When it comes to selling online, it is important to pay attention to the smallest of details to increase your conversion rates, and to get the best ROI. The following is a list of 25 useful tips to get the best conversion rates happening when it comes to your digital commerce. While every aspect of this list may not be that relevant for every online store, let it be a guideline for what steps you should be taking to get the best turnout.
1. Security and the Visitor’s Feeling of Security: In an online business, it is necessary to have a reputation for both security and credibility. One of the most basic measures is having an SSL security certificate, however additional stamps of security and credibility attest to your site’s safety and increase visitor’s feeling of security.
2. Availability: Unified commerce is pretty much the norm nowadays, as it’s expected that if you are a seller, you’ve got your product in as many channels as possible to reach as many audiences as possible. However, the same goes for traditional channels of communication when it comes to customer service; make sure your company can always be reached. It is still essential to have a phone number which customers can reach you on, as well as by email, and even through a chat feature.
3. Offer Something in Return: If you are aiming to capture an email address, offer something as a gesture of reciprocity. A discount code or free shipping can go a long way, so make use of these tactics when attempting to gain something.
4. Categorization: Categorize your products in a way that is specifically geared towards your customer. Your product mix should be tailored to their needs and wants, presenting items that intrigue them to go further than just a glance. It’s not just a matter of catalog categorization, it’s merchandising!
5. Invest in Good Design and Banners: As exampled by one of our brands, Fit by Sue, well-made banners that occupy a larger space are highly attractive and are eye-catching. Also, their “living showcase” demonstrates quickly and easily how the garments work on the moving body, communicating with a glance visually.
6. You knew this was coming: EMAIL. Email addresses are literally gold; so do your best to get them from your customers ASAP. They are essential to running campaigns and remarketing strategies. Focus on placing orders is important, but don’t forget about capturing email addresses.
7. Email Marketing: Email marketing should not be overlooked! When done correctly and frequently, as well as with the right tools for shooting them out and monitoring their success rates, it is a highly effective, highly efficient tool. Email marketing provides you with concrete info on the opening rate, how many clicks, bounces, as well as other factors necessary for targeting upcoming campaigns.
8. Increase the Open Rate: Have you had a bad success rate of people receiving your marketing emails and not opening them? You may not be using the right submission tool. With a window of 24-48 hours from the time your first email was sent, a good email tool will re-write the message of the first one, hence creating an entirely new email, send it again to those who didn’t open the first one and allow you to double the results of the campaign overall.
9. Adopt Best Practices for Newsletters: Amazon is one company that just gets how newsletters are supposed to be done. They allow customers to sign up on how they want to receive them, and allow changes to be made in their submissions. Additionally, their newsletters provide a range of information often tailored to the customer individually based on their interests. Also, regarding the design of newsletters, it is really important to pay attention to the text and captioning on images to have the most impact.
10. AB Testing: Multiple campaigns calls for multivariate testing, to see where you’re seeing the best results. This enables you to test what’s working, and allows you to plan ahead for future campaigns.
11. Check your Bounce Rates: Pages with high bounce rates will be in need of improvement ASAP. Compare your average bounce rates with pages that are high up. Typically the culprit behind pages that are not holding the attention of visitors is going to be either usability or the content. Monitor both areas to see where things could be off.
12. Product Value: Your photos and product descriptions are among the most important parts of your online presence, so make sure you are putting forth the absolute best quality content in regards to both. Tip: Highlight major products with special attention, data, and possibly video.
13. The Importance of Reviews: Product evaluations and reviews are an excellent way to add credibility to your product selection and content offerings. Because they enable customers to make decisions, negative reviews are just as important as positive ones.
14. Take the Customer’s Advice: Product recommendations based on the customer’s actions and behavior are a great way to increase the average ticket, and customer satisfaction.
15. Say NO to Cart Abandonment: It is essential to pay attention to cart abandonment rates, and to find ways to increase the usability. The scroll bar should always be strategically placed, and call-to-action buttons should be visible at all times.
16. Pay Attention to Colors: Important information can be conveyed using the right colors, such as orange and lime green, in order to be eye-catching. These colors should not be repeated haphazardly across the site; they should be used specifically to communicate your message.
17. Make it Easy for Your Customer: By helping your customer to find what they are looking for easily, and by making shopping convenient for them, you are assisting in keeping them as customers for the long term. Intuitive shopping is a very good thing, lessening the need for countless menus. Rather, being able to sort products by specific data like price range, or age for children’s products enables customers to navigate smoothly from shopping to checkout.
18. Performance = Results: You simply cannot get around this one. The better performing your site is, the better it will be overall for your conversion rates. Load time of pages is especially important, so be careful with how content, banners and photos are used and created on the pages.
19. Search is Optimal: According to data from Nielsen, 43% of customers give up after the first search attempt. That’s a huge percentage traffic that leaves due to frustration, which can easily be fixed with an efficient search engine that delivers intuitive, intelligent results customers are looking for.
20. Monitor Your Searches: Always keep your eye on the search terms that cause people to land on your site. This can help you increase your product mix to accommodate the demand, and also to create targeted, specific pages that cater to this traffic.
21. Test & Analyze: To quote 19th century Irish physicist, Lord Kelvin on the need for logic in all areas: “What you cannot measure, you cannot improve”. This statement rings true even now in a digital environment, and we are in complete agreement. Test everything you can, monitor, compare, and do your very best to improve the performance of your site.
22. Ideal Customer Profile: The higher your customer targeting, the better your targeting communication is going to be in regards to your overall results. Customer profiles that have the best conversion rates are going to be the ones to invest in.
23. Incomplete Order Recover: Do not discard any information! Whether it’s an incomplete order, or a fraud refusal; if the customer has reached this point, do your best to reverse the situation to a positive. Try automated tools or manual strategies to turn those incomplete orders into sales.
24. Think About the Intangibles: Reputation is one of those intangible assets that is incredibly valuable and adds a great competitive advantage. Being very customer-friendly, offering great service, and carefully monitoring social media networks, and complaint sites allows you to stay on top of your customers’ needs to continuously improve your offerings.
25. Remarketing: Landing your customers was tremendous work, however keeping them requires additional strategy. Don’t waste the opportunity; existing customers are proof that you’ve done a great job in capturing them, and catering to them can be very effective so think about the long-term possibilities! Many remarketing tools exist, so take advantage of them!
If your platform is not ready to help you to seamless improve your digital commerce, contact VTEX!
