In eCommerce, conversion is one of the key metrics , since it measures the sales efficiency of your online store and allows you to determine how much profit you are capable of generating for a certain level of traffic.
After reading the latter you may think: “increasing sales is as simple as increasing traffic”.
This is the first mistake we should not make. To begin with, this entails continually increasing investment in deposits. Consequently, it will increase the acquisition costs, ending up not being profitable to win one more sale.
This is why conversion is usually a much more profitable lever to work with. It does not depend on such a continuous investment over time and what we invest will accompany us in the future.
In this article we are going to see 9 proven tips to improve the conversion of your online store.
Table of Contents
1. Use Quality Product Photographs
In eCommerce “photography is the product”. Given the impossibility of touching the product that we are going to buy, we need to be able to transmit all the details and peculiarities of our product through visual material such as photographs.
Use good product photographs, increase the number of them number for each product, show different angles or details, retouch them or even offer “zoom”. There are many ways to improve the quality of product photos perceived by our potential buyers. This will bring us an increase in additional sales by multiplying several factors of the conversion in the product sheets.
2. Use A Good Search Engine For eCommerce
Most eCommerce platforms have an internal search engine integrated. Magento, Hybris, WooCommerce, etc. These fulfill the function of returning a product related to the user’s search.
However, the quality of these search engines is disastrous. On many occasions they do not return as many products as they should or even do not respond. This is because they are not able to manage the use of synonyms, understand/correct misspellings or understand what the user is asking for.
Although the search engine is used by a relatively small percentage of our visitors, users who use the internal search engine convert 382% more than the rest of our eCommerce visitors. which makes the internal search engine a great generator of sales for many businesses.
To have a clear example of the impact of the search engine, I recently attended a talk by the Mercadona Tech team who are in charge of the new Mercadona online store and they themselves explained how 27.99% of the products that are added to the shopping cart The purchase in Mercadona is done from the search engine of the online store .
3. Capture The Emails Of The Users Who Are Going To Leave Your Online Store
A very valuable resource for any eCommerce is its email database of interested buyers and users. This is so because email continues to be one of the channels that generates the most sales for consolidated eCommerce.
On the other hand, when we attract a new user to our store through CPC campaigns, we are investing money for this visit. If the user leaves without buying, we cannot make that visit profitable. One way to achieve a certain profitability of the visit is to get them to leave us the email so that we can put it in the “wheel” of emails, both newsletter and retargeting (recovery of abandoned carts, visits, etc.) to finish leading the user to buy from us.
That is why before the user leaves our store without buying, we can show him a pop-up asking him to leave us his email in exchange for sending him a discount or assuring him that we will keep him informed of relevant promotions. We call these “exit-intent” pop-ups because we use technology that allows us to detect when the user is about to leave the page (moves to the top bar where they can close the browser tab or window).
4. Integrate Visual Content Generated By Users
Users trust other users similar to them much more than what the brand itself tells them . That is why, in recent years, all the techniques that have to do with Social Proof have become very popular, such as testimonials, product reviews, ratings, etc.
On the other hand, our customers today are already sharing photos of our products on social networks, especially on Instagram, where it is very common to see our friends showing off their latest purchases, whether they are clothing or technology.
Putting both elements together we find the visual “UGC” or “User Generated Content”, or what some call “Visual Commerce”. By integrating any of these platforms in our online store, such as the platform of the Spanish company Photoslurp , we will be able to show photographs of our products that have been published by our buyers on their Instagram account, quickly and effortlessly, thus increasing the conversion of our eCommerce by being able to show many more “views” of our products and also being able to show the products in use by real people.
5. It Offers Financing For High-Value Purchases
One of the main conversion stoppers is, without a doubt, money . Sometimes we like a product but it costs too much for us to pay for it “tocateja”, on other occasions we can afford the outlay but it is difficult for us to self-justify spending a large amount on a product that we want but that is not essential …
Obviously, paying for the product generates significant friction between the buyer and the seller and many sales are stopped for this reason.
Now, if we manage to convert a purchase of €500 into 10 payments of €50, the psychological perception of the cost of the product is greatly reduced , and with it the probability of completing the sale (in short, the conversion), increases.
The good thing is that today we can integrate services such as Aplazame that allow us to offer instant financing for our products (all of them, or a selection of them based on the amount) to our clients, thus facilitating decision-making.
6. Recover Abandoned Carts
The cart abandonment rate in Spain in the last year stands, on average, at 73.5%. This implies that of every 100 purchase processes that are initiated in an online store by adding a product to the cart, only 26.5% complete the purchase , and in the rest of the cases that purchase intention vanishes for one reason or another.
Fortunately, the problem of cart abandonment is a problem that has a clear solution, such as the automation of cart recovery shipments . These shipments are usually made between 20 minutes and 1 hour after abandonment, contain all the products in the cart and encourage the user to complete the purchase .
The effectiveness of these emails is very high, since between 10% and 25% of the emails sent usually end in a purchase (the challenge is always to have as many emails from our visitors as possible, which is why we commented in this same article the interest of using capturing pop-ups when an “exit-intent” occurs). And with this we can significantly increase the conversion and sales of our eCommerce.
7. Offer Visual Customer Service
One of the things that online sales lack is the figure of the “grocer”. That person who is interested in you in a physical store and is able to find the best products for you, listens to your needs and helps you make a purchase decision.
Although this is difficult to replicate in the online channel, with the use of visual customer service technologies such as Oct8ne’s co-viewer , we can partially simulate this experience thanks to being able to see the same thing that your customers are seeing on the screen, being able to interact with them and help them move forward in the purchase process.
8. Use Product Videos
Today, most of our clients are very used to consuming information in video format. This format is very interesting because it allows you to absorb a lot of information very quickly and it is also much easier to convey the full potential of a product in a video than in a single image or text description of a product.
Product videos have many advantages, from increasing conversion on the product sheet to getting new visitors to our website thanks to the positioning of videos on huge traffic channels such as YouTube. That is why they are a brutal resource at our disposal to improve the conversion and sales of our eCommerce.
9. Flip The Funnel
We end up with something that is not a technology to be integrated, but a concept to be exploited. The best way to continuously improve your conversion is to “ turn the funnel around ”.
This consists of starting by focusing on the final part of the funnel. In this case, we will maximize the number of people who have bought from the traffic you already have on your website. Once you have it optimized, go to the previous phase (product search) and work on it thoroughly. Finally, we would focus on improving forms of recruitment.
If we follow this approach, we will be able to reduce our acquisition investment to achieve the same (or better) sales, purchase experience and we will frustrate the team much less.
Conclusions
In this article we have reviewed 9 tips to increase the conversion of your eCommerce. Each of them can bring us a significant improvement in our conversion. If we apply them all, little by little, with criteria and a good strategy behind it. At the end of everything, we will be able to multiply our online sales considerably and reduce the acquisition costs.
Also Read: Global Trends In Brand Management
