Conversions are the most significant element of running an ecommerce store. After all, your goal is to sell as many items as possible and make high profits. Yet, many ecommerce entrepreneurs do not focus on their website’s conversion rates and struggle to reach the projected benchmarks. Even if your website is attracting tons of traffic, your conversion rate will decide the eventual success of your brand.
Again, there’s no point in having thousands of customers on a web page when only a few of them are actually buying the product.
So, what you can do to ensure your website’s conversions are up to the mark. The answer is – conversion rate optimization. For readers who don’t know conversion rate optimization is the process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who actually complete their purchase – in short, getting more conversions.
But, it’s worth pointing out that improving the conversion rate is not a piece of cake, especially if you’re running your e-commerce shop using a competitive tool like Shopify. With 825,000 active Shopify stores, your conventional marketing tactics aren’t going to work in beating the competition.
To make your job easier, we have compiled a list of the top 10 most effective ways to improve your Shopify store’s conversions and keep your profit on the higher side.
10 Conversion Rate Optimization Tactics to Increase Your Shopify Store’s Conversions
1. Simplify the Shopping Experience
As opposed to the conventional belief, simple website architecture is the best way to engage shoppers. Of course, visual elements help you make a great first impression, but too many of such elements can also backfire in some situations. Not to mention, they’ll crowd your website and probably slow down the loading speed.
That’s why it’s always advised to keep the website architecture as simple as possible. Everything should be clearly visible to the customers and they should be able to find products within seconds. An easy way to do this is to improve the overall navigation of your website.
Start by choosing a Shopify theme that comes with a static navigation bar at the top. This will allow you to link all your category pages in the bar, allowing shoppers to reach a particular product page in no time. In case you are selling thousands of products, you can also add sub-categories for better navigation.
The goal should be to help customers reach a particular product page in not more than 3 clicks. Once your website’s navigation is up to the mark, you’ll automatically start seeing a growth in the overall sales.
2. Optimize the Checkout Page
Do you know the average cart abandonment rate? Before you make any wild guesses, let me give you the exact answer….it’s 69.82%. It means more than half of the shoppers on an ecommerce store never complete the purchase.
Now, there are several factors that might cause a shopper to abandon their cart in the final stage of the sales funnel. However, the most common reason behind the high cart abandonment rate is a lengthy checkout process with too many fields. Take a look at the checkout page and validate the significance of each field.
In case you see any unnecessary text fields, remove them immediately so that customers can experience a quick checkout process. You can also add a checkout progress bar to give customers an idea about how many steps are remaining to complete the checkout.
Finally, your checkout page should include multi-payment support to help customers complete the payment using their preferred method. These small elements will enhance the overall shopping experience for customers and you’ll start seeing a drop in the cart abandonment rate.
3. Use Pop-Ups to Share Exclusive Discounts and Coupons
As soon as a new customer lands on your home page, you have the opportunity to encourage them to make a purchase. An easy way to do this would be to display a pop-up to showcase special discounts and offers you’re currently running on the website.
Customers are always looking to buy items at heavy discounts. Studies reveal that 93% of online shoppers use a coupon code or sign up for a discount program while shopping online. This showcases that by offering simple discounts, an ecommerce entrepreneur can easily double the overall sales of their stores.
But, how do you notify new customers about these special discounts? Yes, you guessed it right – by triggering pop-ups on the home page itself. Showcasing the special discounts for new customers right on the homepage will allow you to hook the shoppers right from the beginning and navigate them through the entire sales funnel.
4. Use High-Quality Content for Customer Engagement
If you go to any ecommerce SEO guide, you’ll see that adding relevant content on product pages is a common tactic that everyone talks about. However, we would like to point out that content should not be limited to just your product pages.
You can also leverage it as an effective marketing tool to spread information and establish authority. Using your Shopify builder, set up a dedicated blog page on your website and make sure to publish regular blogs from time to time. The more blogs you publish, the easier it’ll become to engage your customers and build authority.
Publishing blogs will also benefit your website in terms of search engine visibility as it’ll allow you to optimize the website for more keywords. Once your blogs start appearing in Google search results, you can easily direct the traffic to your product pages via internal linking.
5. Add Intelligent Search Bars
Search bars are a great tool for any ecommerce store. They not only help customers find the desired products more quickly but also provide suggestions to find similar items. If you’re using Shopify as your ecommerce platform, adding intelligent search bars will be a hassle-free task.
With third-party tools like Findify and Instant Search+, you can also make your search bar more adaptive so that it can provide relevant suggestions as soon as customers type in a few keywords.
This way customers will be able to find a particular product right away without having to look through the categories and subcategories in the navigation bar.
6. Optimize Product Pages
The actual product page is where shoppers make a decision on whether to buy a particular item or not. So, it’s extremely crucial to optimize the product pages so that they don’t push away the customers in frustration.
To get started, always make sure to use high-quality product images to give a visual representation of your products. You can also add 360-degree pictures to help customers see the item from every angle.
In case you are selling electronic gadgets that require some sort of installation, you can also add a tutorial video to make the product page more user-centric. In any case, the more high-quality pictures you publish on the product pages, the easier it’ll get to captivate the customers.
Another way to optimize product pages on a Shopify store to unlock higher conversion rates is to add relevant product descriptions. Descriptions are a great way to pinpoint the USPs and key features of a particular product and help customers decide if it’s right for them or not.
7. Use Limited-Time Offers
Limited-time offers can be an effective tool in alluring your potential customers. With limited-time offers, you can easily trigger the feeling of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) in customers and encourage them to avail these offers before others.
When it comes to running limited-time offers, you don’t necessarily have to offer huge discounts. Something as simple as ‘free shipping if one orders in the next two hours will also work like a charm and help you get more sales.
To notify customers about these limited-time offers, you have the liberty to choose from different available options. You can set up email marketing campaigns or use push notifications to alert customers about these exclusive offers.
If your ecommerce store only has a web presence, you can use pop-ups on the homepage or the particular product page to notify customers about your limited-time deals.
8. Always Stay Upfront About Shipping and Additional Charges
Nearly 26% of customers abandon their shopping cart after seeing additional shipping charges on the checkout page. Shoppers don’t like being double-crossed. As an ecommerce entrepreneur, your goal should be to build trust among your consumers.
That’s the only way to acquire recurring customers. One of the easiest methods to build trust among your shoppers is to be upfront about all the charges right from the beginning. Adding unnecessary charges during the checkout will only frustrate the customers and make them furious, resulting in a higher cart abandonment rate.
9. Use Customer Reviews as Trust Signs
A study by Testimonial Engine reveals that 72% of shoppers will never purchase a product until they’ve read the customer reviews. By displaying customer reviews on your online store, you can easily engage new customers and aid them in their shopping decision.
On your Shopify store, you can add the customer reviews on each product page and also let customers filter these reviews using different metrics including the latest, positive, negative, etc. These reviews will build trust factors with your new shoppers and acquire long-term clients.
10. Use 404 Pages to Improve Your Store’s Navigation
When you are managing a large-scale ecommerce store, it’s most likely to have several 404 pages. Since it’s not possible to delete all these dead-end pages, you can leverage them to make your store more navigable. By optimizing 404 pages, you’ll be able to redirect customers to relevant product pages and keep them engaged within the sales funnel.
The Bottom Line
Getting higher conversions is an eventual goal of every ecommerce business, be it a small-scale online shop or an extensive marketplace like Amazon. However, due to the fierce competition in the industry, it’s quite challenging for business owners to improve their conversion rates. It’s not impossible, though.
With the right approach and a well-strategized plan, you can easily optimize your website to acquire better conversions. The above-mentioned tactics are only the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of other ways to improve the overall conversion rate of your ecommerce store. You can also hire professional SEO experts to devise a personalized Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) campaign to turn potential leads into conversions.
