The e-commerce store looks attractive with pretty colors and images. Now it’s time to get the customers land on the homepage of your site. When we talk about e-commerce, we must realize that getting the customers attention is not enough as the success of your store depends on the conversion rate.
What is Conversion Rate?
Conversion rate refers to a number of visitors to your website who actually took the action you wanted them to take. For example, buying a product or signing up for the newsletter.
E-commerce entrepreneurs must invest in ways to innovate their websites so as to generate instant and more conversions. According to a survey conducted by the E-marketers, E-commerce is expected to expand to 12.4 percent of the world’s economy by 2019. To achieve successful e-commerce performance and high rate of conversion, customer experience is paramount.
The Importance of Rate of Conversions in E-commerce
Conversion rate optimization is one of the most important metrics which determines the success of an e-commerce website. Every individual decision made in e-commerce impacts the rate at which the visitors convert to purchase.
Conversion rate helps in predicting future success by measuring the business profitability and by determining the shortcomings of the e-commerce website. The average conversion rate for e-commerce is approximately 2-3 percent.
How to increase the Ecommerce Conversion Rates?
Using a proactive approach towards improving the experience of the customers visiting the e-commerce website helps in exceeding customer expectations. By considering the following points while setting up an e-commerce website, the conversion rates may be greatly improved:
∙ Reducing the number of form fields: The websites must aim at deriving only the necessary information from the customers to value their time and privacy. According to a recent study, forms with three fields are expected to get 25 percent higher conversions as compared to the forms having more than four fields.
∙ Removing automatic image sliders: Due to the automatic image sliders, the website users tend to lose control which could lead to the user bouncing off the website. According to a study conducted by NNGroup.com, there is a symptom called banner blindness which means there are certain category of users who tend to ignore anything which appears to resemble an advertisement.
∙ Using high quality real and relatable photos: In order to give a real and authentic appeal to the users, the e-commerce websites must discard stock images and try to use high-quality real images to help them increase their conversion rate.
∙ Use Live Chat to exceed customer satisfaction: According to research, 77 percent of the users using live chat believe that their queries are attended to quickly and efficiently, 61 percent using email believe their questions are being quickly answered and 44 percent of the users using phone calls were satisfied. Live chat not only helps in bringing the customers closer but also generates traffic from mouth to mouth publicity.
∙ Displaying the company’s phone number on the e-commerce website: The customers tend to trust the websites which display their contact details and phone numbers and this can greatly help in increasing the conversion rate.
∙ Using the ‘Principle of Scarcity’: It is the psychology of the customers to assign more value to the products which are available in lesser numbers than the ones which are available in abundance. Displaying an inventory meter for the products on the e-commerce website is a good idea to improve conversions.
∙ Include Site-Search option: On-Site search tool enables quicker product discovery and thus helps in saving the user’s time. The search data is an important by-product of site search option which further helps in targeting marketing campaigns better by identifying which products are being most searched for by the customers.
∙ Others: Some of the other features which when included in e-commerce website help in improving the conversion rates include testimonials, recommendations by experts or stylists, descriptive product details, etc.
By including the features mentioned above in an e-commerce website, it is most likely the conversions will go up, however, at the same time, it is very crucial to analyze the impact of these features on a timely basis and make modifications that bring a higher number of conversions to the website.