On paper, the process of eCommerce conversion seems rather simple – you start sending visitors to your website with advertising, they find the product they like, and finally, they make a purchase. In reality, though, things couldn’t be more different.
In an increasingly competitive digital trading environment, then conversion doesn’t simply happen – you need to invest a lot of money and resources to encourage the visitors to eventually follow through and become your customers.
So let us take a look at some of the most efficient and profitable tactics that will help you to finally increase the percentage of website visitors who eventually purchased something from your online store.
Upgrade product pages
This is one of the oldest rules of marketing – if you expect people to buy something, you need to make the product enticing. The merchants of old did that by making their apple shine. You will do that by updating the pages of your products. How? Take product photos from multiple angles, try using 360-degree snapshots, write organic, detailed and engaging product descriptions, and include unboxing videos and various tutorials. All these things make your product look more appealing and bring visitors a step closer to hitting “Purchase.”
Personalize the content
The importance of personalized content can’t be stressed enough – if you want your customers to make a purchase, they need to be presented with the products they are most likely to buy. The way you are going to do this is by:
- Providing dynamic content
- Setting up streamlined purchase pathways
The dynamic recommendations you are going to offer should be based primarily on the visitors’ on-site behavior, history with your brand, and bits of info like geographic location. In terms of streamlined pathways, you can try creating personalized collections of products that don’t necessarily belong to the same category.
Give your website a sense of urgency
When they visit your website, people are usually left to their own devices when making purchasing decisions. This interaction can be made far more dynamic with the inclusion of a reliable social proof tool that will engage the visitors with various cues about the behavior of other users, and build the trust with social proof signals. When the terrain is ready, these tools will start shooting the urgent messages that leverage FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). Playing up this social anxiety and the need to do what other people are doing is a great way to give your website a much-needed sense of urgency.
Leverage the power of social proof
Of course, tools like the one we have described in the previous section are not the only way to leverage social proofs to your advantage. According to recent stats, 90% of respondents claimed that reading a positive online review influenced their purchase decision, while 91% of 18-34-year-olds trust such reviews as much as personal recommendations. So, it should be obvious that you should leverage as many social proof techniques as possible. Some of the ways to go around are:
- The inclusion of data-driven case studies
- Testimonials
- Customer reviews
- Social media comments
- Trust icons (endorsement from other businesses)
Make the website easy to navigate
As hard as you try to steer the website visitors in the right direction and provide them with personalized content, they will inevitably do a lot of research on their own. Keeping that in mind, it is in your best interest to make your website as easy to explore as possible. So, some of the greatest obstacles on the road to relevant products have always been convoluted menus – clean them up and highlight the important categories and subcategories with informative labels. The other way to shorten the shopping life-cycle is by utilizing search boxes and filters relevant to customers (price, availability, etc.).
Nail the checkout
You would be surprised just how many purchases fail because the checkout process is a narrow funnel that simply doesn’t let the customers pass through. Well, you should do your best to turn this funnel upside down (keep the calls to actions prominent on the website and simplify the checkout forms as much as humanly possible), while still presenting the customers with a lot of freedom in the areas they find the most relevant. We are, of course, talking about the payment and delivery options.
We hope these few strategies will help you to finally make some proactive steps in turning your website visitors into customers and start doing the conversion in the true sense of the word. The contemporary digital trading environment has become too competitive to leave things to chance and goodwill of our clients. Let us, then, do our best to push them in the right direction and make them finally click on that “Add to cart” button.
Diana Smith is a full time mom of two beautiful girls interested in latest business news and new social media trends. In her free time she enjoys exercising and preparing healthy meals for her family.