As more and more companies pivot to online-only sales to avoid disruptions and survive amidst the fluctuating business landscape, it becomes vital for online retailers to understand that it takes more than an online storefront to create a thriving e-commerce enterprise. Selling your products online without measuring the performance of your business is like driving with your eyes closed. No business can progress if you don’t measure the performance and compare how you are doing overtime.  How do you measure the success of your e-commerce business?

The most vital eCommerce business decisions are made based on data. The data will show you the state of your business at all levels and help you recognize which lever to push for your business to grow. There are plenty of eCommerce metrics that you can use to track the growth of your business but only a few of them enable you to turn them into actionable insights for optimal growth. The ability to collect and evaluate essential metrics plays a huge role in managing the success of your eCommerce store. Changes in key metrics can throw your attention immediately to situations you need to act on. To fine-tune your marketing strategies and sales in a way that engages customers and website traffic, they have to be backed by authentic data. This is why an eCommerce conversion rate is integral for your growth as an eCommerce player.

What is the eCommerce conversion rate?

The commerce conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website or landing page that is converted to the desired action or a profitable score. Your business may define conversion actions in various ways like clicking a link on your site, completing an online survey, adding a product to a cart, or subscribing to a service on the website. Your conversion rate percentage is determined by dividing your total number of conversions by the total number of visitors to your website and then multiplying by 100.

Used along with other critical metrics conversion rates serve as an excellent barometer to measure the health, performance, competitiveness of your online store. The higher the conversion rate, the better the customer value proposition and lower the customer acquisition cost. To target meaningful and actionable insights into the growth of your eCommerce business, it is vital to take an audit of your current conversion rate. Regardless of the business you operate in, it is important to understand that conversions simply do not happen, it requires skilled optimization to improve your conversion rates to an optimal value. A good conversion rate for an online business lies anywhere between 1-3%. Conversion rates are also vastly affected by sector, region, season, online marketing presence, website user experience, etc. The key to measuring eCommerce conversion rates is to look at the average rates across the industry and then put them into use as benchmarks to your performance.

What is the Importance of Conversion rate?

·       Generates a stream of free customers

Optimizing your conversion rates helps you increase your website traffic and in turn the number of customers who accept your offer, without leading you to parallelly invest in your advertising budget.

·       Increases traffic to your eCommerce store

As more customers visit your website, this generates more profit for you to run advertising campaigns based on your audience, outbid, and thus outgrow the competition. This snowball effect on your traffic, conversion and profits leads you to create a growth loop for your business.

·       Increases Revenue and Profit

Your higher conversion rates do not most likely translate to increase costs. As you start optimizing different elements on your website, you would remove the unwanted variable that includes extra units, more workers, extra distribution, and others, which will in turn increase revenue.

·       You get to know your customers

CR Optimization strategies help to know various information about your customers like what they want, what they need, what drives them to your website, and other audience behaviors that form the basis to optimize your marketing and sales strategies. CR gives you real-time feedback from your customers for any change in elements with regards to your website, from which you can deduce what clicks with them and what does not.

·       Lower Customer Acquisition costs

Customer acquisition is otherwise costly. If you improve your site’s UX and other elements based on data derived from conversion rates, that process becomes less expensive as more of your website’s traffic is now converting and generating revenue. As you lower your customer acquisition costs, you in turn increase your ROI.

·       Improves your Search Engine Rankings

Search engine optimization is an integral part of any business today as most customers tend to go online and find out about a business first before they decide to buy a product. It will be hard to generate online sales if you are not visible on search engines. Through conversion rates, you will be more focused on optimizing the pages of your website with primary keywords to rank higher on search engine pages.

What is the most effective way to improve your conversion rate?

Use a CRO Planner

One of the vital steps to improve your conversion rate is to use a CRO planner. With a CRO planner, you will be able to pre-schedule regular site audits, identify and analyses areas to improve your conversion funnel, understand the users on your site, and go through the process of A/B testing and experimentation. All this data will enable you to develop a strategy for increasing your conversion rate.

Create Content that converts

A website is one of the most important factors affecting its conversion rates. It greatly affects how your pages perform during an organic search. While your content should be optimized with keywords from an SEO standpoint, make sure that your content still retains the human touch. A great marketing content that comes off with clarity and a strong sense of urgency helps to seamlessly blend conversion opportunities. Utilizing strong call-to-action and well-thought-out design and product information will make users sign up with your business.

Create a compelling value proposition

The potential of your value proposition is directly dependent on your conversion rate. Your value proposition must be differentiated and stand out from your competitor’s offers in such a way it stands parallel to every element of your competitors except one. Optimizing your value proposition and communicating it credibly is a continuous process that involves identifying, expressing, and testing/measuring it. You could use the above-mentioned A/B testing for this. Your value proposition should specifically address your target audience. Additionally, they should throw light on the benefits of your products/services in such a way it leads your potential customers to imagine life with your product and how it can solve your customers’ problems.

Add a third-party signup service

These are now cited in most websites, instead of signing up from scratch, you can opt to use your Google/Facebook profiles to create a new profile. This eliminates filling out the sign-up form altogether.

Track how people interact with your site

It is important to understand how users interact with your site to identify and develop strategies to improve your conversion rate. Website analysis tools offer screen recordings of your users on your site. You will get to see if they skip an offer if they stop to fill a form and what they clicked on and what they ignored. Heat maps of your site call out elements that stand out and what draws the audience’s eye.

What are some relatively new conversion rate optimization tips?

Strategic CTA’s (Buttons, Pop-ups, pricing tables)

A leading page comes with a purpose to acquire something from your audience – be it for lead generation or building a list of email subscribers, contact information, or ultimately sales. A strategic CTA and positioning can be strong factor that affects the website conversion rate. Pop-Ups on your website require your audience to actively engage the visitors and assist in social awareness, subscriber acquisition, promote discounts and upcoming offers. If you do not want to use pop-ups there are plenty of other options like a push notification or plug-ins. Nowadays many landing pages employ the use of Buy Now buttons as their CTA. You could innovate on your button by experimenting with colours or themes to customize it with your offerings. Pricing tables allow you to present and market different options in a table and promote a particular option as compared to the others.

Incorporating multimedia elements to the landing page

Multimedia elements make your products/ services more genuine and reliable. Also, it is the preferred way of consuming content in an Internet-savvy generation. Including product videos and images, video testimonials, etc. of your products can give your customers a closer and more realistic look at what your product offers. These are displayed soon after the details and benefits of a particular offer. If you can convince others to be happy with your products and services, it becomes much easier to convert your visitors to clients.

Do A/B testing

A/B testing is a technique that is used to decide on an event/strategy one of which would possibly increase the conversion rate than the other. If you had two alternatives of your page each with a different headline, you could run an A/B split testing to see which clicks better with your customers. A/B testing software would direct 50% of your incoming traffic to page A and 50% to page B, and in the end, you could count how many people took the action.

Add live chat to your website

Many visitors wait on the fence to buy a product due to a lingering concern or doubt. Live chat software greatly helps in clearing these blockers and lends an intimacy to their shopping experience. Just like pop-ups, live chat tools are easier to add to your websites and are a great tool to optimize your conversions.

About YRC

Your Retail Coach (YRC) is a retail consulting and eCommerce outsourcing company offering a wide range of services in retail offline, retail eCommerce, and retail omnichannel catering to a multitude of industries. With the enormous experience that YRC has accumulated over the years by working with international eCommerce brands, YRC can help hire, establish, or reform your current organizational structure to enable continuous communication flow within the company. YRC will spend time analyzing your business process and ensure optimization of the business processes and roles, validating if all the defined roles are necessary and contributing to the organization’s wider goals.  YRC is one of the best among the market leaders in organizational strategy consulting with a depth of capabilities, breadth of capabilities, and maximum client impact. YRC has played a pivotal role in shaping up successful and sustainable eCommerce businesses with aligned leadership and purpose-driven organizational culture.