Imagine having traffic on your website but wasting sales opportunities? This actually can happen if you don’t work on your ecommerce conversion rate optimization (CRO).
In this post you’ll read about:
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion Rate Optimization is the strategy of optimizing websites to boost conversion rates. This optimization involves analyzing user behavior, identifying barriers to conversion, and implementing strategic changes to improve the overall conversion rate.
Conversion Rate (CR) is the percentage of visitors that enter a site and make a conversion. Formula:
Translating the numbers of the example above to an Ecommerce site, 10% of the total visitors converted a purchase.
A conversion can be a newsletter register, a click on button for determined action, it always will be dependent on the business goal, but here we’re mainly focusing on the transactional goal: the purchase.
That being known, Conversion Rate Optimization is identifying gaps on your website, working on improvements and measuring results to enhance conversion rate.
Why is Conversion Rate Optimization for ecommerce important?
Consider this: When we want to impress someone visiting our house, we ensure that everything is in order and at its best – the kitchen is organized, bathrooms are clean, and the living room has that special decorative touch. All of this to ensure that our friends or family, wharever they may be, feel comfortable, converting our goal to impress them.
This metaphor works similarly to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) in ecommerce: we wanna ensure that every page users navigate provides the best possible purchasing experience so, at the end of the journey, they’re more likely to turn into a potential customer.
Is a waste of potential using all those marketing strategies to bring traffic to your website and then offering a poor experience. That’s why it is so important, it goes side by side with User Experience and leads you to get the best of your Ecommerce. If you want to read more about UX, here goes an amazing post explaining why UX can be as important as price advantage in Ecommerce, click here to read.
Besides, paid traffic is not the only strategy to encrease revenue. A well-executed CRO strategy can empower your E-commerce to enhance sales by leveraging the strengths of your site for customers.
Indeed having great customer experience on pages helps us to achieve our goals, but in Ecommerce we have the homepage, categories, product pages, and more… So how should I start?
How to do Conversion Rate Optimization?
In the universe of digital marketing and ecommerce stores, to ensure a strategy right on target you’ll need to make it data-driven. CRO is not different, knowing what are the current gaps and points of improvements will lead you to assertive work.
Start point: Identifying gaps of optimization
To begin a CRO strategy, there are various tools to help understanding customer behavior and showcasing experience on site.
Hotjar for Conversion Rate Optimization
Hotjar is a famous tool to better understand your customer behavior through heatmaps, screen recording, surveys and feedbacks.
With heatmaps, you’ll be able to identify the most clicked areas of your Ecommerce, in desktop or mobile devices.
Screen recordings reveal unimagined ways of navigation, allowing you to see tons of gaps of improvement in diverse situations.
With the surveys and feedbacks features, users can interact giving rich information which you can adapt and use at your advantage.
Hotjar is truly a complete tool. And no, they aren’t sponsoring me, although they could 😉
Google Analytics Insights on visitor behavior
Google Analytics helps with Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) by providing insights into:
- What’s the Conversion rate, you could even consider filtering per traffic source;
- Demographics, device usage, and how they find your site;
- When they are dropping off in the conversion funnel;
- A/B testing, identifying which optimizations changes result in higher conversion rates and implementing them permanently.
All these possibilities allow you to have a better understanding of what’s happening in your website, including doing tests and comparing further.
Qualitative research giving rich insights
Last but not least, in the old but gold method of Qualitative research, you can ask your customers how they experienced buying in your ecommerce. Don’t subestimate this method, there are companies that use only qualitative research to improve and do work in many cases.
To have nice feedback and great insights, don’t waste any potential by asking bad questions to customers. To ensure this rare opportunity with fairness and precision, click here to read this article about Smart Questions Leading Data-Driven Actions.
Research cases and Insights
Now you’re understanding your gaps and having insightful information, it’s time to search for inspiration out there. A case research will open your eyes to new features of great market players, is essential to considering exploring resources and even in diversified niches.
And when I say “search for inspiration” I don’t mean copy and paste, not at all. You have to consider that each feature has a purpose and many of them are attached to the ecommerce brand. Ensure authenticity by creating unique features for your ecommerce’s purpose.
CRO Cases in Ecommerce
Talking about authenticity, every company has its features, and that’s a point to analyze in CRO and UX. Understanding that, let’s dive into our cases:
Truck World has the mission to help truck drivers, introducing online shopping with transparency and helping them to achieve their goals, offering quality products at fair prices.
My Garage is a new feature in Truck World, where users can select their truck model and navigate through a personalized landing page, displaying compatible products.
Yet, this feature has CRO adjustments to be made (as always), but the improvement on conversion already increased 20% in sales (in “hard to find” products). My garage also prevents wrong product ordering, brings a special way of navigation, and is a great SEO machine!
Imagine having all these landing pages with unique SEO content ranking ‘x truck part to x model x year and x manufacturer’, with enormous variants… Google’s SEO algorithm must be doing cartwheels!
It basically shows customers how to best showcase their advantages in a smart way, because knowing how to showcase your best advantages is as essential as having them (yes, this quote is too good to be written just one time).
We already cited this strategy of Mundo do Caminhão (Truck World) Ecommerce in our post about Branding and UX as your Niche Ecommerce Sword and Shield, where you can read more details by clicking here.
CRO research giving results
Also in Mundo do Caminhão’s Ecommerce, we have an great example of use of CRO. Diving into it, the company has always seen excellent performance selling wheels for big trucks in competitors physical stores, but the sales of recently launched ecommerce was equivalent to 3% of the revenue.
A quantitative research was made, asking customers why they don’t buy wheels online.
Was clarified that customers liked to buy more than one wheel per order because the physical store always gave them extra discounts and offered lower price similar products.
Besides, when going to that trucker place, they could see how the wheels looked beautiful when applied on the trucks.
Based on that data, two optimizations were made on the ecommerce:
– Kits with 2, 4 and even more wheels were created, allied to lower ticket buy together items on the product page.
– Also, the marketing team photographed trucks with nice applied wheels, putting a “Client photo” tag on the product images.
One month was defined to measure these actions.
Result: In the next months, the truck parts ecommerce increased on 71% on orders to wheels, impulsing 52% the ecommerce revenue, by selling better these high ticket products.
Examples of Conversion Rate Optimization aligned with User Experience
As we said before, CRO is almost attached with User Experience strategies. In the end you want your users to become customers with the best experience possible, and that’s achievable when the two strategies work together. There are plenty of nice cases with features that elevate conversion in online stores and here are some of them with visual examples:
Homepage Optimization Techniques
Menu top bar with main Categories including Deals page. Besides the usual categories, a highly conversion page with the best offers hits on customers wanting the best advantages for Walmart.
Online stores with great diversity in products can use this model of categories block, showcasing tons of departments. AliExpress does that very well by placing a two lined carousel of varieties. Similar to Instagram stories? Maybe this design technique sets this urge to click to see more.
Sometimes, our ideal customers have the need for solid and reputable products. This store, Trade Counter Direct, shows to users what they call “Trusted Brands” giving this sense of responsibility on their online catalog. It’s nice how they place the logo, maintaining the identity with images of products, and clicking in this banner leads to brand pages offering highly conversion products.
ASOS ecommerce makes users make a choice right from the start, choosing a high conversion navigation based on women or man products. This optimizes time and search by displaying only what you want to see. I can imagine how many stores can use this approach, like a sports ecommerce where you choose your sport, or even your favorite team.
Improving Category Page Conversion Rates
It’s almost a ‘must do’ putting Amazon as a success case in Ecommerce content, but if I can highlight something not so obvious, I would highlight 3 things in the page results: the easy filtering option, the horizontal product card allowing great reading, and how well the CTA shows wp. Plus, already telling when this product arrives in my address in one line is just amazing, and yes, mobile friendly.
Hey, you got 10 hours to buy a washing machine! Another countrymate company, Consul, is doing a nice job by presenting a stopwatch with time-bounded offers. This urgency sense to buy is very interesting for certain sales campaigns in ecommerce.
I was really impressed by this ‘pick’ feature by AliExpress, offering choices of various products where, picking 3 of them, you can get free shipping. Is almost like a gamification practice inside the store.
What about giving your available offers right on spot? This is what Kitchen Aid does, by placing a label with the current offers in a smart way. This prevents customers from visiting your ecommerce store and losing your store’s advantages. Always remember, showing your advantages is as important as having them.
Kabum is a brazilian ecommerce who does an excellent job by displaying discount banners with time-bounded offerts on their site. Besides that, smart filters allow you to see the current offers or opt to know the next offers. It’s an very technological and cool approach, even more so with their bad*ss virtual Ninja.
Now if there is something that my countrymates know how to do is to show main advantages on the product card. Mercado Livre is simply the biggest online store on LATAM, and the way that they offer labels, show discount coupons and show us they free shipping with “Full” mode (super fast shipping), is just amazing.
Strategies for Enhancing Product Page Conversions
A cool feature also in Amazon is this compare section right below in the product page, giving right comparisons information with similar products. Many sites give you this possibility of selecting what product you want to compare and that happens mainly using the product attributes.
Thinkin on must do practices, having great imagery and videos is essential. So, thinking in doing more than that, KitchenAid also has nice produced photos of their products applied to real life scenarios, giving the sense of how it will be when I install it in my kitchen. Plus, humanizing the scene absolutely gives a trusted branding touch to it.
Mercado Livre’s site also offer possibilities to buy right away or add to cart with two CTA. It’s just admirable how they put only relevant information in the buy box, attending to all needs. It’s truly a showcase of highlighting great features and advantages!
Banners are also welcome on product pages, and Bikesonline.com does that very clearly. It gives the urge of promotion, while showing what product variation is on offer. Above the image, a “Ride now, pay later” argument well positioned is placed, presenting their special payment service.
We already talked about time-bounded offers, offer banners on product pages, labels and nice CTA’s, but imagine an all together of this and also having an unique layout? Kabum, also brings a full journey offer to the product page.
They have a very interesting way to showcase the relevant conversion enhancer information.
In conclusion
There are many examples of CRO strategies, but the main objective here is to understand the relevance of it and know how to apply it to your online business. By implementing data-driven strategies and continuously refining website elements, businesses can enhance user experience, drive higher conversion rates, and ultimately increase revenue. As we’ve explored throughout this article, aligning conversion rate optimization with user experience is key to unlocking the full potential of an ecommerce website.
I hope to have given you rich information about Ecommerce CRO and how to work on it. If you liked this article, please share with your friends and leave a comment below 🙂
