Have you considered the total investment in terms of money and effort that you have made to drive traffic to your website? It’s important to not only consider the amount of money spent on digital marketing, but also the amount of work and time invested. It is quite significant, isn’t it? All those dollars and hours you have put in, what value do they hold if your visitors click away shortly after their initial visit and never return?
The solution is straightforward: nothing.
In order for your website traffic to hold any worth, your website visitors must take action beyond simply arriving on your site. Using marketing terminology, they must engage in a conversion.
The process of conversion rate optimization is what enables you to maximize the value of website traffic.
To transform visitors of your website into followers and, ideally, customers, it is essential to ensure that your website is effectively designed for maximizing conversions. This is where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes into play.
Crafting a CRO strategy is more complex than one might assume. Anticipating human behavior and identifying their reactions is challenging.
You can guarantee that the money you invest in marketing will result in not only sales but also the establishment of lasting relationships with every website visitor, by utilizing the appropriate digital marketing strategies to achieve a higher conversion rate on your website.
The Fallacy of Relying on Marketplaces
If your goal is to sell, you have the option to upload your catalog to Amazon and make use of their CRO for your benefit. This idea is not unfavorable, as 63% of shoppers initiate their search on Amazon.com. In fact, third-party sellers account for 59% of Amazon’s unit sales.
However, this would expose your business to the tactics employed by Amazon, such as promoting their own brands more aggressively than those of other sellers and making shoppers navigate through an overwhelming number of advertisements – a phenomenon referred to as the ‘junkification’ of Amazon.
Furthermore, you are missing out on valuable user behavior and product data that is essential for personalization and company growth. It is Amazon that has ownership over all your customer data. Google becomes the alternative option for a website visitor seeking to make a purchase. To successfully convert these prospects into paying customers, here is what you can do once they arrive on your site.
Rely on AI Search and Personalization
Returning to the focus on improving the conversion rate, there are three aspects to consider: hope, search powered by AI, and personalization techniques.
Most retailers have acknowledged that hoping for success is not a viable plan. Instead, they allocate resources to implement a strong search system that offers highly relevant search results, suggestions as you type, and automatically updates facets that enable customers to easily navigate through the results.
To enhance a good conversion rate and make it exceptional, incorporating machine learning to support excellent search is recommended. This approach utilizes behavioral data to offer personalized recommendations. Furthermore, merchandisers can employ the extensive capabilities of analytics and perform A/B testing to identify which changes yield the most favorable outcomes.
1. Turn Disaster Into Discovery with ‘Zero-Result’ Recommendations
As a shopper visitor searching for a product, picture yourself typing it in the search bar, only to be met with the discouraging “no results” notification. It is natural to feel frustrated in such a situation. Moreover, pages with zero results raise the chances of customers leaving an ecommerce site. These unfulfilling pages provide limited or no options for customers to find their way back, resulting in a user experience that leads nowhere.
When faced with a zero-results page that provides little or no helpful guidance or content, customers can choose from a few options: generating a completely new search term, navigating through links, or leaving the site (where they will probably resort to using Google or Amazon).
By suggesting zero-result recommendations, you can effectively convert this potential disaster into a chance for customers to explore and discover other products that may appeal to them.
2. Personalize Shopping Experiences With Session-Aware Recommendations
Session-aware recommendations provide personalized shopping experiences by displaying items that are relevant to customers’ searches, even in situations where there is limited data available, such as when browsers are cleared, using Incognito mode, or for customers who have not visited the platform for an extended period of time. This specific group of shoppers is commonly referred to as cold-start shoppers.
If you’re interested in learning more about how small retailers can personalize without relying on “big data” and the misconceptions surrounding digital personalization, listen to Episode 1 of our podcast, The Ecom Edge. In this episode, our guest Ciro Greco, former vice president of AI at Coveo, and the host Diane Burley, explore the possibilities for small data applications.
Tailored offers are utilized to incentivize purchases by implementing smart personalization strategies, taking into consideration the information you have about your website visitors and the products you offer.
By accurately predicting when customers will need to restock on their preferred products, you can automatically provide personalized replenishment prompts. These prompts will not only enhance customer loyalty but also encourage them to make repeat purchases.
After that, if a customer comes back, they would receive a notification saying “it’s time to stock up.” Our customer MAC employed this exact strategy in a marketing campaign and observed that 67% of the banners were clicked, which encouraged more purchases on their website.
4. Simplify UX
UX, which stands for user experience, is a significant aspect of CRO as well as an independent aspect. It involves ensuring that your website visitors can easily navigate and accomplish their objectives on your website. When focusing on CRO, one must primarily consider reducing obstacles to enhance the UX.
The impatience of people on the internet is simply a normal aspect of browsing the web. Have you ever thought about wanting to view content, download something, or make a purchase, but changed your mind because it required more time or effort than you anticipated? This is a typical behavior of online users.
In practical terms, it could imply minimizing the number of fields on a form that are mandatory for completion. A greater number of individuals are inclined to provide their name and email address compared to providing additional information such as age, gender, job title, and company size.
Surprisingly, the unwillingness to invest time in providing additional information during the checkout process may occur even if someone is willing to pay for an item they desire.
One way to increase conversions is by making it easier for people to provide their shipping and payment information. For example, allowing them to create an account that automatically fills in the information for future transactions or accepting payment methods stored in their browser can be a simple solution.
5. Use Heatmaps and Session Recordings
During the website-building process, you can envision how visitors might interact with your website. However, this is merely speculation primarily influenced by your own behavior rather than that of your target audience. In order to gain a more accurate understanding of how visitors truly engage with your website, you can utilize CRO tools such as heatmaps and session recordings.
Heatmaps provide a visual representation of a visitor’s focus, scroll depth, and clicking behavior on a webpage using data from multiple visitors. This information can reveal if an essential call-to-action is being ignored or if a less significant section of the page is diverting attention.
Session recordings enable website owners to observe the precise user interactions on their website, including the sequence of actions, their order, and duration, thereby augmenting the data provided by heatmaps.
Both tools have the potential to be effective in assessing the overall performance of your website and identifying areas that are either functioning properly or not.
6. Consider and Use Micro Conversions
The term “conversion” encompasses various actions, and the most significant ones for businesses are those directly impacting profits, like making a purchase, selecting an upgrade, or becoming a returning customer. However, it is rare for consumers to buy something during their initial visit to a website.
The initial visit is often an opportunity to persuade and convince visitors to stay longer and return in the future. Micro conversions refer to the smaller accomplishments that aid in achieving these objectives before making a purchase. These accomplishments encompass actions such as clicking on an internal link, following your brand on social media, subscribing to your email list, and downloading an eBook.
Although these actions may not have as significant an impact on your overall profit as a purchase, they still hold importance. Therefore, a effective CRO strategy should encompass these actions as well.
7. Understand the Conversion Funnel
Understanding how various conversions connect is essential for effective CRO, rather than solely focusing on the sheer volume of tracking and testing different conversions.
If a particular blog post consistently leads to conversions for your email list, but a majority of those conversions later unsubscribe without taking any additional actions, then that blog post isn’t as beneficial as the conversion numbers may indicate. On the other hand, if another post results in fewer sign-ups for your email list, but a higher percentage of those sign-ups engage further with your brand, then that post is considered more valuable.
By comprehending your conversion funnel, you can better evaluate the value of various conversions and identify broader patterns in effective strategies. Familiarity with the correlation between different actions aids in understanding the sequential choices that are highly likely to result in a purchase. This knowledge enables you to develop a more efficient marketing strategy.
8. Prevent The Bounce
One more chance to boost conversion rates is by comprehending potential actions of shoppers who may leave. For instance, if a customer selects a product name, there is a high possibility that she intends to copy and paste it into another browser tab to compare prices. If appropriate CRO tools are not utilized to identify this behavior and present an appealing substitute, you may have simply lost a customer.
By utilizing exit behavior detection technology, you can gain insights into the timing and reasons behind a shopper potentially leaving your website. This technology provides a tailored proposition that motivates them to remain on your site and complete a purchase.
9. Deploy the Brilliant Basics
Product badges, referred to as product labels or product stickers, act as effective tools for conversion rate optimization (CRO) by emphasizing products in your digital store. The badges that concentrate on social proof, scarcity, and urgency have consistently demonstrated their effectiveness.
The badge can be created by combining text or an image with creative design elements to make it visually appealing. Social proofing is a technique that demonstrates to customers what similar shoppers are purchasing, motivating them to confidently add items to their cart.
By showcasing social demand, badges have the ability to generate momentum and urgency for the desired action you want a visitor to take on a website. For instance, Crocus displayed badges on their product page indicating the number of times an item had been viewed or purchased, such as “viewed 12 times in the last 24 hours.” This implementation led to a 1.26% increase in their website conversion rate.
10. Analyze the Data you Have
A significant portion of CRO involves the gathering of data. To achieve higher conversions, it is necessary to allocate time to examine the data. Examine the data for patterns. What information can it provide regarding the interests of your audience in terms of topics and products? Does it uncover any insights about the factors influencing their decision-making process?
By first learning which CTA color or headline is most effective on a particular page, you can enhance conversion rates specifically on that page. However, comprehending the underlying reasons behind its success is crucial in utilizing that knowledge to shape the overall design of your website and guide your marketing campaigns.
Side notes
When it comes to increasing conversions along the customer journey on your ecommerce website, the methods mentioned above are only scratching the surface.
Without a doubt, the majority of consumers initiate their shopping process on either Google or Amazon. In order to effectively contend with these prominent online platforms, marketers must establish worth that extends beyond mere pricing and accessibility. Even if a website amasses a significant amount of web traffic, this is inconsequential without such added value.
