How to Improve Your Ecommerce Conversion Rate in 2021

Running an online business is a fantastic way of generating income nowadays. The internet has created unprecedented opportunities, but they don’t come without its own set of challenges. One of the most common ones is the ecommerce conversion rate.

It’s not the same getting people to visit your online store than actually making a sale. That’s where your conversion rate comes in.

But fear not, attracting thousands of visitors to your website with only tens of customers making a purchase is a very common problem among ecommerce sellers.

The big question is: “Now that you have the clicks, how can you make the conversion?”

Read on to find out.

What is a conversion rate?

A conversion refers to the number (or more specifically, the percentage) of visitors who take a specific action on your website. That means the number of possible customers that click on your shop and that interact with it.

Traffic is great! And broadly, any KPI that is key for your business. For example, you want people to do any of the following:

• Buying something

• Adding products to the shopping cart

• Signing up for newsletters or emails

• Sharing on social media

To be able to measure the conversion rate of your website, you need to set a specific period of time and then divide the number of visitors (clicks) with the number of interactions (conversions).

How do I know if my ecommerce conversion rate is working?

The rule of thumb is that good conversion rates range between 1% or 2%, and that should be the baseline.

If you’re getting 3,000 visitors per month and you get a total of 30 conversions a month, that would be 1%. That means, you can optimize your online shop and increase it to 60 conversions per month.

This can help you detect a possible problem with your sales or your eCommerce funnel. The sales funnel is one of the most important aspects of online shopping. It comprehends the whole process of luring your new customers and having them return to your site.

Not only can it make a huge difference between getting or losing a sale, but it is also a key factor to develop loyalty.

What is an eCommerce funnel?

It’s called a ‘funnel’ because not all the people being introduced to your brand and products will make a purchase.

Let’s be realistic. Not everyone will go through the entire process on their first visit. And only a few out of those that buy something from you will repeat the process.

Remember, online shoppers like to get informed before buying a product, so if they don’t take action in the first visit, they might the next time. Think about the way you buy.

How to create an effective ecommerce funnel?

An ecommerce funnel should be designed in a way that will lead your customers to click that “Buy Now” button.

Since each business and brand is different, you’ll have to know your current conversion rate benchmarks to design the best funnel for your clients.

It should be easy to follow and it must improve their buying experience.

It usually consists of 4 major steps that lead to you to making a sale:

1. Awareness: An ad or a piece of content that introduces the potential shopper to your product or brand. Provide information to possible buyers to get familiar with your business. Explain how you can solve their problems.

2. Interest and Evaluation: Once they’ve noticed you, keep your possible customers interested. Continue to post interesting and entertaining content. The goal is to eventually get them to your site.

3. Desire: This is when you stop talking about features and focus on the benefits. This can be an article or explainer video that convinces the person that this product is exactly what they need.

4. Action: Here’s where your strategic CTA comes in. You already lured clients with your product’s features, then you explained the benefits and now it’s the final punch to show them your product is the right way to go.

When someone repeats the process, we will have created brand loyalty: people come back to purchase from you. Your brand has achieved to position itself in the minds of the buyers as a main option.

How can an ecommerce funnel improve your conversion rates?

Monitoring your ecommerce funnel will allow you to find “leaks” in the process and determine where people are abandoning the purchase. Maybe your purchase process is too complex and you need to narrow it down.

Remember “1-Click Ordering” from Amazon? The tech giant simplified the process of placing an order. And now, every time someone clicks “Buy now with 1 Click” when making a purchase, any associated payment method and shipping address is automatically added. This of course is time-efficient and eliminates leaks.

Whatever the case, monitoring your ecommerce funnel will give you the answers to optimize your purchase process and get more conversions.

Other ways to optimize your conversion rates

As you can see, optimizing your conversions can make or break your business. One way of optimizing your conversions is with a perfect funnel, but that’s not the only way to drive numbers up.

There are many things you can do to achieve these goals:

Search Engine Optimization

Optimizing your ranking on google is a matter of using the right keywords to point the algorithm in the right direction to link your website with the right people.

Once you get your website to rank higher, we recommend you take the time to optimize your user experience and tailor the content your visitors see.

Remember that this is the best way for users to find you among your other online competitors.

Make your website faster

In most cases, you have about 3 seconds to capture the attention of a visitor. A 1-second delay can represent a 7% reduction in conversions, some studies even suggest that 57% of visitors will leave a slow webpage and purchase from a competitor. Here’s how to avoid it:

1. Optimize your images: Your designer might be able to help with this but for the most part your images need to be treated specifically for web use and in a lighter format that doesn’t compromise quality.

2. Change your hosting plan: Get a faster hosting plan, the cost will be worth it. Maybe a cheaper package may look like an opportunity to save money, but you’ll be losing clients.

3. Optimize your CSS & JavaScript files: The less clutter you can have on the backend of your website, the better. Every bit of extra data represents more time when loading and navigating.

Don’t forget about A/B Testing

If you’ve never heard about A/B testing, it’s a popular testing method used in marketing. It consists of testing small changes to see which option (a or b) works best.

By making small changes to your website, you can see how it affects your metrics, visitors, eCommerce funnel, and more. You can test many things like:

• Navigation and site maps

• CTA buttons, how they look and attract

• Emails or Ad campaigns

• Photography styles

• Web design

Highlight the pages that create the most conversions

Through analytics and metrics, you can determine which pages of your website are generating more sales and where purchases actually happen.

In understanding this you can then emphasize the parts of your page that are leading people to buy from you. Maybe it’s the design, the information, the CTA that you’re using, or just the way the page is constructed.

Whatever the case may be, you know something there is working; so, shine a spotlight on it.

Best case scenario, you can even replicate it on other areas of your webpage. Take advantage of those strengths.

Simplify your checkout process

Make it easy to buy from you. Allow users to shop as guests, keep your Checkout button visible. Most importantly, make them sure your site is safe, so make sure to allow for different types of payment that will make your buyers trust you.

Know your audience

You’d think it goes without saying but you have to study the behavior of your visitors in order to understand what makes them tick, or in this case, buy. Some good practices to have would be:

1. Keeping up to date with consumer trends to stay one step ahead

2. Run surveys through your clients to understand their experience

3. Personalize your website to tailor that experience

4. Create buyer personas to understand your target audience

5. Collect information on consumer habits and buying patterns

Keep optimizing

We live in an ever-changing world, so you can’t just optimize your conversion rates once and forget about it. Surprise loyal customers every now and then and lure new customers by making your marketing campaign better as you learn.

Conclusion

It may seem like a lot of unnecessary work to some, but monitoring and optimizing your website is the best way to grow your ecommerce conversion rate.

In doing so, you’ll find that it is absolutely worth it once you see the results. That’s because conversion rates are not only about one-time purchases.

If you analyze your conversions right, you can get the data to work for you and improve your marketing campaign to offer the best shopping experience out there.

Remember that the bottom line is using your insights to keep your online website clean and easy to follow.

Basically, it’s about knowing what strategy to use for any visitor at any stage they’re at in the sales funnel.