Increase Your Conversion Rate To Increase Your Sales

What is conversion and why is it important?

‘Build it and they will come’ might’ve worked for Noah but unfortunately, it’s not so simple for eCommerce owners. Strategic marketing of your online retail business is crucial if you want to gain brand recognition, increase sales, and expand. In an online world, focusing on digital marketing is an obvious choice and the key to success is to improve your online conversion rate.

Conversion rate can be defined as the percentage of customers who complete an action – a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) – that you want them to take. There are many types of conversion rates that you can look at, but here are some of the most important conversions for an eCommerce site:

1. Email signups
2. Social media shares
3. Click through rates from ads
4. Filling out an enquiry form
5. Adding an item to the basket
6. An online sale
7. Any KPI that is unique to your business

Conversion rates are usually expressed as a percentage. For example, if you have a 7% eCommerce conversion rate, that means that seven out of every one hundred people who visit your website complete a purchase.

JEM’s Top 5 Tips for Better Conversion

1. Know Your Users

To maximise your online conversion rate, you’ll need to collect data and understand the psychology of your users. You can do this by analysing your website data (Google Analytics is the place to start), and here are the top statistics to monitor;

• Where traffic originates from
• How long users spend on your site
• What point they leave your site (when no purchase has been made)
• How many purchases are added to the basket and then abandoned
• What pattern customers go through before completing a purchase (so looking at origin, length of time on each page etc…)

2. Use Your Data Wisely

Once you have some understanding of your users and what parts of your site or process could be improved, you can make changes. If you notice a high exit rate on certain pages or short visit times on pages with lots of text, you’ll know you must make those pages more appealing, easier to navigate or perhaps remove them altogether. On the flip side, if some web pages seem to result in high conversion then make sure it’s very easy for more customers to find them.
If you find lots of baskets are abandoned, perhaps the delivery charge is off-putting, or the checkout process isn’t simple enough.

Whatever changes you make, keep monitoring your data and continually modify to get even better results.

3. SEO Focused conversion

Make sure your content has been created with the aim of attracting search engine traffic – aka Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). We can’t cover everything on SEO here, but here’s a few areas to work on;

• Keyword Research: focus on keywords that people are already searching for (that relate to your business of course!)
• Keyword Optimisation: Know where and how to use keywords in your content
• Content Organisation: Organise your site content logically so it’s easy for the user to navigate

If you want to delve deeper, Moz.com have excellent articles – like this one on beginner’s SEO https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

4.Visuals 

Your customers can’t handle your products, so you need to make sure your images and videos are very high quality, beautifully produced and placed in the best part of the web page. Usually, images come before the descriptions and having galleried thumbnail pictures in your categories makes it easier for your customers to navigate. The best tip is to think about what you would want to see if you were unable to handle the product and make sure your customers can look at it from all angles. Photography is also a chance to mirror your brand ideas, style and personality so make sure you hire a photographer that understands your business aesthetics.

5. Promotions, freebies, samples

After you’ve ensured you’re competitively priced, think of other ways to make your customers feel like they are getting value and the right product – two key factors in getting that purchase conversion rate up. Here are some of the ways you can stand out against the competition;

• Delivery options. Charging postage and packaging can really help you increase your margins, but customers also need to feel like they’re getting good value. If offering it for free isn’t an option can you give free delivery for high value orders (with the bonus of encouraging extra spend), or include a tracking service?
• Coupons and sales. Make sure you offer an email sign up so you can let customers know when your sales are on, and adjust your website to highlight limited time offers, products bundled together or coupons for repeat customers.
• Samples. Certain products, particularly food or beauty products but many more, can really increase sales and customer confidence by giving away freebies and selling small sample sizes. It’s such a good marketing tool that we wrote a whole article on it, which you can check out here.

Have a chat with JEM

If you need a UK fulfilment house that really delivers (fast effective shipping really helps convert first time customers into repeat customers) and want to know more about what we could do for you, please talk to us about your needs. Switching your fulfilment over to us is easy, smooth and quick – whatever size your company is.