To succeed as an ecommerce entrepreneur, you need to convert casual website visitors to loyal customers. This guide provides 11 smart strategies for better conversion along with best practices to try these marketing techniques.
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11 Ways to Boost Your Conversion Rate
These tried-and-true techniques can clear the path for impressive conversions, allowing your ecommerce store to set and shatter new sales benchmarks.
Clarify Calls to Action
Your online visitors should understand exactly what action to take when they visit your pages. Having too many options creates confusion, one of the biggest barriers to customer conversion. Lack of a clear path to purchase causes browsers to bounce rather than click the checkout button (especially if they can't find it).
Every single piece of content that your brand publishes online should have a CTA if it doesn't already.
Stand By Strong Security
Your audience needs to trust your brand before they'll make the customer conversion. Data security is a major factor in showing your status as a reliable business. When you work with Pay.com, you and your customers will get the benefit of our Level 1 compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS).
When you set up your site's checkout page through our easy-to-use platform, you can also add official PCI DSS badges. These icons show the market that you're serious about protecting every transaction, shielding stored credit card numbers, and preventing costly identity theft and fraud.
Cut Checkout Time
Try shortening your web checkout form as an easy early step to increase conversions. Too many fields to complete can cause friction, defined as anything that slows the process and derails a potential purchase.
You should also provide the option to check out as a guest without creating an account. Connecting with a third-party service can streamline checkout since the customer can log in using an existing email or social media account.
Add a Pop-Up Offer
A special offer can instantly boost conversions for your product or service. You can highlight this promotion with a pop-up ad that appears once per user after a short delay, so you don't annoy your visitors with multiple windows that show up immediately. Pop-ups should be easy to close and have a clear CTA (see above for ideas).
A/B testing is a valuable strategy to see what works and what doesn't when it comes to ads and offers. For example, you can swap out everything from headlines to CTAs, marketing copy, page layout, colors, and buttons to see which aspects of a pop-up offer or landing page drive the most conversions.
Customize Your Checkout Page
Your website visitors expect a seamless experience from the time they see your brand on social media until the time they make their first purchase (and beyond). If your checkout page looks different than the rest of your online presence, it's a red flag for some customers that your brand can't be trusted.
When you select Pay.com as your payment services provider, you'll benefit from our full-service infrastructure and easy-to-use tools. It's simple to customize your checkout so it fits right in with the rest of your brand's look and feel. Customers can glide right through the process without missing a beat.
Make Data-Driven Decisions
You need to review actual data about how your users interact with your website to understand where you can most effectively improve conversion rates. Metrics to evaluate can include:
- Customer feedback measures like net promoter scores
- The number of returns you receive
- The average amount of each customer order
- The click-through rates for campaigns and ads
- The bounce rates for forms and abandonment rates for carts
- User actions on your landing page
- How much traffic your site gets and where it comes from
For example, if you're losing users at your landing page, revisions can result in a dramatic conversion increase.
Show Off Positive Reviews
Customers rely on so-called social proof when purchasing from brands they haven't used before. Studies show that nearly every single online shopper reads reviews when buying online. Approximately 89% of customers say they check out what others are saying before they use an unfamiliar ecommerce site.
You can easily add links to online directories like Yelp if your business already shows up on those sites, but you should also have at least a few reviews people can read without clicking away from your page.
If you've built a strong reputation with a few solid clients, ask whether they'd be willing to write testimonials you can use on your site. It's also impactful to add a line of client logos to your website, with their express permission of course.
Optimize Page Layouts
Like the landing page and pop-up offer, your other page layouts should be updated to remove sources of friction. Strive to omit anything that doesn't drive your reader directly to your CTA.
You can also take advantage of data to see exactly how visitors behave on your pages and optimize accordingly. Gather insight with tools like clickmaps, mouse tracking, scroll maps, and eye tracking to find out where your audience clicks and how long they stay on certain pages.
Then, remove page elements that don't get a lot of attention while emphasizing items where viewers spend significant time.
Try Adding a Chatbot
As a small business owner, you can't necessarily answer customer questions day and night. However, you can implement a chatbox feature so after-hours and early-morning browsers can find answers to questions about shipping, pricing, and other key topics. This removes barriers to purchase that hamper your conversion rate.
You can determine which questions your chatbot should answer by investigating the questions your actual audience asks about your brand. When used effectively, this feature can increase the chances of conversion by replicating around-the-clock connection.
Improve Page Speeds
If your site has a substantial bounce rate, slow pages could be the cause. In this case, identifying and fixing the lag can instantly improve your conversions. Data indicates that you could lose 7% of conversions for every 1-second delay as your site loads. After just 3 seconds, 40% of your audience will likely abandon your brand entirely.
Test both your online and mobile pages with Google PageSpeed or a similar service. You can increase load times by compressing and decreasing the size of images. Your website should be responsive, which means it adjusts in size depending on the person's viewing screen.
Accept Preferred Payment Methods
Your target market is much more likely to buy from their brand if they have a variety of payment options at checkout. Pay.com makes it easy to accept many different payment methods, from digital wallets to debit cards, credit cards, ACH transfers, and other choices.
Catering to customer preference in this area can have a positive effect on your company's overall conversions.
The Benefits of Using Pay.com to Receive Online Payments
Whether your ecommerce store is brand-new or you're simply ready to revitalize your payment solution, Pay.com can put you on the path to better conversions. We combine easy onboarding and transparent affordable flat fees with robust features like:
- The ability to accept many different payment methods so you can offer your audience the options they want
- Top-level security measures so you comply with industry data privacy standards and earn customer trust
- Customizable checkout pages including both no-code solutions and advanced API plugins, supporting all levels of tech expertise
Our personalized platform can grow with your conversions so you can expand your ecommerce operations without missing a beat.
The Bottom Line
Conversion can be tricky, but these strategies will get your ecommerce endeavor on the right track if you're not impressed with your rates. You might see a positive change even after implementing just a few of these ideas. Gathering data about how your customers behave on your website will inform a plan that works for your business.
Pay.com has solutions to streamline your site's checkout process, one of the most important elements in effective conversion. You can even view comprehensive data about your business transactions to make marketing decisions based on real numbers. Click here to get started now!
