Building and running an online business successfully takes a lot. It therefor becomes extra more frustrating when someone leaves your shop without buying anything, whether you are getting them via content marketing, paid ads, or any other sources. A high traffic site is worthless if visitors are not converting into loyal customers. This is why optimizing your website, landing pages and ad copies is important. Understanding your conversions rates is the first step to your e-commerce site’s success.

An e-commerce conversion is recorded when a desired event occurred on your site. This is more often a sale, however, it might be sometimes adding products to cart or signing up for a newsletter. All these actions encourage your leads to go through the site’s sales funnel.

Some of the most common conversion metrics for an e-commerce website include:

• purchase from the site
• adding products to the cart
• adding an item to the wishlist
• signup for newsletter
• social media shares
• any KPI your business counts valuable

By calculating the conversion rate based on these attributes you can understand if your strategies correspond with your company’s goal or if it needs to be changed.

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) refers to how effectively you convert your website visitors into paying customers, leads, or other metrics by the actions they take on your site. CRO is only one metric among many that can—and do—determine the success of your website, and a high conversion rate does not necessarily equal business success. After all, a website that has had only one visitor would have a conversion rate of 100% if that visitor converted, but a single conversion will not keep the doors open. Relevancy, relationship, your business vertical, cost of your product, cost-to-value ratio, copywriting and user experience all influence your conversion rate.

Hierarchy of conversions

Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, CRO has a hierarchy of conversions. The basic functionality of your website makes up the foundational layer and runs all the way up to the most specific CRO tweaks and adjustments. To quickly run through the different steps in the CRO hierarchy starting at the bottom and working our way to the top. Is your site functional, accessible, usable/user-friendly, intuitive and persuasive? When optimising your site for conversions, it’s important to start with the first step (functional) and make sure that is fully covered, before moving on to the next step and so on. Once you have these basic needs covered, you can apply the following tips to further increase your CRO:

1. Communicate your value proposition – This should clearly communicate the benefit, or value, that the product or service in question will provide. You want to make your website visitors feel like they want what you offer.
2. Improve page speed – Page speed is a prominent part of the core web vitals that Google intends to add to their existing search signals. Remove unnecessary formatting and properly size and format your page images to ensure your page is ready when your customers want it.
3. Streamline page design – Distractions can stop your customers’ journey to the check-out page dead in its tracks, so don’t bombard your page visitors with too much at once! An efficient, streamlined page design not only looks more professional but also makes your customers feel like they’re in control of their site navigation.
4. Mobile-first strategy – Assume your customers will buy using their mobile devices and then design your site and strategy accordingly. A site that’s attractive and easy to navigate on mobile puts you in a prime position the moment your potential customers are ready.
5. A/B test your messaging – The words you use on your site can have a huge impact on your conversion rate. The language you use must speak to your ideal customers and demonstrate an authoritative understanding, not just of your brand and product or service, but of their needs as customers.
6. Social proof – social proof is merely people doing what they see other people doing. It’s why we’re more likely to try a new restaurant if we see that many others are eating there. Make testimonials and positive user reviews readily available and visible on your site to let potential customers know they’re not in uncharted waters.

Happy selling!

The Publisher Management Team