Whether you’re running a Shopify, Woocommerce store or a ClickFunnels sales funnel, you’ll need to know how to increase conversions in order to generate more sales and impact business growth. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is simply the process of increasing the percentage of conversions from your online store or mobile app. CRO involves idea generation for elements on your online store, which you can improve and then use split and multivariate testing to validate your ideas.
A conversion is when a user takes a desired action on your website, such as making a purchase or signing up for an email list. By understanding and optimizing your conversion rate, you can increase the number of users taking these desired actions on your website.
A typical conversion on an ecommerce site consists of a sale, new users adding products to their wish lists or carts, email signups, social media shares, and any other important performance indicator (KPI) you care about.
In short, the conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your ecommerce store who complete a desired action (‘a bellweather metric,’ as said by Forbes). With this in mind, CRO becomes vital because it allows you to lower customer acquisition costs and increase revenue per user or visitor. More concretely, successful conversions lead to increased customers and business growth.
Why Conversion Rate Is Important For eCommerce
There are a number of reasons why learning CRO is essential, but the most important thing to know is how many people accept your offer compared to those who visit your site. Many company owners and marketers ignore CRO as a side issue, but it’s the most crucial activity for their businesses. This article goes through 12 reasons why conversion rate optimization is critical for ecommerce so you can improve your customer experience and increase conversions on your website.
1. Generates a stream of free customers
CRO helps you earn more conversions from your current web traffic without having to spend extra on advertising. CRO allows you to collect the money on the table that you may create with the same regular online traffic to your site. As a result, CRO lowers customer acquisition costs and increases sales and income.
2. Increases traffic to your eCommerce store
As you improve your conversion rate, you’ll be able to acquire customers for less and start getting free consumers without having to increase your advertising budget.
As a result of all of this, you receive more visitors to your site and greater earnings, allowing you to place advertising based on your audience, outbid and outperform the competition. nYou begin a growth loop by investing and applying new CRO methods to your site, which results in a snowball effect on traffic, conversions, and profits.
With the increasing popularity of ecommerce, stores are beginning to pop up everywhere. And as more stores join the market, it becomes increasingly difficult to draw in customers. To make matters worse, some large retailers seem to be swallowing smaller ones whole.
So if you want your store to succeed, you’ll need a comprehensive strategy that can beat out the competition.
CRO makes your website user-friendly for potential customers, which then entices them to take the desired actions, such as making a purchase, and subsequently raises conversions.
3. Increases revenues and more importantly profit
A higher conversion rate does not imply greater expenses.
In fact, as you start optimizing different parts of your website, your fixed costs and advertising will stay the same. When you eliminate variable expenditures like extra units, more employees, and additional distribution, you save even more money.
This compounding, snow-ball effect means you can beat the competition in your market, and out-compete those, spending higher to acquire leads and sales.
4. You get to know your customers
As you employ more and newer CRO tactics on your ecommerce site, you’ll learn even more about your customers and visitors.
CRO is informed by data you collect about your audience’s needs, wants, why they visit your site, and other behaviors. You can test different elements of your site’s functionality to get feedback from your audience and customers that reveals what works for them.
5. Leverages existing assets
You want visitors to your website to convert once you’ve established a constant flow. You may use a variety of tools to assist you with the growth hacking process, which uses current assets such as traffic from your website to anticipate what people will do when they arrive on it.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that provides you with data sets like user demographics, devices used, sessions and pageviews. With this information at your disposal, you can make changes to your website to draw in more traffic without spending any money.
6. Lower customer acquisition costs
Retaining a current customer is allegedly less expensive than acquiring a new one, according to experts. Harvard Business Review claims that gaining new consumers costs between 5 and 25 times more than retaining existing customers.
This illustrates how important customer lifetime value is, so you want to spend as little as possible to gain more customers, which CRO allows you to do.
CRO ensures that you can give your customers what they want, position your brand on the market using more effective copy and sharp brand design. You also get to reach the right prospects and enjoy sustainable, repeatable, and consistent growth.
7. Improves your search engine rankings
SEO is important for many enterprises today since customers will go online before making a purchase to learn more about your company or product. If you can’t be found on search engines, obtaining new consumers and earnings will be difficult. Optimize the pages and primary keywords of your website so you may rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
8. Data-driven decision making
When it comes to running a company and making money, you don’t want to leave anything to chance or guesswork.
You want evidence that what you’re doing is reliable. CRO ensures that you have access to hard data about your audience so that you may make more informed decisions such as changing some elements on your website in order for them to perform better and bring in more income.
9. Allows you to take calculated risks
CRO helps you understand your customers and your business better. With the needed information and strategies in hand, you can take calculated risks because you are more confident in what you may test owing to the continuous traffic flow and rising revenue. After all, taking chances is an important element of company success.
10. Get more business leads
You may optimize various elements of your website to enhance conversion rates and increase lead generation results. This allows you to collect more information about your customers and visitors and promote to them. Get leads to your ecommerce business, then make sure they’re ready to get down to business. Depending on the type of product and sales process, this might include speaking with a sales representative directly.
You can increase the likelihood of conversion by convincing visitors to take specific actions. Ideally, you want these people to become marketing qualified leads. You can achieve this goal by designing several effective pages with persuasive copy and strategic calls-to-action. For example, if you discover that fewer people who sign up for free trials convert than those who sign up for product demos, then focus your energies on making it easy for site visitors to book meetings or demonstrations with a sales rep.
11. Create more targeted and profitable advertising campaigns
The CRO framework also includes business growth, enhanced traffic and profits, which more often than not will push you to advertise more in order to gain extra. In particular, social advertising is quite advantageous for ecommerce firms since it generates increased leads, traffic, and data that can be used to develop targeted paid advertising campaigns and keep the success cycle going.
PPC costs are rising, as the competition increases accross media buying channels. So if you’re not maximizing your impact on the current traffic you’re buying, your going to finder it harder to compete over time.
The goal of marketing is to drive users to your ecommerce store, but if you’re low on budget, CRO is the cheapest and most successful method to boosting page visitors and conversions, as well as saving money on digital advertising and marketing costs.
12. Builds trust
You won’t be able to make the earnings you desire if you don’t have confidence. Customers learn more about you and what to anticipate as a result of continuous marketing, so you do all that you can to never let them down.
CRO aids in the development of this trust by allowing you to target your consumers with the correct offers based on previously collected data.
Not only does CRO help you improve your website traffic, but it also makes it simpler for users to locate what they need on your site. If not that, then at least they can quickly comprehend how to find the desired information.
This is noteworthy because numerous psychological studies have indicated that consumers nowadays have shorter attention spans than consumers of previous generations. The quicker they can find what they need on your site, the more likely they are to return due to the user experience. Consumers want a site that readily provides them with what they desire regardless of cost, and CRO helps fight this attention span mentality by raising the likelihood of getting their notice.
The Importance of Following eCommerce CRO Best Practices to Optimize Your eCommerce Store for Conversions
If you’re still doubtful of why Conversion Rate Optimization is key for your ecommerce store, here are a few tips to get started with optimizing your site. Keep in mind qualities such as credibility, trust and safety which will be reassuring to your visitors as they browse through your website.
- If you want to build trust and credibility with your audience, offer social proof in the form of client testimonials, certifications, awards, media exposure, social shares and industry experts.
- Improve your website’s speed to keep users happy and increase your chances of ranking higher on search engines.
- Content creation and effective messaging starts with understanding your audience. Develop user personas to get inside their heads, so you can figure out what they need and want.
- Calls to action with bright colors should be used to attract consumers and encourage them to click.
- Use heatmaps to understand how your customers behave when they visit your store.
- Keep running split tests and making improvements until your pages are fully optimized.
- To discover which pages are critical in the conversion process, conduct customer journey studies.
- Create a polished look for your website by including only professional looking elements and images.
The Bottom Line
Many business owners mistakenly focus on getting minimum viable products into the market as cheaply and quickly as possible. While this may work for some startups, it’s not necessarily the best strategy for ecommerce stores.
As an ecommerce company owner, you must provide a great online experience as part of your revenue optimization efforts, and this demands immediate attention, just like a physical store.
You can boost conversions and sales on your website significantly by implementing these CRO best practices. The conversion rate is the only number that matters in the long run, so make it count.
