How To Increase Your Ecommerce Conversion Rates
How To Increase Your Ecommerce Conversion Rates
Table of Contents
Are you losing 65% of your traffic in the checkout funnel? Checkout abandonment is one of the major problems of eCommerce websites. In this article, I am going to teach you how to increase your eCommerce conversion rates. This article is going to be structured into four sections, I’m going to talk about acquisition, I’m going to talk about landing pages, then I’m going to talk about the checkout funnel and how you can improve conversion in your checkout funnel.
Then I’m going to talk about the thank you page, how you can optimise it. My name is Femi Olajiga, I’m a digital marketing strategist with over 13 years of experience. If you’re new to my website, kindly subscribe to my YouTube channel, and then click on the bell notification so you can get updated videos in future.
Your Ecommerce Conversion Rates Depends on Quality Website Traffic
You want to make sure that you’re getting quality traffic to your eCommerce landing pages. You want to make sure that your keywords that you’re targeting are not broad match keywords. If you’re looking to create awareness, then you need to be careful where you spend money on. You can get awareness from Facebook, YouTube video content and cheaper acquisition channels, but for expensive campaigns, you want to make sure that you have the exact match keyword matching with your landing page. So, once you have targeted keyword, then you also want to make sure that the landing page that you’re using is aligned with your keyword strategy.
Targeted and Optimised Landing Pages
The key word that people click on in your Google ads, SEO links or whichever campaign you’re sending traffic from, matches with the landing page they land on. The page header needs to have the target keyword within the title. The subtitle also needs to have benefits and features to hook the customer when they land on your pages. And below your heading, you want to make sure that you have very visible and high quality images.
The image needs to communicate. Whatever you can do to the image to communicate the benefits and the features of the product, that will go a long way to increasing your conversion. Then one other thing you want to include on your landing page is a video. Video is known to increase landing page conversion considerably. One thing you also want to focus on, is you want to make sure that you have social proof on your landing page.
Social proof in form of reviews, and you want to make sure that those reviews are authentic. Then another thing you want to consider is trust symbol, you want to make sure that your landing page has important trust symbols so that customers will understand that they can trust you with their credit card details, and they can trust that their personal information is safe with you. In recent times, we’ve seen companies being hacked and personal information being compromised. If you really want to encourage people to convert on your landing page, on your website, you want to make sure that you have visible trust symbols, so they sure that okay, I can put my credit card details in this website.
Another thing you want to make sure, is you want to make sure that the call to action is visible. And there’s colour contrast on the call to action. You want your call to action to pop so that people can easily see it. And when people even scroll over it, you can offer the option where the call to action can change colours to kind of engage people. You also want to make sure that your shopping cart is visible. In some instances, when people land on eCommerce landing pages, they click on Add to Cart and it just disappears.
They don’t know if they’ve had added to cart, it just shows a number one up somewhere on their page. You want to make sure that people can visibly see the number of items they have in their shopping cart, so they’re not confused. This way encourage them to continue shopping or to checkout if they’ve completed their shopping. Page load time is another thing that you want to focus on. You want to make sure that people landing in your page have a very good experience from a speed perspective.
If someone is trying to buy from your website using their mobile, if your site is very slow to load, they are bound to leave and shop somewhere else. When people land on your website, you have about five seconds to eight seconds to get their attention to convince them that they are on the right page. Once they’re convinced, they will then engage with more sections of that landing page.
So, it is important that you optimise your landing page, after you’ve optimised your Google ads or whatever acquisition channel you’re doing, using to send traffic to those pages, make sure that the landing page is also optimised.
Ecommerce Checkout Funnel Optimisation
Earlier on I mentioned that 65% of people drop out in the checkout funnel.These are people that you’ve acquired through PPC campaign or Google ads and you’ve paid a lot of money to get them they land on your website; they go to your landing page and they start the journey only for them to drop off in the checkout funnel.
The number one way you can increase your eCommerce conversion rate, is by reducing the number of pages in your checkout funnel. I once worked with a client that had seven pages in the checkout funnel and we managed to reduce it to three. If you’re able to reduce the checkout funnel pages, then you’re able to increase conversion because then people wouldn’t have to fill out a lot of forms and get inundated and then they leave.
Reduce the number of pages in your checkout funnel and you’ll see increase in your conversion rate. You also want to offer your customers the option of guest checkout. This is standard across many eCommerce websites, but some websites don’t have guest checkout. So, if you’re looking to increase conversion on your eCommerce website, you need to integrate guest checkout. People find it difficult to remember their password, and if they have to start thinking about what password they use on your website, if they’re repeat customers or even new customers, then you’re costing them a lot of friction, and they are bound to go somewhere else.
You want to give people the option to login with their email, Google email, or their Twitter or Facebook, this will go a long way to help them log in easily to the checkout. So if they have like, guest checkout option, and then login in with their email and social media login, that helps a lot. Live Chat is another good feature and functionality that you can put on your eCommerce website.
This will help people engage with your eCommerce platform if they have questions. And if those questions are answered very quickly, then they are able to continue with their conversion. This also helps with the conversion process and increase your conversion rates. Customers have come to expect free shipping. So, some eCommerce website doesn’t offer free shipping. If you are one of those eCommerce websites, I encourage you to look at free shipping because Amazon has created that standard where people expect that as part of the package.
If you offer free shipping, make sure it’s visible in the checkout pages, so people can see that okay, for this product, they can get free shipping, and even if you offer money-back guarantee as well, you want to make sure it’s visible in the checkout pages, and make sure that you do not have huge amount of links. What this does to people in the checkout funnel is once they have links within the checkout funnel, that link will create a path out of the funnel.
So whatever distraction that you have in your checkout funnel, make sure you review that and use Google Analytics and other analytics too to identify elements within your checkout funnel that is making people click on those things and then drop off. Any distraction whatsoever within the checkout funnel should be removed, if you’re really looking to increase conversion in your landing pages.
Then you’ll also want to make sure that your checkout funnel is optimised with benefits and features. So when people are going through those journeys, they are reassured that okay, from a trust symbol perspective, anything that would encourage them, that will not be a distraction, to complete that purchase, you need to include in your checkout funnel pages. You also want to make sure that you don’t have like coupon codes, discount codes, and stuff like that, that will make them think twice about completing the checkout funnel.
Once people have completed the checkout funnel, they get to the final thank you page. You thank you page is a very important page that helps you bring the customers back again. Some websites offer a discount for repeat purchase. So if someone has bought something, you have the option to offer them maybe 5% discount for their next purchase, they’ll have that at the back of their mind, because if you then give them that coupon code, they will try and come back because people like free stuff. So, my recommendation is to include some form of incentives in your thank you page.
You also want to make your thank you page an option for people to continue buying, you can upsell, cross sell with your thank you page. And even within your eCommerce strategy you want to integrate email marketing. Email Marketing will help people that have dropped off in one stage or the other. You need to be able to go back to them using email to nudge them back to complete their purchase.
My name is Femi Olajiga, and I am the author of the book Lean Agile Marketing. If you have any questions or any concerns that you’d like clarification, contact me via email and connect with me on LinkedIn.
