In order for companies to be successful in the ecommerce space, maximizing sales and driving business growth is more important than ever.
To that end, conversion rate optimization (CRO) is one of the most important areas to focus on to grow your business.
CRO is the art and science of optimizing your business to boost conversions, enhance user experience, and ultimately, increase your sales.
By taking advantage of data-based insights, cutting-edge tools, and proven best practices, you can transform your e-commerce website into a conversion generating asset that continues to grow your sales.
To do this successfully, you will need to calculate conversion rate metrics and deep dive into some interesting data from your site.
The goal of this guide is to give you some basic strategies that you can use to optimize your ecommerce business for improved sales in 2024 and well into the future, encouraging your customers to shop online.
We'll go into some of the basics of ecommerce conversion rates, and help you to create a better experience for your online shoppers while improving your CRO at the same time.
Understanding Ecommerce Conversion Rates
Let's look at the basics behind conversion rate, and how to improve your conversion rate optimization.
Conversion rates are a percentage value calculated by using the number of website visitors that buy a product, subscribe to your newsletter, or sign up to a service that you offer. Average conversion rates are calculated by taking the total number of visitors and dividing that by the number of conversions, then multiplying it by one hundred to give you a percentage.
Your primary focus should be on the sales conversion rate, which looks at the percentage of visitors who actually complete a purchase. But not all conversions are necessarily sales. Remember that conversions are a set of specific target actions that you want visitors to complete, which will differ from business to business. For example, capturing customer details might be an objective that you want to complete, which you could classify as a conversion.
Each conversion metric is used to track the overall success of your online business. Other conversion action examples could be adding items to a cart, creating an account, or reading product reviews.
The average conversion rate won't be the same for every business, but ecommerce sites that are doing well can generally expect a conversion rate of 1% to 4%.
Therefore, even a 1% improvement to your conversion rate will have a strong and positive effect on your earnings. If your website receives 20,000 visitors per month and has a conversion rate of 2%, an increase to 3% would result in 200 more conversions.
To improve your conversion rate, think about how well your ecommerce website compares to similar businesses in industry. A high conversion rate shows that your website is telling customers that you have what they want, along with providing a streamlined user experience, and building trust with visitors on your website. If you are seeing low conversions then it could be a signal that you have problems with your website's design, usability, pricing, or even the products or services themselves.
Once you understand ecommerce conversion metrics and their impact on your business, you can start to make better decisions that will optimize your online store’s conversions and sales. To do this properly, you will need to monitor and analyze your conversion metrics, identify areas for improvement, and implement strategies to boost conversions and drive sales.
The Significance of Additional Metrics in Understanding Conversions
Your e-commerce website conversion rate is a very important data point for the success of your business, but it's worthwhile considering other important metrics too.
User behavior is an example of a metric that offers a direct view into how your ecommerce site is performing, and identifying patterns that will lead to more conversions once they have been addressed and fixed. Additional metrics that you should watch are bounce rate and the duration of sessions as an average per user.
Bounce rate is calculated as a percentage of the visitors who leave your website or 'bounce' after viewing only a single page without taking any action or clicking on any other elements of your site. A high bounce rate can point to several issues, like slow page load times, poor website design, or low quality content. By analyzing your bounce rate, you can find pages that may be stalling conversions, and you can then take steps to optimize your worst pages for better user engagement.
Average session duration is the amount of time on average that users spend on your website during a single visit or session. It shows how engaged visitors are with your content and how effectively your website holds their attention. A longer average session duration means that visitors find your website valuable and are more likely to convert.
Other metrics that provide a lot of information about user activity and how they relate to conversions are:
- Pages per session: The average number of pages a user visited during a single session on your site.
- Rate of Cart abandonment: The percentage of visitors to your site who add items to their cart but leave before buying anything.
- Checkout abandonment rate: The percentage of visitors who initiate the checkout process but do not complete the transaction.
- Customer lifetime value: The total amount that a customer is projected to spend on the products you offer, or on the services you provide over their lifetime of visiting your site.
Analyze these data points along with your conversion rate so that you can see the bigger picture, and track your ecommerce site's performance more accurately. This approach that allows you to find areas for improvement and test new strategies.
Essential Tools for Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization
To optimize your ecommerce website for conversions, it's very important to use the right tools. These are examples of software tools that provide insights into user activity and help identify problem areas so that you can make improvements.
Lucky Orange
Lucky Orange offers a solution that acts as a conversion optimization platform that has helpful features that allow you to understand your website visitors in more detail. It has session recordings and heat maps as well as useful form analytics. Quickly identify user experience problems as well as areas that are confusing your visitors and make improvements to enhance user experience and boost conversions.
Hotjar
Hotjar is another tool that analyzes user activity on your ecommerce site. It features heat maps, session recordings, and user feedback tools that will help you understand how visitors navigate your site. With this data you can identify potential snags that are stopping your users from converting. Hotjar also has visual insights that allow you to optimize your site's design and content, as well as fix any functional issues with your site.
Quantcast Measure
Quantcast Measure is more of an audience insights platform, but it delivers detailed information about your website visitors that is very useful. It identifies demographic data and interests related to your visitors as well as browsing behavior. This data gives you to get a better understanding of your target audience and helps identify potential sales. Your marketing team can create targeted campaigns and personalize the user experience to drive conversions based on all the data colected.
Google Analytics
Although many web publishers and online businesses are not huge fans of the latest GA4 (Google Analytics 4), it still offers basic insights that most ecommerce business teams are familiar with. It provides data related to website traffic, user activity, and conversion metrics. GA4 you can track KPIs (key performance indicators) like as average session duration, conversion rate, and bounce rate. This is useful to identify patterns over time. Analytics data lets you to make decisions so that you can optimize your ecommerce store for better performance.
BigCommerce Analytics
BigCommerce Analytics offers a selection of built-in tools that allow you to monitor and analyze ecommerce performance, giving you access to data about sales, customer behavior, and marketing effectiveness. Once setup and collecting data, you are able to make decisions based on real analytics to improve your online store's conversion rates.
Lift AI
Lift AI is an advanced tool that uses AI to optimize ecommerce conversions by analyzing visitor behavior in real-time. Lift AI determines the buyer intent score of unidentified and anonymous website users visiting your site, segmenting them into high intent, medium intent, and low intent.
This enables the ability to trigger targeted conversion tools before those visitors leave your site. This instant method of interacting with site visitors can lead to a significant increase in conversions and overall sales.
Traditional analytics tools are not able to compete with Lift AI because of the way it tracks individual user behavior and processes every signal using a machine learning model in true real time.
Lift AI instantly highlights prospects that are more likely to convert while they are on your site, which is an excellent way to work on your conversion rate optimization. This is different to most tools that provide data only after the user has already left your website.
When you are selecting tools for your ecommerce CRO strategy, think about your business needs, budget, and the features missing from your current solution. It's important to choose tools that integrate seamlessly with your existing workflows and purchase process, while providing useful information that will help you improve how your customers interact with your site.
Effective Strategies for Enhancing Ecommerce Conversion Rates
Now that we've looked at some of the basic tools that you can use to improve your ecommerce conversion rate optimization, let's look at some strategies you can implement to improve your online store's performance. By using some of these suggestions, you deliver an engaging customer journey that drives conversions.
Free Shipping
Shipping costs can negatively impact sales and conversions, especially in an age where many larger ecommerce brands offer free shipping. Studies have shown that offering free shipping can lead to higher average order values and reduced cart abandonment rates. If it makes sense for your business, think about offering free shipping for purchases above a certain threshold to encourage customers to spend more and qualify for free shipping. If you want to track your free shipping, then campaigns with a coupon code are a good way to find out where your users are hearing about your promotions.
High-Quality Product Images
Images are an important part of ecommerce. For the average online ecommerce customer, high-quality product images help to visualize the product so that they can make better purchasing decisions. If it makes sense for your business to invest in professional photography, then this is an area that will help your conversion rates. Search engines love original content, so you can also expect traffic from high quality images on your site as they climb up in the search engine rankings.
Product Pages for Mobile Devices
Mobile web is here to stay. With more people using online mobile shopping, you need to make sure that your product pages are optimized and usable for mobile devices. Mobile optimization involves responsive design, fast load times, and easy navigation. Streamline your mobile checkout process, minimize form fields, and ensure that interactive items like menus, hyperlinks and buttons easy to use on smaller screens. User interfaces are very important, so don’t be afraid to spend time on getting the right design for your site with basics like a category page, and other elements to make your site easy to navigate.
Detailed Product Descriptions
Product descriptions can be the deciding factor for customer sales. To stand out, you need to give your customers important information and advice that might be lacking from your competitors. Give detailed information about each product, including features, benefits, materials, dimensions, and anything else that a potential buyer might want to know about. Use persuasive copywriting techniques to highlight the unique selling points of your products and address common customer concerns or questions with FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions).
Customer Testimonials and Reviews
Social proof builds trust and credibility with visitors. Use customer testimonials and reviews on your product pages to provide authentic, real-world feedback from satisfied customers. Genuine positive reviews reassure hesitant buyers and increase conversion rates. Let your customers leave reviews and send follow-up emails after their purchases. Find out how satisfied they have been with the products, the shipping, billing, and other parts of the sales process. When you use social proof on your website, you build trust.
Checkout Process
The end goal of a marketing funnel is the checkout. A complicated checkout form leads to cart abandonment and lost sales, which is why keeping it simple is best. Work on your checkout process and make it as easy to complete as possible. Simplify the purchase process for your users, and offer a guest checkout facility for customers who don't want to sign up for an account. Have multiple payment options, including popular digital wallets like PayPal and Apple Pay so that your site is accessible to a wider range of customers.
User Experience
Personalization is a powerful tool that you can use for engaging user experiences that promote sales. Use customer data and browsing behavior to provide personalized product recommendations, targeted promotions, a search bar, and customized content. Use tools like Lift AI to identify the buying intent of anonymous visitors and trigger relevant conversions in real-time.
Offer Multiple Customer Support Channels
Providing excellent customer support can build trust and loyalty, which leads to better conversion rates. Offer multiple support channels, live chat, phone (displaying your phone number prominently), email, and social media. Make sure that your support team is knowledgeable about your products and responsive, with the authority to resolve customer inquiries and issues quickly.
Continuously Test and Optimize
Conversion rate optimization never ends, and it needs constant testing and refinement as you work towards your ideal marketing strategy. Run A/B tests to compare different iterations of your website's individual components like headlines, CTA (call to action) buttons, and product descriptions to find the sales sweet spot. Data analysis is needed so that you can implement the best-performing variations of your sales funnel to improve your conversion rates and sales.
By using these strategies, you can create an e-commerce experience that encourages visitors to take action and convert into paying customers. Understand your target audience, address their needs, and always be optimizing your online store based on the information you collect with your analytics.
Leveraging AI & Advanced Technology for CRO
We touched on this earlier when we looked at Lift AI, but artificial intelligence is a technology that has made a massive impact on online sales. The e commerce business can be tough with so many competitors, and using advanced technology can give you an advantage in optimizing your conversion rates.
By implementing artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), you can deliver personalized experiences for individual customers and drive conversions with a solid CRO strategy.
As mentioned, Lift AI is one such cutting-edge tool that you should be looking at for your e-commerce CRO rates. Lift AI's proprietary machine learning model is built on a massive set of data of over 1 billion data points and 14 million real sales engagements. This allows the platform to accurately predict visitor intent based on the typical signals that lead to sales.
The best part of Lift AI is its seamless integration with your existing e-commerce platform. It works out-of-the-box, requiring minimal setup and configuration, and can deliver results within just 30 days.
By using Lift AI, businesses have reported a 2-10x increase in chat conversions, showing the potential of AI-driven personalization.
There are many tools that you can choose from, but not many take the real time approach to sales that can enhance your e-commerce CRO efforts like Lift AI does. By implementing advanced technology and integrating it into your e-commerce CRO strategy, you can stay ahead of the curve and provide your site visitors with a personalized, seamless experience when shopping online.
Real-World Success Stories and Case Studies
Let's look at some real-world success stories and case studies. These examples are businesses that have successfully implemented CRO strategies to increase their average order value, boost conversion rates, and drive revenue growth, all of which are great metrics to measure success.
Truckstop, a freight business in the United States implemented Lift AI in their business and have seen impressive growth thanks to improved conversions. Lift AI accurately tracks a user’s buying intent and issues a score based on the visitor's profile when they visit your website. By focusing on these visitors, Truckstop sees a 3x improvement on conversions, not only representing extra revenue but increasing sales team efficiency. Compared to the cost of Lift AI, Truckstop has achieved a 27x ROI.
In another example, Fluke Health Solutions (consisting of Fluke Biomedical which is the premier, global organization providing test and measurement equipment and services for the healthcare industry), developed custom Intercom playbooks based on the unique buyer intent score of each visitor, which increased the average revenue per Intercom conversation by 246%, and increased revenue per site visitor by 345%!
These success stories highlight the impact that ecommerce conversion rate optimization can have on businesses of all sizes and industries.
By identifying areas for improvement, implementing targeted strategies, and continuously testing and refining their approach, these companies were able to unlock significant growth and achieve their ecommerce goals. Targeting individual users is really important if you are looking to offer personalized sales offers, which is where Lift AI is able to drastically improve conversion rates for websites.
Common CRO Mistakes and Strategies for Avoidance
Implementing ecommerce conversion rate optimization strategies can lead to incredible success, but it's also important to be aware of common mistakes that can slow down your progress. You need to understand these issues and learn how to avoid them. When done right, all of these factors work together so that your CRO strategy is more effective and delivers positive outcomes.
Mobile Optimization
Ecommerce CRO suffers when mobile device optimization is neglected. With growing mobile shopping, failing to optimize your ecommerce site for smartphones significantly impacts conversion rates.
To avoid this, you need to Make sure that your website is responsive (can display correctly on mobile, tablet and desktop browsers without losing any functionality), loads quickly on mobile, and renders your checkout page properly on smaller screens.
Test your mobile site's performance and make improvements to avoid losing potential customers. Mobile users are less likely to complete your sales funnel if there are problems on the landing page, so you need to ensure a flawless mobile experience.
User Experience
Another mistake is focusing solely on aesthetics without considering user experience. While a visually appealing website is important, it should not come at the cost of speed or usability.
Think about your website from a user's point of view. you want to prioritize navigation and make it as easy to get around your site as possible. Create intuitive product categories that are easy to use, and prominent CTA buttons. Your user should never have to guess where to click next.
Page Speed
Page speed is important to your users and search engines. Your site is less likely to show up in the results pages if there are any glaring issues that affect speed like image load times or JS components that take too long to load.
Optimize your website's performance by compressing images without losing image quality and minimize redirects. Tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights do a great job of assessing your site's speed and even makes recommendations for areas improvement.
A perfect speed score is not always possible, but if you can find any performance improvements then it is worth implementing for the sake of user experience.
Display Social Proof
Another opportunity for your ecommerce businesses is social proof. People trust other people's feedback, which means that if you have positive, real world engagement and feedback from customers then you should be using it.
If you aren’t using social proof on your site, it is a missed opportunity in improving CRO. Social proof is anything that is user generated like customer reviews, testimonials, and user-generated content.
Show any social proof that you have gathered throughout your website, especially on pages that display products and services (like your landing page). This builds trust and credibility with a potential customer that might not have heard of your brand before.
Best Practices and Common Pitfalls To Avoid in CRO
Ensure the success of your ecommerce conversion rate optimization CRO efforts, by following some of the best practices that we have outlined, and steer clear of these common mistakes.
Understand your target audience: Optimizing ecommerce stores requires you to develop a deeper understanding of your customers. Conduct market research, analyze customer data, and create buyer personas to gain insights into what their needs are, and how they interact with your site.
This information will help your CRO strategies and allow you to create experiences specifically for your ideal customers who are more likely to convert.
Focus on customer loyalty: New customers are great, but don't overlook the value of customer retention. Loyal customers have a higher lifetime value and can become brand advocates that will spread the word about your business if they have good experiences with your store.
Encourage customer loyalty by creating personalized recommendations, exclusive offers, multiple payment options, and exceptional customer service. Acknowledge repeat purchases and build long-term relationships with your customers to get continued sales into the future.
Highlight your unique selling proposition (USP): In a crowded ecommerce market you have to differentiate your brand and communicate your sales offer clearly. Your USP should state the unique value that your products or services offer when compared to your competitors, leaving the user with no doubt that they have come to the right place.
Emphasize your USP throughout your website, including your homepage, landing pages, and marketing materials with the goal of capturing visitors' attention.
Avoid information overload: Overwhelming visitors with too much information negatively affects conversion rates. Avoid this by simplifying your content, and present information so that it is clear.
Use bullet points, subheadings, and visual aids to make your content easily scannable and digestible. Most people do not want to read wall of text to try and get the important facts about an item that they wish to purchase.
Conclusion
Ecommerce conversion rate optimization is one of many aspects for driving online sales and achieving long-term business success. If you understand conversion rates and how adopting advanced technologies will allow you to implement strategies that will unlock the full potential of your e-commerce store.
Throughout this guide, we've gone into detail the importance of metrics like bounce rate and average session duration, and shown you some useful tools for CRO to help you convert at higher rates. It is a lot of information to take in, so bookmark this article and come back to it as you work through your own CRO strategy.
As you work on your CRO project, remember that optimization is an ongoing process that needs continuous testing and analysis. It may take some refinement, just like your conversion funnel, but the results are worth the effort.
However, with the opportunities uncovered by AI technology over the past 5 years, now is the time to improve your ecommerce conversion rate optimization with Lift AI. This advanced platform harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to score the buyer intent of every single website visitor, allowing you to deliver personalized experiences that will drive conversions on all your web pages.
Book a demo or sign up for a trial so that you can see for yourself how Lift AI improves your e-commerce store's conversions, and helps you achieve your business goals.
