How to Optimise Your Strategy to Improve E-commerce Conversion

In the world of e-commerce, conversion is key. And that means the journey your customers take on the way to purchasing your products is absolutely vital – especially if it’s actually stopping them from buying from you.

To help you improve conversions across your e-commerce site – and stay ahead of your competition – we’ll guide you through the stages of your conversion funnel in more detail and throw in some top tips for optimising your conversion strategy.

The importance of conversion in e-commerce

While the average conversion rate for an e-commerce site is actually below 5%, e-commerce sales still account for nearly half of all retail sales growth. An incremental shift in this percentage can make all the difference for an organisation. 

As well as these positive ripple effects, e-commerce conversion matters for all sorts of other reasons too…

• Advertising platforms like Google Ads and acquisition costs are getting increasingly pricy
• Amidst the noise of social media, it’s harder to capture people’s attention
• Improving conversion rates tends to improve brand and brand experience
• More conversions mean more sales, which ultimately translates to increased profits

The stages of the e-commerce conversion funnel

The conversion funnel tracks the journey that your customers take on the way to (ideally) purchasing your products. The stages they go on this journey can be broken down as follows…

Awareness

Here, visitors are exploring your site and gathering the necessary information so they can weigh up their need for your products. At this stage, they’re likely looking at your competitions’ sites too.

Consideration

With the need established, visitors start narrowing down their options, discounting certain brands and favouring others.

Intention

Their interest has been fully piqued, there’s an emotional engagement with your products, and now your visitors fully intend to buy.

Action

Visitors commit to and complete a purchase.

How to optimise your strategy to improve e-commerce conversion

So what can be done to make sure this journey goes from Awareness to Action with as little friction as possible? Luckily, there’s an entire discipline to improving conversion rates (which you can read more about here), but here we’ll focus on it from an e-commerce perspective, with these top checkout maximising tips.

Focus on user experience

The user experience can be make or break when it comes to purchasing, so it’s important that there’s nothing standing in the way of your visitors paying for your products.

A simplified checkout process is one way you can improve things. Guest checkout is a great option for users put off by needing to create an account with you (or if they’ve forgotten their login details). But be sure to also allow various payment options, whether it’s PayPal, credit card or buy now, pay later schemes. An auto-fill function will also speed up the checkout process considerably, too.

Speaking of speed, a responsive site that’s quick to load will do wonders for your UX. People don’t have the patience for slow sites nowadays – and anything longer than 1 second is deemed slow right now. We’ve got some tips on how you can cut down on loading times here and here.  

Create a product-focused strategy

If you want to sell products, then your strategy should endeavour to give them some TLC. Spend some time optimising your product pages with high quality videos, well-written product descriptions optimised for SEO and well-shot product images that show everything you sell in the best possible light.

Optimise across devices

To go along with a sleek, streamlined desktop site, you need a mobile experience to match – especially as more and more people turn to handheld devices to make purchases. And if your mobile site isn’t great, then customers can easily turn to a competitor’s site that is.

Use your data

Whichever analytics tools you’re using to gather data, then make sure your putting your findings to use as they can contain some top notch insights, including:

– Where customers are dropping off in the journey

– Aspects of your site that are working you can optimise

– Aspects of your site that aren’t working you can either lose or improve

All of which can also be used to optimise your entire CRO strategy.

Include A/B testing

If you’re not sure which campaigns ideas will generate the most results, you can always use A/B testing to try out differing approaches across the likes of:

– Email subject lines

– CTA buttons and copy

– Images

– Ad copy and imagery

– Pricing

A/B testing is also an excellent way of investigating where uses are engaging (or aren’t engaging) across certain stages of the journey. And again, what you learn from your results is a great way to optimise your strategy that leads to more effective structuring of your site as a whole, and individual pages.

Explore potential promotions

An oldie but a goodie, because who doesn’t love a discount? Knocking a certain amount off items or running promotions is a tried and true way of improving retention rates – and they can be offered at numerous points along the funnel, whether it’s as soon as they land on site (for say, signing up to their site) or before they exit so you can keep them on page.

Ensure customer questions are answered

Nobody likes to have their questions go unanswered. When sales are at stake, it pays to make sure you can provide users with the answers they’re seeking. So try optimising your FAQ page by basing it around customer feedback, addressing it around trends that you might have noticed from this kind of data.

Promote customer reviews

Social proof never goes out of style, and customer reviews still have a huge amount of sway when it comes to conversion. By featuring them across your site, or on your social channels, you’ll be giving new visitors the confidence they need to convince them to purchase from you.

Embed retargeting into your strategy

Retargeting is another conversion improving method you should be making use of. The process involves focusing on people who have visited your site before, but failed to make a purchase. So from the outset, you already know a little bit about these visitors. Retargeting harnesses this info and places them back into the funnel.

You can employ retargeting through segmented ads, such as showcasing similar products that are you best sellers, previously viewed products or new lines that are just in.

Personalised retargeting emails are another great method, using the info you’ve gathered to tailor things in way individual visitors can appreciate – and so they’ll finish the purchase they might have initially abandoned.

Upgrade your business’ digital marketing

Want to increase your conversion rate but not sure you’re at the right level to fully leverage the tips above?

That’s OK, sometimes it’s better to look before you leap, and our Digital Marketing Maturity Matrix quiz lets you uncover your current level of activity, and what your next moves might be before you start growing.

Want to find out? Fill in the form and we’ll send you the key information to get you started.

Still not seeing the results you want from your site? Our team can get to work on something that brings in the customers so you can keep growing from strength to strength. To find out more, head to the homepage or give us a call on 0345 459 0558.