Conversion Rates: Increasing online business success

The success of your online business is conversion rates. Conversion is your ability to get people to perform some sort of action from your online store, whether it be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, creating a wish list or starting a free trial. However it's the transaction that you'd want to really focus on as it's essentially what puts the money in the bank. This conversation rate is calculated by the following:

Why are Conversion Rates Important?

Your conversion rate is actually more than a mere measure of sales - it's a measure of how well your store is being perceived by your customers. Your store is the gateway between your target consumers and the products you want them to walk away with. Just like retail assistants do everything they can to give customers a good shopping experience, your ecommerce site needs to do the same. Give them a seamless experience and they'll walk away with a purchase. Give them a bad one and they'll simply close the window without giving your brand a second look.

Because there are so many factors that can include conversion, it's hard to pinpoint just one or two factors as the reason for low or fluctuating conversation rates. Your site analysis can give you clues as to why you're not converting more customers - for example, if you're losing customers at checkout, it could be that your customers have security, payment or price concerns. If you're losing customers on your product pages, it could be that you're not presenting enough detail or the right kind of information about your products.

But the good news is, there's always room for improvement. Whether your conversion rate is 3% (the current industry average) or 13%, you can always implement new strategies to help increase your sales.

1. Help your customers find what they're looking for

One of the biggest reasons shoppers leave an online store without buying isn't because of the price. Rather it's because they can't find something they want and essentially give up. There and two easy ways to help your customers find the right products and increase your conversion rates - search and faceted search.

• Search:

  Improving your product search capabilities is one of the best ways you can increase your conversion rate. Your search bar should be large enough so that it's easily visible, and should appear consistently throughout your site. It's also a good idea to enable autocomplete for search phrases, both to minimize typing for your customer and present him or her with related search options.

• Faceted Search

  :

  Use faceted search options to help customers narrow their searches according to various product attributes, including category, size, colour etc. In addition, configure your search tool to include common misspellings and synonymous phrases to increase relevancy of results.

2. Merchandise your products

Once your customer finds a product and clicks on it to learn more, you need to ensure that they're convinced enough to make a purchase. This means using quality images with zoom, detail views and even videos are great ways to merchandise your product. A big no-no is not to rely on canned or pre-written product descriptions - not only would Google's algorithms pick up on this and reduce your search engine ranking, but it also looks generic and tacky. Create detailed and unique descriptions for all your products and tailor it to your specific target audience.

Customer ratings and reviews are also a highly effective way to reassure customers of its value and worth. By providing credible and social proof to support your own claims that it's a product worth buying, there's a higher chance of a transaction occurring. It also may reduce the number of customer support calls/inquires you get as customer reviews tend to answer a range of questions that would be on potential buyers minds.

If you wanted to take merchandising to the next level, you can implement upsell and cross-sell techniques. On the same page as your product, suggest more expensive items your customers might also like (upsell) or suggest related items other customers may have purchased along with the product they're checking out (cross-sell).

3. Use clear and compelling CTAs

Call to Actions are an essential part of your website as it's what gets your customer interacting directly with your products or services. Effective CTAs direct users into taking a desired action through concise and visually appealing buttons and help your online business achieve its defined goals and increase conversion rates. A good rule of thumb is to start your CTA with a verb and be concise as possible. Register Now, Add to Basket and Proceed to Checkout are all familiar and efficacious examples. They're prompt, they're direct and they are the gateway to adding numbers to your conversation rates.

An additional note to consider is your use of primary vs secondary CTAs. Whilst your main goal is obviously for a user to make a transaction, some users are simply not ready to purchase anything. So don't turn a blind eye on secondary goals such as newsletter subscriptions, social media interaction and wishlists and will allow you to be a familiar face to your potential customer.

4. Make your site fast

'Slow and steady wins the race' is a predominantly wise saying, but not when it comes to loading pages. Online shoppers can and will abandon a shopping experience with no hesitation because of pages that are too slow to load. In face, according to a 2010 study Gomez conducted, 25% of online shoppers will exit a page after 2 - 6 seconds of wait time. Utilising tools such as Google Page Speed and Yahoo! YSlow which allow you to measure page load times and working with your technical team to pinpoint potential bottlenecks are good ways to QA your website and not compromise your conversion rates.

Other recommendations for optimising overall site performance also include:

• Making sure caching is enabled on your site

• Cleaning up any inactive CMS pages and remove out-of-date promotions and products

• Archive old orders and limit your shopping cart lifespan

• Using a global Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve static content and HTML files

• Limit the number of concurrent promotions and disable any functionality you're not using

5. Be mobile friendly

This aspect cannot be stressed enough. According to comScore, 4 out of 5 consumers use smart phones to shop, so it's absolutely foolish to not design your website to be mobile friendly. Your site should be easy to navigate without having to pinch and zoom, with all images optimized for mobile so that they load quickly. A good recommendation is to make your site scalable. This means that it automatically detects mobile or smaller browsers and reformats itself into a simplified version with big mobile-friendly buttons and calls to action.

Failure to do this will definitely mean a high percentage of customer turn arounds from your site. No one likes to keep pinching to view your content. So keep those conversion rates high and opt for a mobile friendly site.

6. Offer multiple payment and shipping options

Every individual is different. And so is their payment and shipping method. It's important to accommodate for everyone who may have different views in the transaction process - some don't mind entering their credit card details, others like PayPal for it's security. Some would rather save money and wait out the average postal period, others would happily pay for a premium to have their package at their doorstep the next day. Withhold a preference and you risk cart abandonment, so the more options you provide, the higher your conversions rates is likely to be.

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Acidgreen is an award winning Magento ecommerce web design development company with over 15 years of  web design experience. Our certified magento developers, digital marketing executives and designers are highly qualified to create aesthetically pleasing magento websites – that generate the highest amount of conversions and provide the best ROI. For more information on Magento 2 and how to get started with Acidgreen’s  web development services, contact us today.