15 Ecommerce CRO Tactics You Can Implement Today to Increase Sales

MonsterPost Editorial

5 years ago

Making money with your online store falls into a predictable pattern. You input capital, run ads, post on social media, and write blog posts all in an effort to generate more traffic - and eventually sales.

This strategy requires you to continually find new ways to attract more and more traffic to your site so that you hopefully get more customers. But how much of that traffic are you wasting?

Your website’s conversion rate is one of the most important metrics you can track. It shows you how your marketing efforts translate into sales. And it provides insights into which marketing channels and web pages produce the best return on investment (ROI).

If you’re suffering from low ecommerce conversion rates (traffic to sales ratio), you shouldn’t ramp up your ad spend to compensate. It makes more financial sense to improve your website experience and conversion funnel to maximize sales from your existing traffic.

Here are 15 easy ecommerce CRO tactics you can implement today to increase sales.

1. Optimize Your Conversion Rate with Value Added Content (Lead Magnets)

Everyone likes a freebie.

If you’re looking for ways to increase your conversions, try adding some value with a lead magnet.

There are different kinds of lead magnets like ebooks, checklists, and templates. They offer the opportunity to capture email addresses and start a lead nurture cycle.

A good example of this is Freshdesk’s customer service resume with template and cover letter sample:

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2. Create Content that Resonates with Your Audience

Tons of content is created every day by businesses of every size and in every industry. You’re competing with professionals, hobbyists, and anyone with a computer. Because of this, your content needs to resonate with your audience.

It needs to get their attention quickly and stick with them. It helps them to identify with you as a brand and your products. You’ll see engagement levels change and barriers to conversion lower. Whether your new content strategy includes building an online course, podcast, or simply repurposing an old blog post, speaking to your audience’s needs is priority number one.

3. Get Feedback with Chatbot Surveys

Surveys have been a time-honored tradition in customer service. It’s hard to know what you’re doing wrong without getting information from the source. Throughout the years, many options have been used to deliver those customer feedback surveys but motivating people to complete them has been a pain point. If you’re filling up your customer’s inboxes but getting an underwhelming response, you should try using a chatbot to survey them before they ever navigate away.

By choosing to ask questions before the customer leaves the site and while everything is fresh in their mind, you’ll get honest answers about their experience. Understanding a user’s frustrations and needs will lead to a website and/or process edits, which will raise your conversions.

4. Grab a Visitor’s Attention with On-Trend Graphic Design

Gone are the days of unappealing, low-quality graphics and an utter lack of design. If you just created a website and it looks like it’s stuck in the early 2000s (or worse the 1990s), then you’re probably not winning a lot of new customers.

Your job is to stand out among all of the things vying for attention. Emails, social media, text messages, and other distractions mean you only have a few seconds. Using the latest graphic design trends like vivid pops of color show visitors to your site that you stay on top of what’s trending.

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Using up-to-date trends will help you improve your communication with users and impress them at the same time. It will draw them in, and convince them to learn more about your products.

Couple fantastic graphics with high-quality product photos, and you’ll have given a great user experience which is paramount since this is the only way they’ll ever interact with you.

5. Be Ready to Help with Live Chat

There’s nothing worse than having a product question or needing help during the checkout process, and have nowhere to turn.

Picking up the phone or sending an email, doesn’t address the level of urgency. Having someone on hand via Live Chat to address questions, give a friendly hello, or even offer advice has proven benefits including reducing cart abandonment and raising conversion rates.

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6. Create a Sense of Urgency with Flash Sales

A ticking timer creates a sense of urgency in most people. It’s happened to all of us before, we open an email or see a great sale while we’re browsing.

We weren’t actively looking to buy, but the price was right, and the timer gave us a classic case of FOMO.

Urgency is the perfect way to boost sales on because it removes hesitancy from the picture. If you’re going to miss out, then it’s hard to resist the “grab it before it’s gone” feeling.

7. Streamline Your Checkout Process

Have you checked your cart abandonment rates lately? If you have high abandonment, then it’s time to reevaluate your checkout process.

If it involves multiple steps, does it need to? Is all of the information contained on one page, or do you have to click “next” several times? Crazy Egg reports, “14% of shoppers report abandoning shopping carts when the checkout requests too much information.” The bottom line is people are pressed for time, and they don’t want to struggle with your form.

Stop cart abandonment and realize more sales by streamlining the process. Offer to autocomplete addresses, so they don’t have to be typed out. Keep your form short.

Instead of making your customer type everything out, give them dropdowns, radio buttons, electronic signature software, and checkboxes wherever possible so that it’s easy to breeze through checkout. Keep in mind Amazon developed 1-click checkout for a reason.

8. Provide Social Proof

Humans are social creatures. They rely on other people’s opinions and experiences for reference. The Consumerist found that 70% of consumers read online reviews before they make a purchase.

Social proof takes many familiar forms we see every day. Media mentions, testimonials, and customer reviews are just a few of the many ways to reassure your site visitors about you, your products, and your process.

Some other successful strategies are to provide real-time stats, like a little popup that says, “Chris in Washington just bought a can opener.”

For services or more complicated, case studies show customers why they’ll see improvement when they buy. Trust seals like Norton or Verisign can increase your conversions by as much as 40%. Going above and beyond to prove that you’re not the only ones saying you are great will boost your conversions.

9. Tackle Abandonment in Multiple Ways

Cart abandonment is always a struggle in ecommerce. The data proves it:

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While taking many of the other actions in this list will help you to drop abandonment, it will still happen. When it does, you should be prepared to get those users back. They were almost to the finish line.

Test a variety of methods like exit-intent popups, email reminders, and retargeting. Measure the data, and figure out what brings people back.

Tackling abandonment with strategy and data is essential because as we see in other parts of the sales process, assumptions with no data can be dangerous and detrimental to your business. Employing more than one method and actively testing the process will help you win back sales without boosting traffic.

10. Apply User Experience to the Cart

Frustrations over a shopping cart can lead to the loss of a sale. Is it easy to find the cart and take a peek inside it? How hard is it to edit the contents of the cart or see products once they’re in it. Endless clicking for simple answers is going to create a lot of friction and lead to abandonment.

Investing in a tool like UserTesting to have outsiders test your cart and provide feedback about their experience will illustrate your cart’s shortcomings and help you to find real-world resolutions. Sometimes small issues can lead to huge conversion losses.

Think about the cart functionality on your favorite sites. Use successful big names as models for your strategy and testing. Again, it’s a shame to lose someone this close to the sale. Nailing this part of the user experience will be worth it.

11. Address Shipping Prices

People don’t like to pay for shipping. Amazon Prime has spoiled consumers by getting them used to the idea that they shouldn’t have to pay for shipping.

It’s likely you made need to account for shipping in your bottom line, but build that into the price rather than charging shipping. You might even supply a free shipping option and then an upgrade to expedited shipping so that there’s always another option available for those who might need something faster.

Neil Patel says that you could see a 15-30% increase in net profit if you execute free shipping right. In his blog post on the subject, he gives plenty of tips and advice on how to test and devise the best plans to make free shipping work with your bottom line.

12. Add a Video

Not using video? Why haven’t you tried it yet? You can use them to showcase products or supply instructional guides for your products. If you haven’t already noticed, many people rather watch a video than read a paragraph.

Including a video on a landing page can increase conversions by 80%. It encourages people to stay on your page longer and gives a personal touch.

You can also do neat things like show customers around your production facility or introduce them to the team. It invites you a step further into people’s lives and helps them to trust you.

This is a strategy that Snowboard Addiction used to build a $1 million ecommerce brand:

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13. Make Products Easy to Find

How searchable is your site? Do you have product filters? How do users find products on your site?

Product filters help a user navigate to the products they’re most interested. Many people like to use more than one filter to speed up their shopping process. For instance, someone buying shoes may use filters for size, brand, and type of shoe.

Restricting filter use to just one, or not having any at all decreases the chances someone is going to stick around and find the product they want.

Filters help boost sales in another way too. They’ll help to stand out in the crowd. Offering a good filtering experience will put you in just a slim 16% of websites. Beat the competition and win the sale with the help of your filters.

14. Don’t Make People Sign In

You may want to personalize the experience or capture their name and email address, but you’re really just giving them an excuse to leave.

By forcing the issue, you’re causing your cart abandonment to go up by 29%. Not only does it slow down the process, but it also feels invasive. It’s too much of a commitment. Either make it optional or allow opt-in when the purchase is made.

15. Build a Better Content Strategy

What does your content look like? Do you currently have a strategy?

You can’t create content that resonates with your audience if you don’t have a plan. An effective content strategy framework lays the ground for all of your content which in turn draws users in.

This involves understanding your existing traffic metrics...

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And auditing your website user flow to understand research and buying patterns on your site:

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Planning properly will help you develop methods to move your visitors through the funnel all the way to purchase.

Want better content that converts? Put a plan in place that is based on data!

Conclusion

These strategies can be used separately or all together to help you improve your sales.

The bottom line is people don’t have patience, and they want things to be easy, so if you address those two pain points, you’ve already done a lot to improve your website.

Now that you know a bit more about conversion rate optimization for ecommerce take these strategies back to your own website and stop wasting all that great traffic!