7 Proven Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization Tips to Drive Sales

Do you want a quick hack to increase website conversion rates?

There might not be one, but there are some simple steps to take with your ecommerce conversion rate optimisation (CRO) to get there.

For eCommerce businesses, your conversion rate measures how many visitors to your website take the desired action, and, for most, that action drives sales. They also help you predict if your company will survive and grow in the long run.

For these and many other reasons, executing good CRO is critical to ensure that people on your website buy from you.

And we're here to help. This blog will show you what steps you should take to make sure your ecommerce site is CRO approved. Here's what we'll cover:

Ecommerce conversion rate optimization best practices

1. Start with your goals
2. Identify your target audience
3. Define your key metrics
4. Link your metrics to your conversion strategies
5. Optimize your website design
6. Focus and optimize your product landing pages
7. Use A/B testing to refine your strategies

1. Start with your goals

Knowing what you want to achieve with your ecommerce conversion rate optimisation is the first best practice to ensuring you see the desired results.

And defining your conversion goals is essential for clarity, focus, and direction.

As a first step, start with broad goals. For example: become the number one online furniture store in your area or transform patients' lives with better healthcare support.

Such large and overarching goals will influence everything from your branding decisions to marketing campaigns.

However, you want to be more specific when it comes to practical ecommerce business goals that you can start working towards.

Specific goals can be something like this:

• Increase sales conversion rate by 20% 
• Reduce cart abandonment rate by 5% Double the average order value during the holiday season, and so on. 

These are just a few examples of what specific goals could look like. Starting with the right goals will make your overall strategy more cohesive and drive the desired results.

2. Identify your target audience and website visitors

Understanding your audience is crucial part of optimizing your strategy every step of the way.

Try to figure out:

• What age range they fall into 
• What location they're in
• What their interests and preferences may be, and so on

But how do you find out this information about your target audience? 

Let the data you collect help you create detailed customer profiles.

You can get direct data from your Google Analytics, ad campaign results or your website targeting tools. Alternatively, you can also conduct surveys of your audience and look at reviews to learn more about them.

As you learn more about your target audience, you'll offer greater personalization and see better results for your business.

Having the right target audience in mind will also help you create triggers on your website and capture the potential customer at the right time with the right information.

3. Define your key metrics

Defining your metrics is crucial because it translates your store's conversion rate goals into something defined and measurable.

What should your key metrics be? Here are some main ones:

• Sales conversion rate: What percentage of visitors on your site buy from you. 
• CTA conversions: Track the number of conversions from your call-to-action buttons.
• Time on site: How long are people spending on your website?
• Unique and returning visitors: Monitor how many amazing and returning visitors your website gets.
• Engagement rate: Track the length of time people spend on your website. This could include how much of a post they read or whether they click on buttons, fill in forms, etc. 
• The average order value: the average amount customers spend in one transaction.
• Customer lifetime value: measures how much revenue your customers bring in over a lifetime.

These are just a few key metrics you should keep track of to ensure effective conversion-rate optimization.

Based on your audience and industry, you'll find some more critical than others.

For example, if you're selling a single consumer product, you might focus on sales conversions alone. But suppose you offer multiple products that belong to tiers. In that case, tracking how much a customer spends over a lifetime is useful.

Ask yourself if your metrics and KPIs fit your overall company goals. Also, do they make sense when you look at your audience?

Understanding the right metrics will help track if your eCommerce website and marketing campaigns are working correctly.

4. Link your metrics to your conversion rate optimization strategies

At this stage, you're ready to take action. 

It's time to match your marketing campaigns and other activities to actual conversions. In other words, this is where you plan your eCommerce conversion optimization strategies and link them to real actions. 

Let's take an example.

Do you want to build brand awareness for your eCommerce site? How about tracking the number of returning visitors to your website? Or the number of mentions your brand gets on social media?

These metrics can serve as proxies to show that brand awareness is growing.

Want to drive more sales? Create ad campaigns and highly-optimized landing pages. And then look at your sales numbers. Are they engaging and targeting the right people?

Tweak every aspect of this campaign to improve results.

Another way to boost sales is also to bring back users who abandoned their carts. Make sure they see a pop-up reminding them of a possible discount or a better suitable product. This will help you increase sales rates and reduce cart abandonment. 

In essence, you're linking metrics and activities with your overall goals. This is the key part of your conversion optimization strategy.

The following sections will focus on the remaining steps to help you take action, measure, and improve your efforts.

5. Optimize your website design for higher conversions

Get into the nitty-gritty of the design of your website. It is essential for higher sales and a better user experience.

Look at everything from the design to the copy, and ask yourself: is it attractive? Does it compel users to take action? Can it be better?

The bottom line is; conversions will only happen if you are up to par.

Website optimization is the first and most crucial step in all successful CRO strategies. Some steps you can follow to optimize your website are:

• Hire a UX designer and writer and get top UX writing tools to optimize the design.
• Work with talented copywriters and UX writers to optimize writing.
• Make sure the website is mobile-responsive.
• It is essential to have the right forms to capture leads. With the giosg form-builder you can optimize your web page fast and easily.

Such activities are critical to ensure that people don't leave your site as soon as they arrive.

Improving your site experience is also essential to ensure that your buyer doesn't deal with any issues when they make a purchase. 

This is one of those steps where you can't measure precisely how taking such efforts impacts your conversions. But it's inevitable that not optimizing your site is why people aren't taking action like subscribing, buying, or engaging with your brand.

So, ensure that part of your eCommerce optimization strategy is optimizing your entire site to create the most impact.

6. Focus and optimize your product pages

Whatever you're doing to drive traffic to your site, your product landing pages need to convert.

And you need to use the best marketing tactics and landing page optimization techniques to boost sales.

Here's how:

Create urgency with your offer ⏰

Creating urgency on your landing page is a great way to drive sales and boost conversions. To give visitors the motivation they need, try offering an unbeatable deal that will only be available for a limited time. 

This will set the stage for them to act now rather than later. 

Don't forget to make it an enticing offer and keep the language warm, friendly, and encouraging – your customers will appreciate it! 

Keep in mind that people are far more likely to buy when there's a sense of urgency involved, so try using strategies like countdown timers or limited-time offers to get people excited about taking advantage of what you offer.

Keep customer reviews visible ⭐️

The importance of showcasing positive reviews on landing pages can't be overlooked. 

User-generated content can make a tremendous difference, from creating credibility to building an emotional connection with customers. 

And while excellent content will help drive conversions, featuring reviews is integral to improve conversions.

Customers today depend heavily on online reviews to make their decisions - and critical rating systems like star ratings allow customers to make informed decisions quickly. 

So, if you want higher sales conversions, show off your good customer feedback and increase trust by displaying ratings prominently on your landing pages. It's a great way to start engaging with potential customers.

Make your ecommerce site checkout process easy 🛒

Shopping online is all about convenience and ease for the customer. 

When a customer has reached the point where they've taken out their card to buy something, nothing on your website should impede their progress.

Make sure popular payment methods are available so customers don't feel like they need to jump through hoops to buy. Not doing this from the start risks increasing your site's bounce rate, instead of helping you improve conversions.

There are many other key ways to get your product landing page to work. And these tips apply to your standard website pages too: 

• Add calls to action
• Showcase benefits, not features
• Stack offers to create a value bundle
• Showcase testimonials
• Use an options popup form to get users to subscribe to your newsletter so you can connect with them later.
  
  

Remember, the product landing page should be designed to spark interest in your products and services and encourage people to take action.

7. Use A/B testing to refine what increases conversions

A/B testing is an essential part of any eCommerce optimization strategy. It's a great way to improve your conversion rates and ensure you get the most out of your optimization efforts.

A/B testing allows you to compare two versions of a page (A and B) to determine which performs best.

This process involves creating multiple page versions - split testing them to see which performs best - and refining the winning version until you have an optimized page that works best for your customers.

Test the following elements in your e-Commerce site and on your ad campaigns:

• Title or headline
• Call to action copy
• Images
• Layout and design
• Page flow and so on

By testing various elements on your page, you can pinpoint the changes that have the most significant impact on conversion rates.

Next steps

Once your strategy is defined, we got you covered.

Guide your potential customers to the correct pages: If you want to make sure your customers can find the right products, services, or information for their needs quickly and easily, it's essential to ensure that you guide them in the right direction.

There are many different conversion rate optimisation tools to help you. One of them being giosg which has been designed to create optimal conversion funnels depending on your products and customer needs.

Offer AI or live assistance:

With Giosg's machine learning software, users can benefit from AI-assisted and human-assisted interactions. With giosg you can use AI technology to understand and respond to customers quickly and accurately to provide the best customer service experience and maximize your conversion.

Improve your up-selling: 

Giosg offers powerful upsell and cross-sell capabilities enabling businesses to maximize customer engagement and drive sales.

By leveraging the software's shopping cart insights, you can create personalized offers for shoppers at purchase, ensuring customers can access the best possible deals.

Just utilizing any one of these features can:

• Increase your conversion
• Increase your CTR
• Increase your Order value

Conclusion

Increasing website conversions is a vital part of any successful business. You'll have to understand the factors that drive conversions and put the right strategies and tactics in place.

Keep in mind that it takes more than one step to achieve good conversion rate for your ecommerce store. But with a little effort and creativity, you can create an effective ecommerce conversion-rate strategy tailored to your business's needs.

Get in touch with our experts to discuss more 💬😊