Your marketing efforts can potentially send hundreds of thousands of visitors to your website through SEO, social media, and more, but if none of these visitors convert to customers, then that traffic is useless and your e-commerce store is facing some major issues.
Here are four ways to help improve conversions for your e-commerce store and build a larger customer base.
1. Perform Extensive A/B Testing
Constantly testing the functionality across your website is important to discover what works best for your audience when it comes to increasing conversions. A/B testing is the process of comparing the actions from your web visitors occurring across multiple versions of the same page on your website to understand which version is the best to publish live.
Test the various sections of your website to see where images, functionality, call to actions, products, headlines, and more can be improved or altered to drive more conversions using tools like Optimizely, Unbounce, Visual Website Optimizer, and Convert.
Start by testing a highly trafficked page on your website and changing one aspect of it across different variations of the page. Your traffic to that page will be split between the variations of the page to gain actionable insights from the data collected to draw worthwhile conclusions on which page version to use for the future. Constantly test your existing web pages across your e-commerce store to make sure each existing design is as effective as possible in helping your customers make a purchase.
2. Using Live Chat on Your Website
Setting up live chat functionality on your website can help increase the average order value (AOV) and the overall conversion of customers that use the service on your e-commerce store. The main benefit of live chat is that it helps build confidence and trust with your customers who feel better equipped to shop with your company since all of their questions, comments, and concerns can be answered quickly in real-time.
Live chat helps to remove any doubts about your products and services among your potential customers, building their confidence in your expertise and increasing the likelihood that they’ll buy more than they normally would from your business.
Virgin Airlines uses a live chat platform on their website to upsell customers with other offerings and provide any assistance they may need booking travel, which converts customers on chat 3.5 times more than customers that don’t engage in a chat. From further research of the impact of live chat, Virgin also found that some of their customers had a higher AOV of 15%, as compared to those who did not speak with them on chat.
Add the human factor to your website by using one of the following live chat services to help increase customer service and conversions: LivePerson, Olark, Comm100, Kayako, LiveHelpNow, and others.
3. Focus on Your Call-to-Action Buttons
The call to action buttons used across your website may seem like a small aspect of your website’s functionality, but in reality, they can majorly impact conversions. According to Copyblogger, testing call-to-action buttons to find the right combination can result in 20 to 95% higher conversions.
This is accomplished by providing very minimal landing pages with simple and concise call-to-action buttons in use, using color to have your most impactful call-to-actions standout from any other buttons on the particular page. Use A/B testing to understand which colors and variations work best, especially when experimenting with making your buttons look like actual buttons since they are easier to click when it is known they are clickable.
Write the copy of your buttons in the first person to increase conversions. For instance, a button that says: Start my free trial today is more likely to be effective than Start your free trial today. To encourage more clicks on these buttons, include click triggers or trust signals throughout the web page containing your call-to-action buttons.
Trust signals include logos from notable customers, awards won, testimonials from satisfied customers, service ratings, money back guarantees, and value propositions. Include these click triggers to help build trust with your audience and increase clicks on your optimized call-to-action buttons. Spend time A/B testing which of these items affects the different versions of your call-to-action buttons.
4. Optimize Your Website for Speed
According to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds. A few extra seconds of load time can make a major difference in the amount of sales your e-commerce store generates. Slow page load time can also affect how your website is ranked in the search engines as well, limiting your visibility for relevant searches.
To start, analyze how quick your website load time is by using PageSpeed Insights to find out which elements are causing any speed related issues. It’s time to begin optimizing your website to ensure it’s as fast as humanly possible, providing the optimal experience for your visitors.
Get a fast web server for your website that can handle the bandwidth of your traffic, especially when there’s a sudden rush of visitors that could slow down your website if you aren’t properly prepared. If you use a web host, contact them to understand what your options are for speeding up your website and increasing the capacity of your server. It’ll probably cost more for an upgrade, but it’s better than the cost of operating a slow website and losing potential customers.
Streamline the code on your website to ensure that it is used quite minimally to reduce the page file size, which affects the load speed of each page. Many content management systems use complicated coding that makes managing the website easier, but the ability to read the code on your website much more difficult. Make sure that your web developer, web design firm or whomever else is working on your website is coding it with clean, simple and tidy coding to improve page load speed.
One of the biggest reasons a website is loading slowly is due to the fact that their images aren’t properly optimized. Large image files slow down your website and lower the value of the experience to your visitors, be sure to focus on sizing your images correctly and using the right image file for the right purposes across your website. Image files like .gif, .png, and .jpg have different uses when you’re trying to display a photo, a graphic, or a multicolor image so make sure the format matches the use.
For more insights on how load time affects users and your search rankings, check out this infographic courtesy of Quick Sprout.
What’s your strategy for increasing conversions on your e-commerce store? Sound off in the comments below!
Updated November 17, 2017.