It is perhaps a couple of months (or a year or so) after your ecommerce store was first launched.
You’re patiently watching the conversions tick over each week, and you start to wonder - what’s next? The journey you took to get your online store live was undoubtedly long and industrious, but it’s not over yet - you may already have encountered some pain points or perhaps you’re not yet satisfied with your conversion rate. So now that your Shopify store is live, what now?
The beauty of digital is that we can constantly and relatively easily update and upgrade our store according to the many metrics we record each and every day of our customers’ behaviour as well as our general website performance on tools such as Google Analytics and heat mapping products like HotJar and CrazyEgg. This ultimately means that your job is never finished when it comes to your Ecommerce store; there are always improvements to be made, A/B testing to be done, and upgrades to make to ensure that your store is running at absolute optimal performance.
Just as you might have found it overwhelming as to where to start while you were devising your now finalised live online store, it can be equally paralyzing when contemplating how and where to start on optimisation. To help you get started we have grouped some aspects that you can take a look at first that will form a great start.
Ultimately, almost everything that you endeavour to do with your Ecommerce store is in aid of increasing your conversions; and there are an infinite number of things you can do to increase sales on your Shopify store. Some things are easier or faster to implement and others might require more research and a bit of development but could yield much better results over a period of time and therefore worth it in the longer run.
We have compiled the checklist below of things you can do to increase conversions:
You can thank Google for making a Search function an expected feature on most websites - and you can use this to great advantage too, especially if you have a large product catalogue. Enhance the user experience with a good quality search feature that makes finding what they need easy. Consider adding auto-suggest functionality to cleverly propose relevant products to the consumer while they are still typing. Usually this would come in the form of an app, and there are a few to choose from.
Video has quickly become the king of content, with more than 500 million hours of videos watched on YouTube each day and a third of all online activity consisting solely of watching video content. Suffice to say, a video explainer is the ideal medium to explain your product/s on your website in basic and succinct terms. Other than your home page, embed these videos in the description field of your product/s, and if you're smart enough to be using one of the Out of the Sandbox themes, you can even put videos into the main image carousel.
Most Shopify themes come with navigation options that ‘do the job’, but you want more than that - you want your navigation to improve product findability, be laser-focused, and offer consumers an intuitive user-experience. Your navigation needs to contribute to your conversion-efforts, so keep your product front and centre - everything else can go into your footer or other secondary navigation areas so as not to clutter up your interface.
A lot of Ecommerce stores, like GymShark (above), use promo bars to communicate value propositions like specials or free shipping to their target audience. However, they often limit this to their home page, limiting its reach along with it. Make your promo bars site-wide, thus maximising the messaging and the opportunity to drive conversions with it.
Consumers trust word-of-mouth more than anything else; according to this Nielsen Global Trust In Advertising Survey 92% of people trust recommendations from friends versus 70% from online consumer opinions. This is why you need to leverage your social presence and social reviews as much as possible, after all they are unpaid endorsements! There is a great app for social reviews called YOTPO that a lot of our merchant clients use with great success.
“According to Forrester research, product recommendations such as upsell and cross-sell offers are responsible for an average of 10-30% of ALL eCommerce side revenues! " – Bold Commerce.
Use up-sell, cross-sell and bundle offers to increase the average cart size and boost your revenue. There are a large number of apps to choose from when looking to provide this on your store but our usual go-to apps are the ones offered by Bold.
Be selective and stay relevant when drawing the consumer’s eye to a CTA, if you give equal attention to all CTAs (Add to Cart, mailing list sign up, inquire now) they contribute to a general ‘noise’ and essentially disappear amongst it. The rule of thumb is that you draw attention primarily to the element(s) that are going to lead to a conversion.
Elements such as expedited shipping, free shipping, product guarantees, country of manufacture/sourcing (locally sourced, etc.), secure transactions, PCI Compliant Hosting & Cart, and payment method logos inspire trust and confidence in your consumer. Proudly display these where they are about to make their buying decision.
Consumers are spammed to death from every angle, so one doesn’t blame them for making us work for their email addresses! One of the best tried and tested ways to persuade consumers to opt-in for a mailing list is to offer them a free gift with their first purchase or a sizable discount code after signing up.
If you currently only have one store catering to multiple countries and are experiencing some drop-off in other territories, consider creating a separate instance for each region. This will allow for you to provide:
Checkout in the customer's own currency.
Ability to market to that region's specific events and holidays.
Ability to market to that region's potentially different seasons.
Use the predominant language of the region.
Use familiar payment methods and shipping providers.
Providing a stock level indication (only 6 items left in stock!) gives a sense of urgency and prays on the consumer’s sense of FOMO (fear of missing out). An app like While Supplies Last will enable you to implement this functionality.
Similarly with the Stock level indication, a Countdown timer effectively provides an air of urgency (to the minute) and also works on the FOMO in every consumer. Use an app for this like Sales Countdown Timer Bar to give the consumer a certain amount of time to act before losing out on a deal.
Don’t lose out on sales simply because a product is temporarily out of stock, capture the consumer’s details and send them an automated reminder when the product is back-in-stock again with functionality like that of the BackInStock app.
“The typical shopping cart abandonment rate for online retailers varies between 60% and 80%, with an average of 67.91%.” - Wikipedia
Abandoned carts are the ultimate low-hanging fruit for picking up on lost sales, consumers were literally selecting items for purchase and for some or other reason didn’t complete the sale. Provide an opportunity for them to pick up where they left off (or even offer a discount to tip them over the edge). If you're on Shopify's "Shopify" plan or higher, you already have abandoned checkouts available to you as a feature, otherwise for a lower plan there are still plenty of options in the form of apps.
In conclusion…
If you implement many (or all) of these points you are very likely to see a marked impact on your store’s performance. If you would like to see more detailed information on the above checklist items, view our article on increasing your site’s conversions. Alternatively, you could sign up for our ConversionBoost service and see exponential growth in your online store conversion.
Have you heard of ConversionBoost?
ConversionBoost is one of our specialised services, where we use an evidence-based approach, with data collection and analysis, to improve and enhance your store. ConversionBoost is designed for established stores that already have a baseline of performance, and stores with a certain level of traffic and sales already will see the best results. If you are just getting started, though, and want to know how you can best optimise your sales for your growing store, we can help too. Ready to take your Shopify store to the next level? Apply now.
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