Optimizing Your Store: Conversion Rate [S02.E01]

Why do people shop online? The main reason is to save money! With online commerce one can save not only money but also time, cause you can make purchase whenever it’s convenient... you can place order late at night and customer support assistant with call you back in the morning to confirm your purchase. At any online store you can find a way more products than in any other mall/supermarket/shop. The whole process of checkout is much easier: there is no need to wait your turn on the check desk, no need to be hunted by sales people. What’s more, one saves gasoline when bringing the product home, if it’s a physical product.

With all that said, why not to make the shopping experience more comfortable for both sides? Here everyone will benefit from optimization that's why the article you are reading right now is dedicated to optimization of online stores. This is a series of articles, the first part we've published not so long ago and it was about key metrics of Web Analytics.

List of themes we cover within this series:

• Understanding Online Store Performance. Key Metrics.
• Optimizing Your Store:
  • Conversion Rate;
  • Bounce Rate;
  • Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates;
  • Add to Cart Rates;
  • Email Marketing;
  • Re-targeting.

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If you have an online store then you definitely know what conversion is, but still let’s recollect what it is and which sauce to serve it with.

Conversion is a ratio of visitors who completed any target action divided by the total number of visitors of the site.

Ex: You’ve got an online store, assume that 500 unique visitors reach your store daily, during this time 7 lucky customers acquire your products. In this case, percentage of conversion of visitors and customers is 1.4 (7 sales/500 visitors * 100 = 1.4%). Successful conversion is understood differently by sellers, advertisers or content providers:

Image Credit: Calculator by Shutterstock

• for online merchants conversion is successful purchase made by a user who clicked relevant banner ad;
• for content provider conversion can be successful registration on the website, subscription to the mailing list, downloading of the software or any other action required.

Measuring Conversion

For websites whose purpose is offline call to action (such as, shopping or a phone call), it may be somehow difficult to count conversion - phone call or trips to the store are not tracked via website. In this case, the solution is following:

• make polls for visitor asking them where they found out about your company;
• place phone number for free calls and track it;
• mark phone number with the contact name, the number of requests on behalf of the calculated number of calls.

Ways to Increase Conversion in eCommerce

Among various methods of conversion following ones are the most significant:

• provide your customers with selling points, telling all the pros of your products, your company and why need to buy stuff at your store;
• improve your content (including text, images, 3D-models of your products, add videos, etc.);
• improve website usability thus reducing all bumps and jumps that decrease conversion;
• improve website navigation, user must not spend extra time and effort thinking where to click;
• form image of reliability by posting logos of companies with a good reputation, in case you resell their products;
• every page of the site should contain clear and simple call to action in the form of text, images, buttons, feedback forms, etc.;
• post information that proves reliability and quality of your services: user reviews, product certifications, photographs of how your products are made, etc.

What’s more? With the growing popularity of an online store, at the same time grows its core of constant visitors. These are the people who make constant purchases at your store and recommend it to their friends. In future, the share of the core visitors can be up to 10% from the total number of visitors, and up to 50-70% on a day after sending well-decorated email to subscribers (with new items, discounts, etc. ) Conversion of the core visitors is much higher than with other users, and in some cases, daily number may exceed 20-25%.

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Now it’s time to get deeper into this subject, we’ve selected some really useful articles on this very topic, feel free to check them out!

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54 Conversion Rate Optimization Tips to Improve Your PPC Campaigns

54 tips broken down by category: Testing Methodology, Landing Pages, Ads, Sign Up Process & Checkout Process.

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5 Highly Effective Landing Page Tips

Marketers are still way behind in their landing page improvement efforts. This article gives a push in the right direction with effective & proven landing page elements and examples.

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11 Simple (But Critical) Tips for Creating Better Landing Pages

The 11 best practices every marketer should consider when setting up and optimizing landing pages.

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5 Tips for Landing Page Optimization Success from Tim Ash

To give you a taste of the conversion rate optimization here are 5 great pieces of advice from Tim Ash.

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Pretend You Are a Mute Salesman and 3 Other Tips to Help Your Landing Page Convert

Sure, your landing page design is one of the most beautiful we have ever seen, but it sucks at converting. Sometimes you need some good strategical, psychological marketing tactics. Here are 3. Well, actually there are 4.

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30 Quick & Clean Conversion Optimization Techniques for Buttons, Forms, Copy, Shopping Carts etc.

‘Quick & Clean’ conversion tips broken down by buttons, forms, copy, shopping carts, typography & metrics.

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Craving to know more? Here you go, couple slideshows to get more info on conversion. These guys did a great job while creating these presentations. Feel free to watch them.

Gruesome conversion-killing mistakes

By Conversion Rate Experts

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Maximizing conversion with checkout optimization

By Elastic Path

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The Anatomy of the Perfect Landing Page

By J-P De Clerck

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Natural born conversion killers - Conversion Jam

By Craig Sullivan

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Using Psychology to Increase e-Commerce Conversion

By Joe Rowlinson

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SPEAK UP:)

Now it's your turn to speak. If you have an online store, informational website or a blog what kind of optimizations you implement? And what's your opinion, the future is for minimal thus highly usable websites or for maximum loaded with various technological solutions making 'em real headache for developers?