If ever there was a time to focus on boosting your online sales, it would be now.
Despite the extenuating circumstances of what is facing the world right now, eCommerce is booming and it’s time to get on top of your conversion optimisation. First things first, if you want to accurately monitor your sales and revenue and ultimately your sales conversion rate, you need to set up Google Analytics on your site and set your conversion rate goals. Now you’re ready to take a deeper look at your ecommerce store.
We’ve set down a list to help you identify where your website might be losing sales - and a few things to consider if you want to be more likely to make a sale. We’re not focusing on ads or general marketing right now, but rather the ways you can tweak and improve your site to better convert your current traffic and see a marked growth in sales and revenue.
If you’d rather have a Shopify Expert optimise your store then take a look at our ConversionBoost product, for a limited time only we are offering 20% off for COVID-19 relief. Apply now to reserve your ConversionBoost slot.
There are a number of things you can do to optimise your Home Page for supporting better sales conversions, including the following:
The Home Page is designed for every kind of visitor and so does not work well as a landing page for marketing of a particular product. This is why a lot of Home Pages have such high bounce rates. Rather use your product pages as landing pages and optimise them better, or custom dedicated landing pages for special offers.
Most Shopify themes come with "sufficient" navigation options with the ability for dropdown and fly-out menus, but merely sufficient isn't going to earn you any extra points with your customers. Make use of a good mega nav type structure, which allows you to merchandise products from within your navigation and drastically improve findability and subsequently your customer's user experience. Also, make your navigation laser-focused by segmenting it into logical groupings such as keeping product related navigation together and your "other" information like customer service, returns, t's & c's and account related stuff in their own place.
Search is an expected feature on every eCommerce website, and it can help your customers navigate through your catalogue of products as well as even help you convert better - provided they can easily find what they are looking for. Ensure that yours has error tolerance for misspellings, is enhanced for mobile search capabilities, offers autocomplete for faster results and better suggestions, and includes merchandising capabilities like pricing and even images. Use your Search to your advantage, it’s more than a navigation tool.
Offer promotions or communicate value propositions like free shipping or a link to a clearance collection by implementing a site-wide promo bar. It enables you to provide value to the customer as well as drive traffic to your easier converting pages.
This is where you need to spend the most resources on optimisation. The buyer makes their decision to purchase here; they have a lot of questions and concerns that you need to adequately address. Product pages have high abandonment rates and you won’t be able to increase your conversion rate unless you fix this. Our answer? Create solid product pages that convert!
Avoid sticking to a template when it comes to providing information on your product pages, rather serve the information to the customer that will help them make an informed buying decision. Use well-written product descriptions that answer the questions that your customers might have, and lead with the good stuff. Don’t make them dig for the information they need. Include videos, demonstrations, how-to guidelines, size guidelines, dimensions, etc. to help put your product “in their hands”.
Product photography is a way for customers to verify the quality and value of your product. It is important that what you sell and what you have on your website are identical, as your transparency and trust hinge on this as a brand. It always looks better to do your own photography, rather than using what is supplied by suppliers as it lends more legitimacy to the product. You will also have the added benefit of getting less returns.
To promote urgency, it's useful to show the customer how many items are still in stock. This sense of urgency can inspire the customer to purchase sooner for fear of losing out. This can be done quite simply with an app like While Stocks Last or if you have a suitably skilled Shopify coder at hand, they should be able to implement a solution fairly quickly in liquid. Similarly, provide a back-in-stock notification rather than leaving “empty shelves”, no one likes finding the product they’ve been searching for only to find a dead end and a red “Out Of Stock” label.
Make sure your Call to Action (Add to Cart button in most cases) is impossible to miss, but without being gaudy. To make them stand out, you can use any or all of the following techniques:
User reviews heavily influence buyer decisions, in fact they’ve become so powerful that 95% of shoppers read online reviews before making a purchase. They are proven sales drivers, and customers now expect to see them on all Ecommerce stores. Don’t fear the negative reviews, they are opportunities for you to react in a way that gives all future customers a glimpse into how you handle customer care issues. We have a detailed article as to why customer reviews can be your secret weapon to boosting conversions.
Abandoned carts are a major hurdle for merchants, however there are a lot of ways that you can take back this platform to your advantage.
Customers want fuss-free, and simple checkout. If there are too many steps, they will likely drop off - especially if they checkout on mobile. Limit the amount of steps by not enforcing sign in (by offering guest checkout), not having a CAPTCHA, or by offering tools like Shopify Pay. This enables customers to opt-in to save their personal and shipping information, so that they can checkout with just one tap or click.
Extra fees like shipping costs can be major sticking points for online shoppers, and it can be quite a shock when the first time they see the cost is right before making the purchase. Be upfront about the costs and you will have less abandoned carts, or offer free shipping if you are able to.
It is a missed opportunity if your interaction with a new customer ends at their first purchase. Also, don’t give up on your abandoned carts - they are low hanging fruit and there are ways to recover them.
Make sure that your first step in your checkout process is getting their email address, that way if they abandon you can contact them and try to recover the sale. There are a number of ways that you can do this, which include offering a discount, offering to save their cart for checking out another time, or offer free shipping if it’s within your budget.
While technically not conversion optimisation, offering your customers superior alternatives, accessories and items that commonly go with the one they're buying is going to increase your average order value (AOV) which is much the same thing in the long run. You can use your promotional newsletter to promote these or optimise your transactional emails to do this automatically for you. We wrote a dedicated article about transactional emails if you’d like to know more. There are a large number of apps to choose from when looking to provide up-selling on your store but our usual go-to apps are the ones offered by Bold. We prefer Spently for transactional emails.
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