How to Quickly Boost Conversion Rates for Your Online Store
If you’re an ecommerce owner, you’re probably looking forward to the upcoming holiday season.
You’re planning your marketing campaigns carefully, maybe hiring new people to help, and waiting for more traffic to come. But you may also think it’s too late to do anything with your website to boost sales.
If that’s the case, I have good news for you! There are plenty of small tips you can follow to boost sales this holiday season.
As a UX consultant helping ecommerce businesses increase their sales, I’ve been using data analysis and A/B testing to turn visitors into buyers. It doesn’t matter if you’re a big player with a lot of traffic and thousands of reviews or you’re just taking your first baby steps in the ecommerce world – you can incrementally improve your conversion rates. And you don’t have to turn everything upside down and redesign the whole site.
In this article I will showcase a couple of real-life examples that you can use as inspiration to get the most out of the increased traffic during the upcoming months.
1. Product Page: Highlight Your Strengths
Your marketing campaigns are driving traffic to the product pages. Let’s take a look at them and analyse the options potential buyers have.
Having a choice between your store and your competitors is very convenient for consumers but let’s think about how they make the final decision?
It’s not always about the price! Safety very often comes first. Especially during the stressful holiday season – people care about timely delivery, great customer support, and a high product quality.
Letting them know you guarantee these will remove any possible doubts and convince them they should buy from you.
Real-World Example
For one of our clients, we ran a test in which we added our clients’ competitive advantages to the product page, right below the “Add to cart” button. This simple change alone increased the number of people adding to cart as well as sales.
It’s best when you have something that distinguishes you from your competitors; something that your users may need. One way to get ideas is directly from emails or phone calls with your clients-to-be: what do they ask for most frequently? Is it white-glove delivery? If you provide this service, add it to your product page.
Just make sure users understand these extra benefits right away – icons combined with a short label will do the trick. You can have entire paragraphs written about the quality of your customer support or special delivery services in ToS, but not many buyers will ever get there. So highlight the benefits on the product page, too.
2. Product Page on Mobile: Show Product Information Above the Fold
Your product page is often the very first page that users land on from your marketing campaigns. That’s why it is tempting to feature perks like fast and free shipping, discounts for new users, or money-back guarantee at the top of the page. The problem is, on mobile devices there is only so much room to feature all the elements that matter and only so much attention users can devote to each and every element.
So, what can you do?
Focus on what’s most important to the users – the product. Make sure the product’s name is easily readable and the product pictures are visible on the very first screen. Otherwise, users won’t see right away whether they’ve found what they’ve been looking for.
Real-World Example:
We A/B tested a variation of the mobile version of the product page with the “We ship fast” banner removed from the top of the page so that the page would start with the header, followed by the product image (in the original version the image came first).
The Result?
The original version had a 3.3% CR (for the “add to cart” button), the variation had a 5.1% CR. To sum up, you should of course feature all the extra value you can provide your users with, but you also need to highlight what’s most important at this particular stage. On the product page, that is the product name and its images. In addition, make sure that mobile users can enlarge the images easily.
If you don’t know how large your mobile traffic is and whether you should care – trust me, you should. Go to your data analytics tool (Google Analytics is an option or Crazy Egg, which lets you create Heatmaps of just your mobile users) and see the percentages – and ratios – for yourself.
3. Homepage on Mobile: Show Discounts Immediately
A lot of ecommerce companies have pictures of their products as the very first screen on the homepage. There’s nothing wrong with this, but on mobile, when you need to fight for visitor attention, it’s good to highlight special offers you have for them.
Some visitors find your store via organic search and their first experience with your company is your homepage. They probably even have some of your competitors’ sites open in other tabs (I know that’s how I shop!).
Now it’s your opportunity to grab their attention right away. Why should they spend more time on your site – and not your competitors’, who offer similar products? Because you have a discount for new users or international shipping or white-glove delivery – just show it off!
But make sure not to use tiny sliders that your users won’t be able to read on a mobile device. Give them a convincing incentive instead and they’ll start browsing your products.
Real-World Example:
For the furniture and home decor industry, the right look and feel is the key to success. We decided to remove the slider that was barely visible to our clients’ homepage visitors on mobile (on desktop it has been working well) and put a promotional banner there, with an easy-to-read discount code for new buyers.
The Result?
Many more visits to the product pages from the homepage! The initial 1.8% CR increased to 2.4% CR. This small change is just a first step, and we are continually tweaking to drive more traffic to the most valuable pages.
4. Product Page: Build Trust
Social proof is a powerful tool. Showing customer reviews of the product and your store somewhere on the product page will ensure that visitors see that you’re trustworthy.
But what if you don’t have enough reviews about a specific product. The answer is to focus on what you’re trying to communicate with these reviews.
Our goal is to convince users that shopping on your store is safe and that former customers can prove it! So, what we normally recommend when you’re struggling for specific product reviews is to add general testimonials about customer support, fast delivery, and careful packaging. This will help remove doubts that users may have about buying from you.
If you’re using Trustpilot or any other software to gather your clients’ opinions – that’s great! Just remember to add the reviews widget to your site. If you aren’t using any review apps yet, then maybe you can conduct a manual outreach to satisfied customers?
Real-World Example:
We built a static testimonials section for one of our clients and put it on the product page.
The Result?
We were able to increase the “add to cart” conversion rate by evoking trust in more users with this simple solution. So, remember that you don’t need to wait until you get thousands of reviews.
Of course “the more the merrier”, as they say, but every ecommerce company started with no reviews.
5. A/B Test Everything
Every ecommerce company is different, as is their target group. So you should always A/B test the current version of the homepage, product page, cart etc. against an alternative. Treat the tips above as ideas for alternatives to launch and you’ll see the results for yourself.
No matter if you’re an ecommerce owner, a designer, or a digital marketing – you can launch A/B tests all by yourself: there’s no need to add any changes to the development backlog or hire a specialist to do it for you. There are a couple of easy-to-use A/B testing tools, like Google Optimize, Crazy Egg, and others. So go ahead and test your site before the holiday season!
Pro Tip: Use Heatmaps to Analyze the Results
Before I leave you, I want to hit home how you really need to use all the tools at your disposal so you fully understand exactly what change you made that resulted in the increase in conversions.
While you get a winner using an A/B testing platform, using a heatmap tool like Crazy Egg lets you see exactly how visitors are actually interacting with each variant in your test. You’ll not only get a solid idea of what caused the improvement in your conversion rate, but also come up with new ideas for what to test next.
Put any of these tips into place? Let us know by messaging us on social media! Good luck, and happy testing.
Alina Prelicz-Zawadzka
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