5 Key Elements to Optimise your eCommerce Conversion Rates

What would an improvement of 10% of your conversion rate mean for you? How about 20%, or 30%, or more?

According to recent studies, the average ecommerce conversion rates (CVR) are between 1.84%-3.71%. Depending on your industry, that could be classed as good, average or in worse cases, a dream.

With massive focus being on maximising returns on the increasing rise in costs, whether digital ads, stock storage, wavering consumer loyalty, or increased competition, we understand how even a relatively small increase in your conversion rate (CVR) can have big impact on your revenue and growth and give a positive side to business growth over cost-cutting measures.

The traditional model of increasing your ad spend may have served well, but the law of diminishing returns is driving up your acquisition costs.

What if we told you that focusing on your CVR delivers the same results, without the additional spend costs as well as a host of benefits to your fundamental growth strategy?

Before we get into the detail, let’s highlight the ideal scenario for generating business from your new and existing customers:

• A consumer visits your site (via organic, paid ads, search activity etc)
• They find products they like and add them to their basket
• They checkout with their purchase without issue
• Bonus points - they find additional products or remarketed complimentary products that bring them back to site and/or add to basket during first visit

Sounds simple? We know it’s easier said than done. Much easier.

So why is so much of your traffic (after you spend the time, money and effort in attracting them to your site) not converting?

It’s important to understand the how and why this could be happening - whilst there could be many, the most likely culprit is down to a poor online experience. A few examples to consider from a customer experience perspective:

• Your site isn’t mobile optimised (with 80+% of online shopping now on mobile, it can’t be ignored)
• You have slow site speed/performance (likely due to a load of plugins? Just guessing..)
• Consumers can’t easily find what they were looking for
• Your ad strategy, as targeted as you think it is, still isn’t focused and agile enough on your core customer profiles
• There’s no site personalisation and/or your site design isn’t set up for a tailored experience
• Your remarketing strategy is none existent

We’re making an assumption that, as you’ve found this post, chances are you know about these challenges and don’t need them being repeated to you.

Whilst they sound like fundamentally large problems and challenging solutions to combat it, a few 'quick win' tweaks to your website design, customer experience, product management and insights, you can make it much easier for consumers to convert and buy from your store. In turn, this can lead to a significant increase in sales, revenue and insights vital to your businesses success.

Create Customisable User Experiences

Out-of-the-box commerce platforms market themselves as providing templates and frameworks to get you started in the world of ecommerce and good (if basic) online experiences.

The reality is that so are 000’s of other users and most likely your competitors using the same templates for their sites too and consumers are quickly dulling to these experiences.

You want to stand out from the crowd, perhaps by offering tailored browsing or showcasing your products in a unique and memorable way, but are constrained by the platform you’re on.

With the ever-changing ecommerce landscape, being able to leverage a customisable front end, to react faster to trends and styles, is vital when looking to provide an enticing, personalised experience to your customers without having to forfeit the benefits of being on that platform you rely on as the foundations of your store.

Upgrade your Product Search + Recommendations

Over 50% of customers navigate directly to product search and customers that use search are significantly more likely to buy.

One of the most important aspects of ecommerce is product discovery, making sure that customers can easily find the products they're looking for. This means implementing a well-optimised product search that can quickly return relevant results.

Tagging and product information management is both the saviour and curse in this. What can feel like a mundane manual process in this tagging can’t be ignored when using this metadata to help your customers find what they need as quickly as possible.

Personalise your customer’s experiences

If you're not using product recommendations, you're missing out on a major opportunity to increase your sales. Product recommendations are one of the most effective ways to increase ecommerce sales because they allow you to suggest products that are relevant to the customer's interests.

Attention spans are reducing, and on average most online shoppers only view the first 3 pages of an eCommerce store, this could mean potential customers only seeing a very small fraction of the available product catalogue. By using personalization strategies you ensure that the most relevant products are displayed to each user increasing the likelihood of the customer converting into a sale.

eCommerce stores can increase their sales even further by using personalised recommendations. Personalised recommendations are when eCommerce stores show customers products that are specifically tailored to their interests. This is done by collecting data about the customer's browsing and purchase history, then using this data to create a personalised list of recommendations.

There are a number of benefits to eCommerce personalisation, including increased customer loyalty and satisfaction, by providing a more personalised experience, customers are more likely to return to your store in the future but the biggest benefit to eCommerce personalization is improved conversion rates and average order values.

The first is not personalising the experience enough. Many retailers simply rely on customer data to make generic product recommendations, instead of tailoring the whole shopping experience specifically for each individual customer. This includes dynamically controlling product display sequences based on segmentation and behaviours across all areas of your eCommerce site - Product Display Pages, search results and product recommendations.

We love personalisation here at MOOT - you can check out our site to find out our views on it here.

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Improve your Site Performance

Research has shown that every 1-second delay in page loading can lead to a 7% reduction in conversion rate. If your site is slow to load, there are increased chances consumers won’t wait around to buy from you. Worse, they could go to a competitor.

Page speed and performance should definitely be one of your regularly monitored KPIs and optimising these results can substantially improve numerous critical stages of your consumer lifecycle.

Site speed is one of the most important factors that affect eCommerce conversion rates. If your website is slow to load, customers will be less likely to stick around and buy from you.

Tools like Google Page Speed Insights and Google Lighthouse provide high-level insights into your site performance and highlight areas of improvement and optimisation.

We’ve helped our clients to increase their site speed by 2-,3- even 400% increases in performance, with our aim to have each site over 85+ score

Take action on your Insights

It’s very easy to be overwhelmed by data when you’re looking for the simplest of answers -

Historical analysis, Anomaly detection, Gap analysis.

• Order by availability: Prioritise products displayed by what’s available, improving conversion

• Merchandise by KPI: Promote high-margin items or high inventory items to help deliver on commercial goals

• A/B test merchandising strategies and track views, adds-to-basket and conversions by category or product page to refine your strategies.

Actionable items on our dashboard ensure traders and merchandisers are acting upon opportunities and pitfalls.

BONUS ELEMENT!

What good are all the insights, personalised journies, beautifully fast pages without being able to target those who you want to see it most?

Introducing Enhanced Retargeting. Deliver your message to the right user, at the right time, in the right context, with the right creative, for the best price.

MOOT evaluates a wide range of signals and meaningful interactions between signals to set the optimal bid amount.

Flexible, simple, transparent programmatic advertising with a powerful algorithmic focus on campaign success.

The easiest way to explain it is with the below, but the benefits are incredible.

Wrap up

eCommerce is a competitive and ever-changing landscape, and to stay ahead of the curve, especially with the re-emergence of inflation, retailers need to invest in technology that can help them optimise their online stores.

By using technology that covers personalisation, customisable user experience, advanced product information management, and powerful AI and ML recommendation engines all backed up by deep BI dashboards showcasing actionable insights, the returns on investment and uplift in revenue can be significant.

These are just some of our insights. We’ll be sharing more advice and insights into these areas so be sure to check back soon.

What other challenges do you face when looking to improve your conversion rates? What opportunities are you looking for in the near future to empower and grow your business? We’d love to hear from you.

The MOOT pitch

MOOT is a completely unified front-end solution for eCommerce brands on Shopify who are seeking advanced functionality to scale faster and more efficiently.

We work with progressive brands who are embracing the next generation of tech to automate and personalise their customer experience for their brands and tailor custom experiences for customers to convert and create lasting advocacy through optimal user experiences.

Clients who use our platform benefit from:

• Richer, custom design and personalised UX
• Best in-class site-performance
• State-of-the-art personalisation
• Best of breed Product Information Management
• Mobile-First design
• Actionable trading and merchandising insights

Resulting in beautiful, fast, searchable, discoverable websites, designed to delight your customers and convert more browsers to buyers.

We help clients and the eCommerce industry reach their full potential across the entire business. We help traders, marketers, merchandisers and business leaders deliver the greatest customer experiences possible, all without the need to re-platform.

Discover more at MOOT.GROUP or Contact Us now to discuss how we can help supercharge your growth ambitions.

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