Why is eCommerce Conversion Rate Optimisation so Important?

Online competition for eCommerce businesses is fierce. The amount of choice customers have makes it difficult to get them through your virtual doors. But just because they are through your doors doesn’t mean they will make a purchase. There are plenty of little steps they take before doing that. If these steps aren’t the best they can be, then it makes it even more unlikely that a sale will be taking place. Optimising this process should lead to a positive effect on your eCommerce conversion rate.

At the moment, only 22% of companies are happy with their conversion rates. This suggests that some major work is needed on their part as a business. This certainly comes down to an internal issue, not an external one.

Optimisation in any sense is important for businesses to thrive. Constant testing is necessary to make sure you are operating to the best of your ability. But there’s a lot about optimising your conversion rates that can really bring a boost to business. 

As of now, the average website conversion rate for eCommerce sits at 1.72%. You know your monthly sales. Imagine what increasing your conversion rate by a single percentage point could mean for your bottom line.

Conversion rate optimisation creates win-win situations. Your customers can enjoy an improved experience, and you can enjoy an increase in revenue and a decreased cost to sale.

Overall, the experience of your website needs professional attention in order for it to work efficiently. Too often is it overlooked and undervalued.

Why it’s important for businesses

Without robust marketing strategies to generate leads, customers wouldn’t know who you are.

But it’s often the simpler things that work best, and can often be overlooked in favour of the flashier sales and marketing tactics.

Conversion rate optimisation makes the most out of every person that visits your website. It lowers costs in the long term, increases profits and sales, and also can help to improve the customer experience. 

Optimise Time and Resources

The time and resources that companies spend on getting traffic to their website is valuable. It can certainly take a lot of effort. So it’s important that the energy put into getting that traffic is rewarded with a good conversion rate.

When it comes to the likes of paid media to get traffic to your site it can be considered to be relatively expensive. Cost per clicks through Google ads has become increasingly more expensive as more and more businesses turn to paid search to drive sales.

Conversion rate optimisation means that when it comes to these high cost ads, you are making the most of them. Increased spend on ads and diminishing returns is becoming an issue for eCommerce brands. Every click counts, so it’s important to provide a good landing page experience to see improvements. Especially when it comes to eCommerce conversion rates.

Lower your Acquisition Costs

Customer acquisition costs can begin to hike up without proper optimisation. Focusing on improving your conversion rates through optimisation may cost you a little bit of money in the short term. But, the long term benefits will be incredibly beneficial and you’ll find that your cost per acquisition will actually decrease.

Even a few percent increase in conversions can decrease your acquisition costs. Take a business that spends around €1,000 on a campaign that brings ten thousand people to their website. Out of those ten thousand, one thousand of them make a purchase. That equates to a conversion rate of 10% and an acquisition cost of €1 per customer.

If that increases from 10% to 15%, then your cost per acquisition would decrease. This is where businesses will start to experience the full benefits of optimising their conversion rates.

Increase your Sales

This might be a bit of an obvious one but it is certainly worth mentioning. eCommerce businesses should be concentrating on keeping conversion rates high. A higher conversion rate equals higher sales, a lower cost to sale and higher profits.

Optimising your conversion rate increases the likelihood that a new customer will complete the action that you want them to. It essentially makes both the customer journey and sales process more efficient.

Steps to Increase Conversion Rates

It can be difficult to know where to start when it comes to making improvements to conversion rates. There are a lot of aspects of a site or landing page to choose from.

Below are a few steps you can take to get the ball rolling for you and your team. 

Establish your KPI’s and what actions feed into them

The first step you should be thinking of is how you are going to measure your website or landing page changes. To know how you’re performing, you need to know where you’re currently at and where you want to get to.

Included in this, you need to understand what actions you want the new user to take. Generally, an eCommerce conversion rate would come down to the amount of purchases your changes result in. But it can be anywhere from filling in a form to simply clicking any of your CTA’s.

You can determine your KPIs by establishing which actions are most significant to you and your business.

Ensure good loading speed

There are few things more frustrating than waiting for a slow page to load. It makes for a terrible user experience and you will lose some potential customers.

Something like this gives your business a bad look and would lead to low rates of customer acquisition and retention.

You need to ensure that your pages are fully optimised and are fast. Customers these days expect a good quality, speedy service that doesn’t take up too much of their time. Even a one second delay in loading time can equal a 7% decrease in conversions. So it’s worth your time investing in page speed.

Use videos on landing pages

Including visuals that are engaging for users can work wonders in any strategy. The same goes for conversion rate optimisation.

The inclusion of a video on your landing page could lead to an 80% increase in conversions. With this number in mind, it’s important to make sure your video gets noticed. It can help to make it one of the more prominent aspects of your page. Product videos can be especially helpful in increasing your ecommerce conversion rate.

But it doesn’t work to just use any old video. It obviously has to be relevant to your page and have a creative aspect to it. A video that brings in high conversions concentrates on meeting customer needs or educating people. 

Length wise, the more succinct you can make it the better. Once you go beyond the two minute mark then engagement drops off significantly. Your best option is to keep it between 30 seconds and two minutes.

Your videos should also have subtitles otherwise Google won’t be able to crawl them.

Always A/B Test

There’s a reason why a/b testing comes up time and time again for businesses. The reason being is that it’s important to the success of any campaign or website.

When it comes to conversion rate optimisation, a/b testing is an effective way forward for businesses to get a feel for what’s working. Any marketing team should be able to carry out this type of testing with no real difficulty.

That being said, about 44% of companies use a split testing software to aid in this process. But this number highlights the importance of split testing for businesses and their success.

Don’t be afraid of failing

The important thing is to try and make changes. Nothing comes from nothing. Although some experiments won’t work out, at least you’ll know what definitely doesn’t work. And that’s half the battle.

There can always be improvements made to your website, especially if your goal is to improve eCommerce conversion rate. With so much competition in that space, constant tweaks are always needed.

To learn more about how you can optimise your customer journey and conversion rates, request a demo today.