Running a webshop can be a roller coaster ride. From abandoned shopping carts to basic usability problems to low conversion rates – you know what we mean. Dear e-commerce manager, please work constantly on your conversion rate optimization, because (as in so many other life situations) consistency is the path to success. In this article, we’re going to talk about 7 ways to increase conversions in your eCommerce business, and how customer feedback can help you ride the CRO wave.
If you’re a complete newbie to CRO, be sure to read our Beginner’s Guide to Customer Feedback and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) first.
Why is CRO so important to eCommerce businesses?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a process to optimize your site. It is supposed to encourage more visitors to achieve a certain goal and then increase the conversion rate. When it comes to eCommerce, buying is the ultimate goal. Other, smaller goals could include creating an account, adding items to a shopping cart, or signing up for a newsletter
Let’s face it, it really doesn’t matter how many leads you generate if you have a low conversion rate. When you consider that the average eCommerce conversion rate was 1.89% in mid-2021, it’s safe to say that there is still plenty of room for improvement for most brands.
Getting enough traffic to your website is one of the most important first steps you can take for your eCommerce website. However, if the conversion rate stays low, the traffic won’t really give you much back at the end of the month. If you want to increase sales, you need to increase your conversion rate. And if visitors have already made it to your webshop, why not get them to convert when they’re already there?
First, let’s take a look at the key areas of your website that will affect your conversion rate:
- Ease of use and speed of the website (s)
- Website layout, navigation, and website structure
- Abandoned shopping cart and checkout process
- Text and messages for pre-and post-conversion
- Call-to-action buttons
- Pictures and colors
In order to increase your conversions, all of these areas should be in the foreground. Basically, your entire online presence and customer journey affect your conversion rates.
Let’s see how we can improve your eCommerce website with CRO.
7 Ways To Increase Conversions On Your Ecommerce Website
Understand your customers and collect customer feedback
We’ve mentioned it in many of our posts, but we can’t stress it enough: collecting customer feedback is critical to your CRO strategy. Who knows best about why your customers aren’t converting? Your customers, of course. To fully understand them, collect feedback from all sorts of channels and pages to find out what would make them convert. For more feedback examples, just read on. We’ll come back to this later in this post.
Help your customers fully understand your products
A best practice for increasing your conversion rate is to improve product photos and descriptions. Using high-quality images and videos will help your customers fully understand your product. Online your customers cannot touch or try on the products, so it should be obvious that your product pages need to be flawless. Show your products from different angles, use customer testimonials, or show a video to help your customers see your products from the right angle.
Optimize the check-out process
According to some statistics from 2018, the shopping cart abandonment rate for fashion and retail is around 74%. A lot of people, 26% to be precise, said they left the cart because of a long or complex check-out process. This is a huge number that you can easily improve with a few UX tweaks around your check-out process. We recommend that you start by optimizing all of your pages for mobile devices and desktops. A distracting design is the most common reason not to. As soon as your visitor has successfully placed his item in the shopping cart, the last thing you want to make it difficult for him to continue buying.
Another UX strategy to reduce cart abandonment is to clearly show the stage of the process your customer is in. A progress indicator is particularly important for visitors who are on the move and want to check out quickly. Such a feature often makes the process less overwhelming as it can see both how far the customer is in the process and how far they have to go.
Collect quantitative data
A / B testing tools provide real-time data about your users, enable you to continuously experiment and optimize your website or app and ultimately increase conversion rates. A modified version of a website or app can be as simple as changing the terminology of your navigation bar and call-to-action-buttons, or as complicated as redesigning your entire website or app.
But you have to find out what your customers prefer! And what better way to find out than to seek their opinions and experiment?
Create a conversion analysis
We cannot recommend this step enough! By starting with extensive research and conversion optimization analysis, you rule out assumptions and your hypotheses are truly valuable. You can create conversion analyzes with quantitative or qualitative analysis types, from web analyzes to must tracking and usability tests.
Many CRO specialists also use soft data (e.g. feedback) first to form a hypothesis and then test it by looking at the variability in their hard data as a result of those changes.
To learn more about performing conversion analysis and the different ways it can be done, please read our article on “Why Conversion Optimization Should Always Start With Analysis”.
CTAs need to stand out
According to Unbounce, over 90% of visitors who read your headline will also read your CTA text. So please make it exciting! Creating boring or unattractive CTAs is really a missed opportunity.
CTAs are important, that is clear. But how can you improve your CTAs? From a design perspective, your CTA should stand out from your other content. It should be easy to spot and understand – you want visitors to know what it represents and where it is on your page.
Think about the color, negative and positive space, the message of your call-to-action – it really matters all and depends on your audience and your business. And again: stay consistent. Don’t change the colors of your buttons.
Use CRO tools
CRO tools can help you in different ways and can be broken down into different CRO tactics. Check out our Tool Blog by Category to find your ideal CRO tool :
- Lead Capturing
- Analytics
- User experience testing
- Page optimization
- Online performance
- Marketing automation
Each of these tools has its own advantages. The best way to find out which tools are best for your business is to try them out.
Collect customer feedback in your webshop
As mentioned above, a great way to increase your conversion rate is to get to know your customers. It sounds cheesy, but the only way to be truly successful in the eCommerce industry (and any other industry, to be honest) is to understand what your customers really want.
To get there, let’s look at some examples of real customer feedback that will help you get closer to your webshop customers.
Feedback on product descriptions or website content
Product descriptions (especially in e-commerce!) Must be 100% correct. How else do you want your customers to know what exactly you are buying? To find out whether your product descriptions are correct, you can embed a feedback form below your product descriptions. For example, our customer SportScheck, one of the largest sports retailers in the DACH region, asks for feedback on product descriptions :
So you can use feedback to find out if your customers are really well informed enough to make a purchase.
Search bar feedback
Many companies also collect feedback on their search bar tool as it is crucial for customers to find what they are looking for.
Put yourself in the customer’s shoes: if you know exactly what you’re looking for, a well-functioning search engine is amazing! You save so much time and get there much faster instead of scrolling through the entire product page.
Multilingual user feedback
Multilingual websites are a must, especially in e-commerce. But do you also have a multilingual team? With our software, you can now collect multilingual customer feedback. Manual translation of the feedback is almost impossible if you are short of time.
That’s why Mopinion supports over 100 languages so you can understand all of your customers’ feedback and respond to their needs.
Imagine collecting feedback from your multilingual e-commerce company and your website is available in English, German, and French. You speak fluent English and German, but your French (probably about like mine!) Leaves a lot to be desired.
You can now automatically translate customer feedback from your French website into German, which can save you a lot of time and effort. This translation tool from Mopinion is particularly helpful when there is a large amount of feedback.
Newsletter feedback
There are numerous reasons why companies incorporate email newsletters into their digital marketing strategy. Email marketing is and remains one of the most effective methods today. And as we learned in our beginner’s guide to CRO, a newsletter registration, clicks from your newsletter, and opening a newsletter is also a conversion.
To make sure that you don’t lose all of these conversions again with a newsletter that doesn’t meet your customers’ expectations, just ask them for their feedback.
You can add a feedback bar with smileys to your newsletter and simply ask how much your readers liked your newsletter.
There is also a second way to get even more feedback on your newsletter. You can include a link that will take your readers to an online survey about your newsletter. Here you can dig deeper and ask for feedback on the content, design, subject lines, and timing of your newsletter.
On-page feedback
What we are seeing more and more often are active feedback forms on various pages for general feedback on your website. Take it from Calvin Klein and make data-driven decisions.
This is also one of the most popular feedback form templates and comes in the form of a general page rating. Feedback forms with this rating measure the usability of the site and use all kinds of ratings ranging from stars and smileys to number ranges, color bars, and thumbs. These types of feedback form templates are great for gaining insight into website usability. They can be placed anywhere on your website.