5 tips for improving your Ecommerce Conversion Rate

This guest post is by Jeff Pearlman of AdQuadrant. Jeff is an analytical and creative Digital Strategist with 9+ years of Social Media, Influencer and Content Marketing experience.

Do visitors to your website simply bounce? This is somewhat inevitable as the average bounce rate for the e-commerce industry is 47%. However, there are ways you can adjust your strategy to ensure that potential customers continue moving along their buyer journey with you. 

Before exploring how your e-commerce brand can improve your conversion rate, let’s dive into why visitors bounce off. Generally speaking, it may happen for the following reasons:

• You’re attracting the wrong traffic
• You have a poor or confusing site design
• Your on-site content isn’t relevant
• Your calls to action are not performing
• Your site loads too slow
• Your site has technical errors

As you can see, it’s vital that you’re able to craft content with clarity and conversion in mind. If your ecommerce brand is able to do just that, you will find your brand providing the value each user desires, transforming them into customers along the way.

Understand the Ecommerce Industry’s Limits

Before we get into the solutions, it’s important that as a marketer or business owner, you have an acceptable conversion rate here. The average ecommerce conversion rate is currently hovering around 1.53%. Naturally, this varies by industry as you can see below: 

Top Ecommerce Conversion Rates by Industry

1. Arts and crafts – 4.17%
2. Kitchen and home appliances – 2.64%
3. Health and wellbeing – 2.11%
4. Toys, games, and collectibles – 1.98%
5. Food and drink – 1.51%

Whether your e-commerce brand is looking to develop new content or you want to revamp your existing landing pages, these surefire optimization techniques will help you improve your conversions rates:

1. Provide Value

This cannot be stressed enough. Before everything else, your ecommerce brand should be addressing pain points that your ideal customer is facing – you must provide value for your customers. And, this value must be obvious. This is the beginning of the sales process, and the moment you begin ushering the user along their path to purchase. What are you providing for your customers? How are their lives going to change and improve if they make this purchase? You need them to see the value in what you have to offer, something that they want. Carefully crafting (or branding) is the first step and most important part of your business. It’s vital to generate the content that your customers want to see (persona based) and in the format that they need (platform and placement based). Depending on your ecommerce brand’s audience and their different personas, it could be in the form of an Instagram Story, a TikTok or a YouTube video. Your product can be everything your potential customer wants, but if it’s not delivered in the correct format, they simply won’t see it.

2. Provide Information

Information is power and content is king. If you can address potential buyer concerns on your landing pages, you could see an 80% uptick in conversions. Your goal as a marketer is to offer as much information as possible without the customer having to ask. You should be trying to mimic real life scenarios, which makes it vital to address as many of your potential customer’s needs as possible.

Realize that while your team knows your brand like the back of their hand, your customer does not. Don’t wait for potential leads to come to you with questions or concerns, offer that information from the get go. When your business has new information such as a sale, product or process change, keep your customers in the know. Never leave your customers hanging.

3. Create an Enjoyable Experience

In everything your ecommerce brand does, look at the experience you are creating for potential customers with a new lens. Try and see it all from their perspective. If you can master this, your insight will go a long way.

Run through the process you’re providing to your potential customers and look out for weak links that can be improved upon. Are there gaps in the experience? What kind of responses does your process elicit? If you think about this process as a chain and identify where the steps are connected in an effort to tell a story, your efforts will pay off by engaging more effectively with your audience. Post purchase surveys are a phenomenal way to gather insights from your most important audience – your current customers.Their insight can provide the vital information you need to provide even more value not only themselves, but to your new customers, as well.

4. Track performance and Test

With brick and mortar businesses, it’s all about location, location, location. With ecommerce conversion optimization, it’s testing, testing, testing.

Experimentation is the best way to avoid risk and explore new opportunities. Your goal should be to have at least one split test running at any given time on your site. There’s no such thing as “perfect” when it comes to marketing, your website, or product design, and the only way you learn about what works and doesn’t work is to continually test. You’ll likely come across moments where aspects of your site that previously tested well are not performing the way they used to, and the only way your ecommerce brand will find out and be able to address the issue is via consistent testing.

Incremental (positive) changes lead to substantial growth.

5. Tailor Your Campaigns

As you work to create an enjoyable experience, make sure you meet your potential customers where they are. What stage are they at in their buyer journey? Have they even moved beyond the awareness stage? If they have, can you be sure that they trust your ecommerce brand? If they trust you and are a returning customer, how can you continue to deliver the value that generates brand affinity? These are the questions you have to ask yourself when tailoring your campaign according to the traffic coming to your website.

Customer engagement is all about creating an individual experience that you’re consistently providing to your customers(both present and potential). One of the best ways is with authenticity and by adjusting your marketing communications to meet your customers where they are in their journey.

Improving your conversion rate isn’t easy. It requires a level of self-reflection and intuition that might not seem natural when you’re not really the customer. However, if you can master this process, working from the beginning and moving through the entire process, what you will find in the end is well worth it: a vastly improved conversion rate. And, if you need some help executing your CRO strategy, contact adQuadrant. They’ve optimized conversion rates for some ambitious ecommerce brands and they can do it for your brand too.

Jeff is an analytical and creative Digital Strategist with 9+ years of Social Media, Influencer and Content Marketing experience with various brands like Jaguar, Land Rover, Lenovo, Motorola, Ulta Beauty, Malin & Goetz, Teleflora, b New York and Raaka Chocolate – to name a few. He started his career as a copywriter, penning copy for an online sports company where he found his work featured on the back covers of national publications and featured on ESPN Radio. He currently resides in Seattle where he likes to spend as much time outside as possible with his wife and three kids, one of which is a dog.