111 Tips For eCommerce CRO – The Only List You Will Ever Need (Part 1 of 3)
The eCommerce industry is a trillion dollar business that is still in its growing phase. With out-of-the box eCommerce solutions like Magento, plenty of online entrepreneurs are jumping on the eCommerce bandwagon to try and make it big.
However, there’s one problem: The majority of eCommerce owners BARELY break even. And this makes sense because if you’re selling online, you’re competing with the big players, like Amazon, Asos, REI, Etsy, etc.
As Magento Developers, we think theonly way to succeed is when you play smart and start paying attention to your CRO.
What is CRO?
Conversion rate optimization isa fancy word used to describe the various tweaks you do to your website to help convert your casual visitors into loyal buyers. Changing colors, adding images, using buttons, incorporating reviews and incluedingpop-ups – Anything you do to increase sales on your eCommerce site falls under the CRO umbrella.
How Do You Calculate The CRO Of Your Magento Website?
To understand your website’s current CRO and set a baseline for your eCommerce website, use this equation:
(Total Orders/Number Of Visitors) * 100
Example: (100 orders per week/10,000 weekly engaged visitors)* 100 = 1% conversion rate
To have an accurate value, remove visitors who bounce off. They never had the chance to experience your website
Now that you have measured the performance of your website, it’s time to make use of our exhaustive MagentoCRO tips to improve your conversion rate.
Understand Your Target Audience
Market analysis should have been your first step when you decided on your eCommerce ventures. Even if you’ve found the target audience who will love your product, it’s sometimes impossible to break the click barrier and get them to make a transaction with you.
What if you’ve targeted the wrong crowd, all together? This happens very, very often. We’ve seen eCommerce owners spend a lot of money on online ads and website makeovers, only to see no return. If that’s the case, then it’s time to find the right audience for your awesome eCommerce store.
The first impression is always the best impression, as you have less than 3 seconds to impress your potential shoppers. It’s essential your website has the best UX to help improve your CRO.
Navigation is how customer’s experience your website. Only when there is a seamless navigation will customers have a fantastic eCommerce experience, resulting in a higher CRO rate.
The major concern of an eCommerce website is product discovery. If customers can’t locate your product, they’re not going to consider returning to your website. These simple tips will help improve product discovery rate tremendously.
The search box is the most important feature of an eCommerce website. It’s the only feature that customers extensively use and when configured right, it helps in improving the site’s CRO drastically.
Your target audience knows what they want. So ask them.Surveys are a great way to get some feedback about your service and website. To encourage maximum participation along with additional transaction, incentivize your shoppers with some store credit they can use for their next purchase. You will have a fair number of takers ready to give you some valuable information needed to optimize your store.
2. Ask The Right Questions
It’s easy to get customers interested in a survey, but framing the right question is the most difficult part. Spend time thinking of the questions that you need answered – And then ask away!
If you need any help in building a questionnaire, shoot out a message to @thecommerceshop and we will help you frame one, tailored for your target audience.
3. Tapping The Social Platform
Social media and other online platforms easily let you reach out to your target audience. It’s essential you visit Google Analytics and identify where your social referrals are coming from and then engage on those platforms.
4. Requesting Your Existing Customer Base
A referral campaign is another easy way to reach out to more potential buyers. Start a referral program and incentivize customers to participate and spread the love.
5. Create Your Unique Brand
With more unique layouts making trends, eCommerce websites are building their own identity. Customers tend to respond better to the emotion of the storytelling website rather than the conventional layout.
The best example is the Graze, which makes use of intuitive photography and an intelligent layout to reach out to the customer’s senses.
6. Provide A Personalized Touch
According to Mojn, personalization is the key to increase eCommerce CRO – In a survey, 75% of customers said they like it when brands give them personalized messages and offers.
To do this, get the customer to participate in a questionnaire session that helps you give a personalized shopping experience to customers. SOJeans is the perfect example, where they take personalization to a whole new level. They have a separate tab called ‘the fitting room’ where the customers answer 4 simple questions, returning the best jean recommendation.
7. Build A Community
Building an online community if you’re on the right platform. Limeroad is the perfect example of building an amazing community of online fashionistas. Their concept is to create a combination of different looks through their scrapbook option. People who create such scrapbook posts get credits that they can use to shop at the Limeroad site itself. Plus, their website is always refreshed with amazing styles belonging to various genres. Visitors can easily purchase the entire look or choose specific pieces they like.
Get customers hooked on to your site with a simple concept called community building.
8. Make Search Visible
The search box should be the most prominent part of your website. The integral part of your eCommerce CRO success depends on making it clean, visible and accessible for everyone. Again, Limeroad does a great job with this.
A perfect search box with a relevant call to action inviting customers to search for their queries.
9. Useful Navigation Bar
The navigation bar is another important element that helps customers locate the products or services they need. If you are a B2C eCommerce portal, then you’re bound to have lots of products. The perfect way to organize them is through the intelligent navigation bar. Take a look at Chumbak– They nail the navigation bar.
The tip is to use simple terms that people can easily remember and identify with. The navigation bar will also help split parent category and their subcategories. Try to showcase your most preferred categories to let people easily access them.
10. Incentivize New Customers To Sign Up And Make Their First Transaction
This is one of the most popular and effective CRO strategies used by most eCommerce websites. But, the truth is that some sites use it better than others.
You gain two main things out of incentivizing:
Motivating customers to make their first transaction
Getting them to sign up to building your database
Koovs.com does a pretty good job in getting people to sign up with their prominent attention grabbing pop up, whereas, Hopscotch has made it low key and placed it next to their sign up button. This might not be as effective, as casual visitor can easily miss it. It’s an opportunity lost.
11. Let Customers Know How And When To Contact You
Prominent display of your customer support details is another positive eCommerce CRO technique. This works best in building your credibility amongst new customers who are looking to make their first transaction. Also, being honest and open about your customer support and availability is important.
Cottonworld does a great job in highlighting their contact number along with their working hours. This helps customers to just open the site and reach out to them.
12. Have A Promotion? Flaunt It
Running promotional campaigns can help you gain some transaction. But, it’s not enough that you send out mailers and run PPC campaigns to promote it – It’s essential to let the your visitors know you have awesome discounts available.
Your homepage is the best location to showcase your promotional offers. The best way to get their attention is with a big banner that says ‘Get X% off on our best selling products’.
13. Showcase Your Security Certificates
A study from Actual Insights revealed that 75.66% of shoppers trust security badges, as they are one of the trust factors customers look for in an unfamiliar website. However, don’t get certified by some random security firms, learn about each one’s credibility and its relevance to your website and users, before displaying it on your website. A test conducted by Baymard revealed that different badges yield different levels of trust. Optimize your website with the right trust seal that best relates to your customers and products.
14. Personalize Your Home Page By Using Shopper’s Browsing History
As the world of eCommerce is heading towards the personalized lane, it’s important to have a specific ‘recommended for you ‘ section on the home page. ASOS does a great job in requesting access to customer’s browser cookies. This helps in recommending products that are of interest to the customers. It also helps in grabbing customer’s attention and also improves your site’s bounce rate.
15. Provide Free Shipping And Returns On Your Homepage
An easy way to get customers to place their order is using the power of the word, ‘Free’. In the book named Free, Chris Anderson (the author)shares the Amazon story about what happened when they implemented free shipping. Spoiler alert: Amazon’s sales shot up globally,with the exception of France. This is the psychology of shoppers and making use of the knowledge, there is a huge difference between free and marginal rates.
Even you can provide conditional free shipping, it greatly helps in CRO. 2BigFeet is a great example as when they implemented free shipping for orders over $100, they witnessed an increase of 50% in their sales.
16. A/B Test On The Products To Display On Your Home Page
Displaying the right products on your homepage will help you realize better CRO. How will you know if your website performs well for seasonable products or the new arrivals? A/B testing is the perfect way to understand how well you customers perceive the product. . Conduct split testing on the different kinds of products displayed on the homepage to understand how well users perceive and respond.
17. Have A Prominent FAQ Section
Online customers like to help themselves, as 91% of survey respondents said they would rather use a self-help tool to fix to their problems.
Investing in a vast and interactive FAQ will help reduce the number of emails to the customer service department. It helps to make the FAQ resourceful with its own search box for a customer’s convenience.
18. Have You Been Covered By Media? If So, Showcase It!
If you’re featured in some top magazines, websites or new papers, then it’s time you got some mileage for all the love showered on you brand.
19. Find The Right Theme To Set Categories
Standard categories are fine for general super stores that sell everything, but when you have a boutique set up, it’s essential to create category theme that best fits your product.
Alphabetical – Makes sense when you have a gazillion categories and products.
Gender And Audience– If you have products for women, men and kids then this is the right kind of theme that best fits all your products.
Purpose Oriented – Based on your products and its purpose. If you have various products like ropes, tents, fishing rods, etc. then have categories like hiking, camping, mountaineering, fishing to target the niche audience.
20. Provide Visual Navigational Assistance
Reebok has done an excellent way of categorizing their product based on a customer’s fitness program and providing a visual display for each, helping them discover the products they need effortlessly.
21. Avoid Having Multiple Categories, Just For The Sake Of It
Multiple categories lead to more confusion and excess navigation time for customers. This creates more frustration and fewer conversions. To have an optimized store, its best you create the right set of categories needed to organize the products within.
22. Analyze Customer’s Preferred Categories
When you are in the mission to bring down your number of categories, don’t blindly remove your customer’s favorite ones. Always use your trusted friend, Google Analytics, and find the most used categories and start weeding out the untouched ones. This helps you understand your customer’s navigational patterns.
23. Create Sub-Categories
No one wants to browse through million products – Sub-categories are a great way to segregate relevant products. Create as many sub-categories needed to fit all your products. The key is relevance.
24. Interlink Category Fields
This is the perfect hack for eCommerce websites that have thousands of products with plenty of parent categories. Using the same sub-category under multiple parent-categories helps customers find products easily.
Jabong has a parent-category for ‘Accessories’ and the same category is used as the sub-category under the parent category ‘Women’. This particular flow is designed for customer’s navigational pattern. Basically, we can’t categorize how customer’s mind works. Our best bet is to look at various possibilities to fit our products to enhance its visibility.
25. Create Appropriate Tags And Make Them Search Friendly
Product pages have the most important keywords. Even if you are unable to create enough content for each and every product page, make sure you add relevant tags. This will greatly improve product visibility.
26. Understand Your Customers’s Navigational Pattern To Set Up An Optimized Store
It’s time to get back to trusted friend Google Analytics. The Behavior Flow Analysis is an intelligent tool that shows us how the mind of the customerperceives your website. Based on the highly preferred route, we can design the navigational pattern that gives the best ROI.
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27. Audit Your Entire Site To Check If Each Product Is Under The Right Parent- And Sub-Category
When creating a database of a huge number of products, it’s difficult to keep track of products going in. Perform regular audits on your site to check if the products are listed under the relevant categories. As mentioned above, if a particular product fits into more than one category, then feel free to include it.
28. Predictive Search Engines
Predictive searches are extremely popular, as they not only reduce a customer’s navigation time, but also lets other products catch the shopper’s eyes.
In Magzter’s predictive search feature, the customer was looking for the ‘Health & Nutrition’ Magazine, but they also show many other similar products of interest. A great CRO improvement!
29. Advanced Search Engines
Advanced search engines are extremely useful for customers who aren’t too keen on browsing different products. They are quite sure about what they want and they want to get it FAST.
The Jabong’s filter works as a great advanced search feature and helps customer’s shortlist the product they want.
30. Make The ‘No Results Found’ Page Work For You
There could be various reasons for customers land on the ‘No results found’ page. But, it depends on how creative you are in diverting customers back to the navigation path.
Zappos does a great job in converting their ‘no results’ page into a space that not only helps the customer find the product they are looking for, but also in spreading information about their culture and workspace.
31. For Mobile Browsers, Make Your Search Box Prominent
It’s mandatory to have a prominent search box on mobile devices since they have much smaller screen sizes. Even though your website maybe responsive, having a tiny search icon is not as effective as having a search bar tool.
In the comparison between the above two screen grabs, Jabong mobile site users are prone to use the search feature compared to the Chumbak mobile site users. This leads to easy product discovery and improved conversion rate.
That’s it for now folks. Our next list will be out with more CRO tips on
