In this article, personalisation and buying behaviour experts, Salesfire, share some helpful conversion rate optimisation guidelines that will help you get the most from your website traffic, drive revenue and encourage brand loyalty. With 576 million user journeys tracked, Salesfire are data experts at the leading edge of eCommerce. Conversion rate optimisation So, what is a conversion? A conversion takes place whenever a customer makes a desirable action like signing up for a newsletter, filling in a form or following you on social media. Conversion rate optimisation, or CRO, is the process of testing different strategies to boost your conversion rate or the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action. Within the eCommerce space, a conversion usually refers to a customer making a purchase. If you’re new to CRO, read this article first. Here we cover what a conversion and conversion rate is, how to work it out, why it’s important and the benefits. The point of CRO is to improve a user’s experience so they are more likely to convert or check out on-site. BigCommerce explains that conversions can be impacted by every aspect of the user experience on your site. So to optimise your conversion rate could mean streamlining the customer journey or improving issues on the site that act as blockers. CRO can be conducted on landing pages, category pages or any other touchpoint. It can be vast, with many different solutions. There isn’t a magic wand. These are tips that you’ll need to adapt to fit your eCommerce strategy. It’s worth noting that different industries have different benchmarks and not all site visitors interact in the same way – but best practices are a good starting point. Remember what you’re trying to achieve to reach your goals and ensure you test and track anything new along the way. Let’s jump in and see how we can get your conversion rate optimised. Starting your journey First up, you should look at your own conversion rate. Find where you are sitting within your industry, and analyse if there’s a problem to solve or an area you could improve. A low conversion rate can be the result of a variety of factors related to how your site is performing or even how it’s designed. Common reasons include copy that isn’t fit for purpose, broken forms or slow load times. It’s important to be able to identify what is and isn’t working on your site before attempting to optimise. A high conversion rate likely means that your website is appealing to the correct target audience, it’s well designed and fit for purpose but there’s always room to improve and adapt. Every second counts Let’s say that your load times are slow. You’ll need to enhance the user experience so they don’t go shopping elsewhere. After all, the chances of a user leaving your site will increase by 32% if page loading time increases. Even a one second delay in loading can lower your conversion rates by 7%. Every second counts for a customer, and this holds true not only for fast loading times but also for fast search times. Search results taking a second too long to load could mean you lose a potential customer. This is why improving your website navigation is essential in optimising your conversion rate. A key part of navigating through a site is the search bar, with 6% of site searches resulting in a sale. With an instant site search, results can be presented to a visitor within as little as 0.001 seconds, which has been proven to increase conversion rates by up to 16%. Connecting your customers to the product they are searching for in the blink of an eye will upgrade your overall user experience. Search is a simple yet effective solution that takes five minutes to set up, and since 84% of companies haven’t thought about optimising their site search offering, you can give your site a competitive edge. Raise your ROI By increasing how many visitors are converting into customers on your site, the better return on investment (ROI) you’ll see from your combined marketing efforts. Using conversion rates to understand how to optimise your website correctly can significantly raise your ROI. Not only is CRO a necessary part of delivering better customer journeys but it’s among the most valuable tools for eCommerce organisations to measure ROI. In fact, according to a Statista survey conducted among marketers in both the U.S. and the UK, almost 90% of personalisation efforts result in a positive ROI. By using personalisation CRO tools like Overlays and Recommendations, you can support your customers without interruption, reimagining the way you display your CRO campaigns. They can be used in various ways to accelerate users through the shopping process, to re-engage them by offering a discount code or remind them of your best price guarantee. An essential move in re-injecting exiting visitors back into the purchasing funnel and increasing your overall conversion rate. Enhance efficiency CRO is not a long and arduous task when you choose solutions with rapid integration and immediate results. Additions to your website like Recommendations or Digital Assistant begin to optimise your conversion rate immediately. With Digital Assistant, you can support the most influential areas of the customer journey in a single hub. Our campaigns work to increase AOV and prompt quicker conversions, all integrated using a single line of code to get to work fast. Not only do these solutions improve the efficiency of your eCommerce site, but by automating your personalisation strategy, you can also enhance the efficiency of your marketing team. Leveraging on-site tools that trigger marketing automation processes, such as sending email campaigns and surfacing on-site messages, allows you to create personalised customer journeys that inspire purchases. Having a seamless experience both on and off-site strengthens your brand’s bond with individual consumers, improving their chances of making repeat purchases. How does your site compare? It’s always a good idea to undertake competitor analysis to see what others in the industry are doing. Figure out competitor strengths and weaknesses in comparison to your own to identify how you can amplify your own strategies. Other companies are likely running into similar challenges, but it’s important to note that their solutions may not work for you. Every eCommerce site is unique so you should assess your own data and uncover what needs solving for you, with your CRO strategy being tailored to your product, brand and site. The average eCommerce conversion rate is between 1 and 3% but this differs between industries. Using the average by industry from IRP’s 2021 eCommerce market data, you can clearly see the differences. Arts and crafts: 3.39% Baby and child: 0.89% Fashion clothing and accessories: 1.63% Food and drink: 1.58% Health and wellbeing: 3.05% Home and giftwares: 0.99% Pet care: 2.85% Sports and recreation: 1.37% These rates also fluctuate depending on the general state of the economic climate. The average conversion rate of eCommerce sites globally was 2.17% in the third quarter of 2020, which was down from 2.37% the previous year. If you’re having difficulty understanding where you should be benchmarking yourself in the industry, there are free tools out there that can help you. With TrendDesk, you can find the latest eCommerce trends and data, benchmarking your own site performance against data in real time. If you’re ranking below your industry’s average, maybe it’s time to maximise your potential and optimise your site. Understand your audience To create a successful CRO strategy, you should develop an understanding of your website visitors. Who are the different visitor types and what are their intentions? Research specifically why they aren’t converting and map out the customer journey to understand their objections and identify potential blockers. Buyers’ expectations are high and they want to find the most suitable solution. Through understanding how they behave you can position yourself within their buyer journey and provide the solutions to allow them to convert at the right time. A quick and easy way to personalise your offering to customers is with solutions such as Recommendations. This AI-powered tool encourages the exploration of your website by showing your customers the products they want, making it more likely for them to add to their basket and reducing bounce rates. Presenting visitors with personalised recommendations from their first click on your homepage to their last click at checkout will work to maximise product engagement and increase revenue. In short, knowing your customer is important but so is knowing your site. When you understand your audience, you can figure out more accurately how they behave in different moments to help you determine how to improve these touchpoints. Using this data allows you to make informed decisions about your strategy, connecting the dots so buyers have better experiences and want to convert. Help is at hand Even after accessing your data, you might not feel confident to define your goals and build strategies, and that’s where Salesfire’s Managed Service comes into play. Salesfire has dedicated Client Success Managers to help you make the best decisions when it comes to your eCommerce strategy. As part of the Managed Service offering, Justmylook’s Client Success Manager proposed Q4 Overlay campaigns for the site which would help the company achieve its eCommerce goals. These campaigns were then created and deployed by Salesfire’s in-house design team. With an efficient setup and expert advice provided by the Client Success team, Managed Service helped to improve Justmylook’s Overlay performance for this crucial sales period, including Black Friday. The site’s Overlay influenced orders increased by 16% YoY, which led to an Overlay influenced revenue increase of 19% YoY. These are just a few of the ways you can optimise your conversion rate to soar to new heights. Achieving long-term growth is made simpler when you adopt Salesfire’s best practices and introduce their latest eCommerce solutions. Based on years of extensive research into personalisation and buying behaviour, Salesfire has developed a full suite of industry-leading conversion rate optimisation solutions that help eCommerce sites convert more visitors into customers. Take the next step in making the most of your website traffic, driving more revenue and encouraging brand supporters with Salesfire. Do you want to find out how Salesfire’s suite of on-site solutions can help increase your conversion rate? You can book a free demo with a Salesfire expert or fire an email over to enquiries@salesfire.co.uk
