When it comes to online business, among the things that matter the most is the conversion rate. The conversion rate refers to the percentage of visitors who actually opt to make a purchase from the site. With an increase in the conversion rates, your cost-per-acquisition (CPA), or the amount you spend on acquiring a new customer, starts declining. This has a direct impact on your profits and your bargaining power with suppliers.
Most of the time, website owners focus on several marketing and promotional strategies in their aim to improve their conversion rates. They use methods such as pay per click advertising, live chats, affiliate marketing programs and customer recommendations to draw visitors to their site. While these methods do ensure higher traffic, they do not necessarily translate into better conversion rates. The best way to improve conversion rates is to follow visitor retention methods. Those methods needn’t involve huge investments. Keeping a few things in mind while creating your site or a few changes to your already built website will do the trick. Here are some of the methods that can help you immensely in improving the conversion rates of your website:
Removing Obstacles
- Do not stress on registering or creating an account: It’s commonly observed that web surfers hesitate in registering or creating an account. If your site makes it compulsory for visitors to do so before they can place an order, it would definitely discourage potential customers of your product or service. You can shift the account creation process to the time when the customer has already placed an order. Since you would already have customer info from the order form, all you can include in the registration form is the username and password.
- Include a subheading reflecting the navigation path: The navigation path, also called breadcrumb navigation, displayed on every page within a site serves a dual purpose. While it helps visitors understand where they are in the website and how they have reached the specific page, it also helps search engines extract information on your products and target audience. A clear navigational view also helps visitors find the section that they are searching for.
- Build trust: Subscribing to services such as VeriSign or ScanAlert and displaying them prominently on the site would help in reassuring visitors that their personal information will be safe with the site.
- Enable fast loading of site: Visitors tend to navigate away from sites that take a lot of time to load. Avoiding intrusive pop-ups and large animation files can help in lowering the loading time.
Enabling Easy Display of Information
- Display contact information on top of a page: There are several visitors who would want to make an enquiry or talk to a customer service executive before placing an order. Providing a toll-free phone number, contact timings and an email address at the top of the page would aid these prospective customers and help you win business. Most of all, the contact information promotes a sense of security in a visitor, helping improve conversion rates.
- Include a search box: The box would help potential customers search for the required products and services within the site. The ideal place to position the search box is the top-right corner of each page so that it can be easily located by visitors. Moreover, you can refine the search results by adding additional distinguishing factors. This would help visitors find the required product/service quite easily.
- Add product information: Adding product description (synopsis in case of books), customer reviews and overall product details for each item would help visitors make a selection.
- Add multifaceted navigation: Through this advanced navigation method, visitors can avoid sifting through a large number of unwanted products or services. Adding this feature to your e-commerce website would help customers sort information and directly access the products with specific attributes, such as color, size and price.
- Display “Add to Cart” and “Checkout” prominently: The importance of the “checkout” button is clear from the fact that a purchase order is not submitted to the e-commerce site until the user checks out. Make both these buttons stand out from the rest of the text on the page so that they are easy to spot. To achieve this, you can choose bold fonts and colours, such as red, blue and green. Avoid the use of “Buy Now” or “Order Now” as this may trick people, who are not tech savvy, into believing that the moment they click that button, they will be transferred to the billing and payment page.
- Display total cost of purchase: The e-commerce site should display the price of all items in the cart, shipping charges and taxes clearly as soon as possible during the checkout process. This will help visitors modify their purchases.
Adding Value
- Display comparison information: Allow visitors to compare different products and services to enable them to make an educated selection. The addition of this service will go a long way in forging strong bonds with your customers.
- Allow modification to shopping cart: One of the best value-add for e-commerce sites is to enable customers to make changes to the product quantity. Giving customers an option to delete an item after it has been added to the shopping cart also goes a long way in improving conversion rates. To simplify the entire process, the cart should also be placed where customers can view and access it easily. This feature will help you reduce abandoned carts and customer support calls, while improving conversion rates and orders.
- Simplify the checkout process: A complicated checkout process may test customer patience and could result in the loss of a crucial customer. This could also result in unfavourable word-of-mouth publicity. Thus, e-commerce sites must have as simple, intuitive and reassuring checkout process as possible.
Following these steps can help you not only to significantly increase the conversion rate of your e-commerce website, but also to improve the customer retention rate through better website usability.
