Why Conversion Rate Optimization is Vital for eCommerce Success

New tools emerged in the market in the first half of the last decade that enabled internet marketers to experiment with their website layout and content variations to determine which design, text, template, offers, or images work the best. This sort of optimization accelerated further in the latter half with the introduction of Google Website Optimizer. CRO, which holds the secret to a website’s overall structure, then became crucial to every firm’s digital marketing strategy.

The science behind conversion is what holds the key to dramatically turning your website into a money making, profit churning venture, which’ would then translate into the highest revenues. Sit back and read on, as we take you in the most awe-inspiring journey of leads to subscribers to sales. The process by which a business increases the percentage of website visitors who convert on available offers. Turn the guest visitors into loyal buyers. The small changes made will now translate to major conversions, furthering more revenue.

The KPI that evaluates the performance of your site and the percentage of users that visited the website and did something productive that benefited your business. The conversion rate can also be defined as the percentage of visitors who complete a goal, as set by the site owner. It’s all about keeping those visitors, getting them to click on more pages and eventually make the conversion. If website sales or lead generation activities don’t provide a healthy ROI, your business is doomed.

Across multiple platforms, varied demographics, segmented or product wise. Whichever is your reference point to draw an in-depth inference of your customer pattern, it should all culminate into one thing, and that is to help you to penetrate your customer’s mindset better.

The conversion rate can become user segmented, such as device, demographic, location, new vs. returning visitor and so on, which in turn may give the wrong impression and any changes made from that, will result in an uneven outcome — a scenario that will likely see more damage done. Hence its vital to know that any variations made will differ, as we move from one reference point to another.

CRO is a data-driven discipline to revamp your website and make it more appealing to your visitors. Test and analyze user behavior, understand lead generation patterns, streamline paths to conversion. Dive in, research, analyze, and apply the findings to a material effort that gets you real results. CRO provides a useful benchmark and prompts the retailers that it is helpful to measure product page views when making design improvements.

Deploy testing mechanisms either in real time or after studying your audience in detail. Either way, the approach, is to proceed after scrutinizing the ecommerce market. So, pretest and then go ahead or test simultaneously to see which way the traffic is more likely to improve. Producing more revenue from the existing website traffic is the sole agenda. Every ecommerce leader deserves a clear path to drive that maximum revenue from their current marketing efforts. CRO steers you in the right lane, does the appropriate audit, plans and equips you with the tools to help you perform better.

Study visitor behaviors and create a model that reflects that. A precise understanding of every minuscule facet of your websites dynamics to set a plan that will yield the highest returns. Study all the key metrics that prevent conversion and make incremental changes that help to boost the visitor to buyer ratio and in turn the sales of your company. The right strategy can give you a colossal edge in the market, which then helps you to excel.

In summary, CRO is a robust framework that is based on metrics, data, and testing; designed to systematically, incrementally, and consistently improve marketing results. It’s data-driven all the time, and when done right, it always builds exponentially, generating a high ROI. An important measure of CRO is to ensure that no content is wasted and pretty much every visual holds the right amount of credibility, to tempt the visitor into spending more time. An immersive experience like that will shake the rust and put the zing back on your website.

Micro- conversions are the one in which only a percentage of your preset goal is fulfilled. It moves the visitor nearer to target but is yet to translate into a full-fledged order. A newsletter, subscription emails, basic registrations, watched a tutorial video, followed you on social media and showing a moderate leaning towards the products offered. Maybe even willing to spend more time on the site compared to other transient visitors.

Macro-conversions are the more concrete changes that will benefit you in the long run. The biggies that will check an offer and check out, instead of free roaming the site and then exiting. They might buy a product, subscribe to the services, or fill out a lead form. These are the ones you want to study, invest and grab at all costs. The way they maneuver the site may help you to penetrate the psyche of every spending consumer and then just set your website around that.

Imagine hitting all the corners and still find your website in a convoluted mess. Not knowing where to begin and what glitches to address can be quite problematic. Which is why, you’d need a robust protocol before you set out to make any major upgrades and this requires an awareness of your website’s hot spots, the best triggers for visitors, areas that lag, responsive regions and numerous other facets. Once this is in place, an appropriate algorithm will dish out the best approach.

Randomly retuning the site could result in awkward outcomes, which may not be the most rewarding. However, considering the right pre-requisites before implementation will result in a greater good, thus a better chance of elevating your website. To improve the scale and effectiveness of an online campaign, it is mandatory that a considerable amount of data has been collected beforehand, before varying anything on the site. Determine what pulls the crowd and then execute any modification.

Not only that but CRO even helps you to take advantage of existing traffic without spending a dime on ads., the visitors will indicate what pleasures them more. Better understand your customers wants and needs and improve brand perception accordingly. Hence, we recommend CRO, the best practice that evaluates the sensitive points, customizes the strategy to the browsing habits of visitors and ensures the methodology used will cater to precisely that. A natural consequence of this is, no area on the site will serve as a vacuum and visitors will get something meaningful out of every inch of content present on the site.

As you gather more data, maybe even look for patterns. Most of the customers either find you via social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on or read your About page before searching at your inventory. You can use that information to boost conversion rates.

• Use Indirect Content to grab interest; something that swerves from the focal point of your site and yet somehow conveys the worth of your product and therefore helps to gain your visitor's trust, leverage keywords and pick topics that will push you up in search engine rankings. Topics you know your audience is gravitating towards.
• Use direct content, that highlights the product as it is. Selling a sneaker, then make sure to have a video that details the intricate craftsmanship on the shoe. Tell whatever is pivotal to your brand, this is the data that is not disposable, and regardless of how you design your site, this would surely have to be featured somewhere.
• Have a chat box that converses with fluidity, know that even a momentary indecisiveness may stall the decision to buy. Whereas, having some reliable immediate consultation will be a great way to suppress that confusion.
• Graphical content that appeals to every clique. Rich media is the perfect thing that appeals to everyone. From GIF’s, images to infographics; have a variety of these and your guest will now be tempted to browse around, even more, a natural consequence of which is an immediate order placement.
• Extensive yet minimalistic written content that summarizes the nature of your business and delivers the most polished template of every product you manufacture. It is vital that you summarize wherever is needed, to ensure an adequate description sits on the side of the topic for referral at any given time. Sprinkle links where possible and even use big subheads to keep people reading, hence invested.
• SEO your site. Keywords that drive traffic will ultimately bring more visitors, and more visitors means a higher likelihood of order placements, that’s conversion rate accelerating. Follow the best SEO practices and get more targeted traffic for your site. Ensure the cherry-picked keywords fit like a glove on the products you sell. Optimize your product pages. From head terms, meta tags, long tail keywords, keyword rich uniform URL’s, descriptions, and every other factor you could use to own your SEO strategy.
• An overall site revamp is necessary from time to time. An outdated interface will be the most repulsive thing for any visitor. Don’t overuse promotions to clutters the pages and end up lowering the site's usability. Re-tool your site with proper care and incorporate the finest elements to stay in fashion. A restored website makes it easier for the user to navigate the website.
• Subscriptions and newsletters are the perfect reminder tools to inform your visitors, grab that mail-id and shoot some bedazzling yet informative content their way. They’d surely click on one of them and land on the site. Once there, you could sucker them in even more but of course if you have everything sorted on the site first.
• Introduce revolutionary new ways to draw the visitor back. Augmented Reality to Artificial Intelligence is the new go to. If you want the site traffic to peak then you should probably invest a good amount in these latest fads, then sit back and relax as the visitors appreciate the inclusion of modern tech and the unmatched life-like awareness it gives to the customer, which in turn helps with the selection and then with the sales.
• Simplify, smoothen and minimize the processes where possible, from registration to checkout reduce the complexity at each stage to make it easier for the user to accomplish each task. Make signups easy and if possible, allow the option to guest checkout.
• Conduct surveys and listen to your user base. Their feedback will help you to create a platform that is more in sync with their needs. Let, what they desire dictate your website’s structure go ahead. Factoring this will likely see a spike in your visitors browsing time and the longer they stay, the more likely it is that they’ll place an order.
• Run enough promotions. Schemes, lucrative discounts and festive offers show that you want to honor the special occasions and make it a memorable one for the buyers seeking something. You go about that by running sales that will tempt people into not just coming but purchasing something. In the end, you have impressed a casual visitor and turned him into a prolific buyer. Add value-add benefits see your site blossom like never.
• Testimonials are a great way to validate the extent of your services, from your responsive actions, the quality of products sold, to the delivery channels used. All elements will see a significant boost when one of your previous customers vouches for the same. Only go ahead with the genuine ones and do not try and fabricate something to add value to your site.
• Use A/B testing where possible, send out different versions and arrive at the most preferred one, which would be the one that performs the best. Dish out alternatives of every design element to find out which one carries the most weight and out that in place immediately. This allows you to measure the differences and invest in polishing the most desirable elements.
• The most pivotal pages on your website, such as your landing pages, product pages or even the about me page deserve special attention. Run heatmap analysis on those pages to see where people click and how they go about using that page. You can then optimize the same for maximum conversions.
• People abandon transactions if the experience is not designed for mobile devices. Be mobile ready and ensure every new page comprises of features that are in sync with the mobile layout. Nearly half of your consumers discover things on the smartphones before the tablet and desktop demographic. So, create a site whose mobile view condenses pleasantly without leaving out any essential elements. Realize the worth and adjust to the smaller screens ASAP.
• Analytics gives critical insight into how your website is looking, read the early signs and accommodate the changes. Look at the country of origin, landing and exit pages, scroll depth, average time on page, pages per session, most popular pages, etc. Helpful information from this assessment will assist you in bringing out a site that is, even more, user-friendly. Learn from user behavior and feature popular products that drive sales. Use CRO tools like Crazy Egg, Clicky and also Google Analytics to keep track.

Harness the power of all this, and you’d have designed an ecommerce portal that transcends the mere definition of selling and becomes an immersive experience, which is bound to leave a concrete impact on every visitor. Leverage your data and successfully nail your audience’s likes and dislikes, their needs with a variety of content offerings, create a great user experience that helps potential customers to find what they’re looking for with ease. The result will be a host of potential customers that will willingly come to the site.

The bottom-line, whatever you do, try and convert your prospects into qualified leads anyhow. The untapped data on your website could potentially hold substantial info on your customers, do not let it go to waste. Indulge in proper planning with the right CRO tools and software, to gauge consumer behavior and implement the same across effortlessly. Done right, you’d witness the bounce rates go down and the sales escalating in no time. Yes, that’s right every effort is geared towards one thing, and that is to maximize your sales by converting visitors to leads.