Trends that drive conversion rate optimization

Do you know that most of the companies even with heavy traffic fail to increase their conversion rate & not able to create a ROI to be in the game? Such scenarios are often the result of inconsistent analysis of performance and inefficacy in taking measures to improve.

Before we delve into factors that plays a major part in increasing conversion rate at an ecommerce website. We need to understand what is ‘Conversion’ & what is ‘Conversion Rate’ first. 

For an eCommerce website; the measure of the proportion of visitor who made purchase on the website can be termed as conversion. Whereas, Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who actually bought something to the total number of visitors on the website on any particular day. Now, to maximize the conversion on website, the concept of CRO comes into play.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the application of methods/nuances aimed to increase the conversion rate of customers on website. CRO can include all the processes ranging from rigorous data analysis to review of factors driving customers to engage for a longer time on the website.

We see a lot of e-commerce websites popping out every day from every corner of the world. A process which has made it a lot easier to create websites has surely enabled most of us to own a website. In addition, it has increased the rate at which the new websites are going live on day to day basis. But the grim & undeniable truth is that not all of these websites fetch traffic of their expectation.

Marketers who want to explore CRO must be able to know how users approach a website, what they click first, what’s the chain of action, and what’s actually forming a barrier between their desire to convert and the lack of a concrete conversion. A conversion is quite a general term but it means that a goal on a website has been completed.

The goal can be to sell a product to users, for instance:

If 1,000 users get to see a web page, but only 100 of them actually convert, then we’re looking at a 10% Conversion Rate - the conversion rate is the number of times a given user has completed a goal divided by the traffic of that specific website.

Conversion Rate Optimization has one obvious goal: to improve conversion rates by leveraging the power of actual data, intense analysis, and strategically precise action.

Optimized pages

Let’s take an example to understand why optimizing pages according to the need of users is important? 

A user enters a keyword say ‘How to make Pizza’ & the search landed him on your website. But, in the absence of any relevant information on the process to make pizza, it is less likely for customers to stay longer on your website.

User landed there because of the probability of some relativity of content available on your website & their search. In such case, you would never want them to browse for some time & leave.

According to libbey bierman, working as an analyst at sageworks; Data shows that around 1% of sales revenue is generally spent by small businesses on advertising.

For an eCommerce website, Listing the features of product is important, but it’s even more important to tell potential customers exactly how your product will help them or solve their problem. Including a no questions asked refund policy on a website might result into higher conversion rate. Even with the associated risks with such practice, increased sales will usually fill the void.

Landing page- add 2^1/2 seconds rule

Landing page is typically a page where a user was redirected after clicking on some link, advertisement, or via any social sites. According to the rule, a website has at most 2.5 seconds for which any user scrolls or navigate the pages. If the website is in any way making it harder for the user to find relevant information then they will hit the back button & probably be gone forever. 

Try to put the information matching with your ads in order to keep the customer’s interest alive and curiosity to look for more on your website. According to the research carried out by ‘Google’ back in 2018, the probability of customer bouncing from mobile website increases to 123% as the page loading time goes from 1second to 10seconds. Similarly, as the number of elements goes from 400 to 6000, the probability of conversion dips to a whooping percentage of 95%.

Incorporation of ‘Call to Action’ button to appeal customers to perform action that seems as conversion worthy to you. A call to action written with ambiguous and unclear language leaves users wondering what will the consequence of their click be. This can bring frustration and eventually prevent users from clicking the button.

On the other hand, your main website button might be visually lost. Being your most important element, the one that will generate conversions, it must always be prominent.

Fix: This prominency can be achieved by making the buttons unique. Consider reorganizing the information architecture of your page by making the CTA easier to find using a primary color that will make it stand out from the crowd. Also, in the case of CTAs less means more. In fact, limiting the number of buttons on a page will make them appear important to the user. When you provide too many options, your users will likely end up in the so-called Paradox of Choice .

Reduce bounce rate

While making an effort to maximize conversion rate by increasing other measured metrics, you’d never want to increase bounce rate. In order to understand the causes of higher bounce rate, we must know what is Bounce rate first.

A/c to Google: Bounce rate is the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to analytics server.

Before you implement the strategies to reduce bounce rate, it’s good to take the help of Google Analytics to identify the pages which have higher bounce rate. After that you can take remedial measures to lower the bounce rate of website.

Working on following things might help to reduce bounce rate by a significant percentage:

• Improvements in User Experience.
• Reduce Loading Speed of web pages.
• Introduction of Useful internal & external links.
• Optimize pages for all kind of devices.
• Use of alternative navigation styles to encourage scrolling.

Organic Listing

Marketers spend a lot of time driving traffic to their website and blog pages with the hope that the target audience will join the opt-in process. But, if these destinations don’t entice prospective customers into the sales funnel and educate and convert them into customers, you are wasting your time.

Organic listing is generally the natural listing of the web pages that google has deemed valuable for searched term. Hence the goal must be to produce an informative & valuable content revolving around a key term.

Ranking on top of the search listing is a long shot but its fully worth taking.

Some of the ways to improve the organic listing of the website could be

• Use of Social Media Sites to spread the word.
• Update website on regular intervals.
• Include links to & from external/relevant websites.
• Optimize site for the search engines.

Customer Testimonials

There is no denial from the fact that customer testimonials matter a lot. Statistics have always pointed towards the importance of online reviews on e-commerce websites. According to the report of Spiegel Research Centre; published back in 2017, around 95% of shoppers read reviews for product specific information.

Psychology also plays a major role in making reviews even more important. We as human beings tend to seek social proof to reassure ourselves on the basis of other individual’s experience. Thus, outlining customer reviews on the product page might help to influence decision of your prospective clients.

Implementation of A/B testing on the website

It is a comparison of two versions of a single variable to test the efficacy in terms of conversion rate on the website. However, there is one inherent limitation that comes with such practice. The test only tells you about the alternative which worked for majority and got you more conversions. It does not consider the opinion of people for whom the changes brought by A/B testing didn’t even matter and had some other reasons to leave the website.

In start, for some marketers it was an acceptable gamble that would not cost the business much. But, after all, shouldn't we want to implement the result that works for everyone & yields maximum conversions.

At last, there are no golden rule or standard recipe that could guarantee you maximum conversions. Rather, it’s a process of relentless work and constant testing implemented over a period of time with regular analysis of output.