated Customers:
Attract newbies with attractive offers and discounts on 1st purchases. For existing customers, offer them referral rewards and other deals to make them feel elated. A happy customer will soon become a loyal one, which will help increase your customer base in the future.
10. Focus on Creating Loyal Customers:
“Once a customer, always a customer” should be the motto of your website. Create customer loyalty programs, reward your loyal customers with gifts or offers, ask for customer reviews and create a strong bond with your customers. This reliable train will help in reaping a reasonable conversion rate and in improving your gains.
11. Use A/B Testing Tool:
A/B testing tool helps in knowing the site’s best elements and increasing the conversion rate without gaining new network traffic. These A/B tests analyze your website pages, specify the versions that the customers love and the ones that require improvement or fixes for better website performance.
Make the essential fixes on your website to give a better user experience and create a happy customer.
Final Words:
Multiple variables are used to measure the conversion rates. You can track customer behaviour, retention rate, product cost, etc., and check out the favourable factors of your website.
Using Google Analytics to track conversions is also a wise step. Suppose you are aware of the factors that can help you gain the upper hand over your competitors, specifically when achieving better conversions. In that case, you are bound to succeed and gain handsomely in your digital business. Implement the above tips to soar conversions and profits.
