You put a lot of time and effort into making your eCommerce website an accurate reflection of your brand, but how is it performing?
Are your visitors converting into sales?
What does your site’s user experience feel like?
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the science of driving your site’s visitors to complete an action of your choosing on your website – whether it’s purchasing a product, downloading a guide, or booking an appointment.
With some simple CRO strategies, you can boost your sales and morph your website from “just-okay” into a money-making machine.
Below are 5 easy tips to increase your website’s CRO score, drive online sales, and give your customers an experience that they’ll come back for again and again.
1. Create Confidence
Make sure your customers feel instantly secure once they arrive on your site. Incorporate trust signals that your customers are familiar with, such as security locks, payment icons (Visa logo, Mastercard logo, etc.), or popular brands you partner with.
You can also help your visitors feel confident purchasing from your site by addressing slow loading speeds, fixing broken page links, and using high-quality, professional photos. When visitors arrive on your site, you want to eliminate any uncertainty they might have about whether or not they should spend their money with you. Help them feel confident making a quality purchase by establishing trust early on.
2. Make it Easy, Make it Clear
Your website needs to be intuitive and crazy simple for a customer to get through the checkout process. Easy and quick-to-use navigation is essential. The checkout should be one page. Eliminate unnecessary steps to give your customers the clearest path to making a purchase.
And you also need GREAT calls to action. Make it clear what you’re offering with easy-to-understand messages, buttons that stand out, and an excellent value proposition (ex: Buy in the next 48 hours for free delivery!)
3. Focus on Mobile-Friendly
It’s no secret…your customers are browsing, posting, and BUYING on mobile. Having a mobile-friendly website is a must and to do so you need to make sure the buying experience is just as seamless (or more!) on mobile, as it is on your desktop site. Comb your mobile site for improvements, and ask yourself these questions:
- When someone lands on my mobile homepage, is it obvious right away what I’m offering/selling?
- Are the call-to-action buttons easy to click?
- Is the font size throughout the site readable on mobile (without zooming)?
- Is the checkout process easy to navigate on mobile?
4. Create Urgency
How can you encourage your visitors to take action now? What incentives, offers, and tone will move them to take action immediately? Give your website visitors a good reason to make a purchase on your site sooner rather than later, and discourage them from navigating away to research your competitors. Think about time-based incentives you can offer your customers. Some examples:
- Order in the next _________ minutes for delivery/shipping today (with a countdown timer)
- 10% off your order in the next 24 hours
- Limited stock left, order before they’re gone!
5. Display Customer Testimonials & Reviews
As you probably already know, social proof is a super powerful conversion tool for brick and mortar shops (word of mouth), and online stores (review sites, like Yelp). Your website should make it incredibly easy to capture customer reviews, whether directly on product pages or via a submission form. Then, these reviews need to easily show up on your website as a product or business testimonial. Show star ratings if possible for your products, and highlight your top reviews on your front page.
Remember, implementing CRO isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it task.
To keep your website’s conversion rate on the right track, you’ll want to test, adjust and retry several of these ideas to elevate the customer buying experience. Use online analytics and customer feedback to make adjustments and improve your site’s performance as you go.
Make it oh-so-easy for your clients to spend money on your eCommerce store with conversion rate science that’s supported by psychology, analytics, and testing. Get creative, be true to your brand, and find which CRO tips make the most sense for you and your customers.