by Fatema Mulla

As both technology and consumer behaviour continues to change and develop for eCommerce, retailers have to review new ways to optimise conversion rate for their stores.

As both technology and consumer behaviour continues to change and develop for eCommerce, retailers have to review new ways to optimise conversion rate for their stores.

Conversion rate optimisation involves improving experiences for website users and visitors in an effort to trigger customers to complete a desired action on your site. Ideally, you want as many website visitors to make a purchase - so how do you ensure this happens?

Here are our 5 tips to successfully strengthening conversion rate for your eCommerce store.

1 - Answer any and all questions a customer has

Live chat is always a good option for any site - but for an eCommerce store it’s essential. It will improve shopping experience for customers as it helps to replicate an in-store experience - but it also gives you the chance to identify common concerns and problems customers may be experiencing.

Give customers the ability to come forward and speak to you in real time if they are having any issues regarding the functionality of your website. This will allow you to identify what areas of your store require improvement. If a live chat solution isn’t quite right for your store, try a FAQs page, a customer support page or ensure visitors are aware of your active social accounts.

2 - Encourage reviews

79% of customers trust a good customer review almost as much as a personal referral - customers are more likely to purchase a product if they can see that it has received positive reviews.

Encourage customers to leave reviews and keep a review/comment section on your product pages - seeing positive feedback from previous users will help to push customers towards making a purchase.

Reviews don’t always have to be included on product pages only - use them in all and any relevant marketing collateral such as emails, featured blog posts, social media posts etc., to maximise the amount of conversions it can trigger.

3 - Optimise the checkout process

Lengthy checkout processes can be the downfall of many eCommerce sites. A customer may find a product they like and begin the checkout process - but then abandon if it is too lengthy with too many steps.

Keep your checkout process as simple as possible - the last thing you want to do is drive customers away who are just about ready to purchase a product.

Use drop down menus, bite sized descriptions etc. to create a simpler process for customers so they are able to complete the checkout process as swiftly and easily as possible, decreasing the chance of them abandoning checkout.

4 - Regularly analyse customer behaviour

If you want to maintain a strong conversion rate, analysing customer behaviour is key. What might work on one online store may differ to another in a different vertical or country - so analysing your customer behaviour is key to making sure you make carefully considered actions.

Use analytics, heatmaps and user recordings to identify and analyse how visitors and customers are using your site (and how they aren’t!).

All of this valuable information will be helpful in determining what areas of your site are and aren’t working, and will enable you to identify what needs to be improved in order to increase conversions on your site.

5 - Test new ideas and analyse results

Analysing customer behaviour will surely give you some ideas on how you could improve your site to increase and strengthen conversion rate.

Always trial new ideas before permanently implementing them so you can see whether they are actually working or not. A good idea would be to run a trial phase for a certain number of weeks and closely analyse the results.

Try to identify changes in user behaviour that may be triggered by the changes you have made to your site, and monitor how effective they may be, compared to how it was previously.

If your new ideas are yielding better results with your customers, implement these permanently in order to keep your conversion rate up.

If it doesn’t seem to work out, it would be a good idea to look at some other options.

Get in touch

Following these five steps is just a start to improving your conversion rate. If you want to find out more about how Statement can help you successfully improve and maintain a strong conversion rate, just get in touch with our friendly team and we’ll be happy to help.

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