5 Proven Strategies for Boosting Your eCommerce Conversion Rates

As an online shop owner, you need to constantly boost your site’s ecommerce conversion rate and sales. After all, that’s how you make money, grow your business, and beat out the competition.

The problem is, no matter how strong your SEO game is or how many people you drive to your site through search results, PPC ads, social media, or email campaigns, if they aren’t converting, you’ll never get anywhere with your online business.

If you’re struggling with just that—improving your ecommerce conversion rate—then allow me to share with you these five conversion optimization strategies.

Let’s hop right in.

1. Better Product Images

People want to see what they’re buying from your online shop.

And since they can’t physically reach out and touch anything you have for sale, they use images to guide their purchasing decisions.

Here are some other reasons why product images are so crucial to the success of your eCommerce shop:

• Images give people important information about your products
• They help people scan what you have for sale, so they can determine whether they want to consider buying anything or not
• The right product images will be shareable and can help expose your brand to a broader audience
• They boost your site’s SEO and help you rank higher in search engines

Just make sure you use an image optimization tool such as TinyPNG or Compressor.io to compress your images, so they don’t affect the loading speed of your eCommerce site.

Tools like these reduce the file sizes of your images, without sacrificing the quality, to reduce the strain on your site’s server and help keep page loading speeds fast.

2. Optimize Your Site for Speed

Speaking of your online shop’s speed and performance, it’s crucial you monitor your site’s speed on a regular basis to make sure your customers have the best buying experience possible.

After all, 40 percent of people will abandon your site if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds or less, regardless of whether they wanted to make a purchase or not.

Not to mention, a 100ms delay can result in a 7 percent reduction in conversions, which can prove to be devastating to your bottom line.

You can use the free Google PageSpeed Insights tool to see just how fast your desktop and mobile sites are.

Plus, Google will provide suggestions for optimizing your site further so you can make your site load faster and rake in more conversions.

If you really want to optimize your site, so users don’t leave before converting, leverage a CDN to speed up the delivery of your site’s content to customers based on their geographic location.

3. Watch the Shipping Charges

People are always going to want free shipping.

In fact, e-tailing found that 73 percent of people claim that free shipping is their number one criterion when it comes to making online purchases.

And with half of online retailers offering free shipping to their customers (whether it be all the time or with conditions), it’s time you join the club if you want to bump up your conversions.

If you do decide to charge for shipping, make sure you maintain full transparency with customers.

There’s nothing more frustrating than getting to the end of the checkout process and realizing there’s a hefty shipping cost tacked onto the final price.

4. Learn About Your Customers

Did you know that it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain a loyal one?

There’s no reason why in your quest to get more conversions and sales you can’t focus on existing customers that come to your site looking for more to buy.

In fact, doing so is a smart business move.

If you want to find out more about your current customers, try running an online survey using WPForms.

With this premium contact form builder, you can create surveys, polls, and even a Net Promoter Score survey to find out whether people would be willing to recommend your brand to others.

This simple solution is a great way to find out what people like, what people wish you would change, and what people want to see more of when it comes to your products and services.

5. Improve Support

When people are trying to decide whether to make a purchase or not, they want to be able to get in touch with customer service right away if they have any questions or concerns.

If your customer support is lacking, you run the risk of people leaving and never returning when they have a question that goes unanswered about a purchase they want to make.

In fact, a study by Forrester suggests that 55 percent of Americans will abandon an online shop if a question they have is not answered right away.

That’s a lot of sales left on the table.

Here are some of the best ways to ramp up your support efforts so you can secure more conversions:

• Email: Make this a simple way people can get in touch. Include a contact form on your eCommerce site, have a separate business email, so customer questions don’t get lost, and add a FAQ section on your website if you find the same questions being asked all the time.

• Social Media: Interact with followers on social media to show them you’re real and that you care for them. Tweet interesting facts, repurpose your blogs posts to inform, and pose questions to your customers to get them talking.

Doing this gives you the chance to gather insight into what your customers want, and also allow them the chance to ask you questions.

• Live Chat: Use live chat as a way to answer immediate questions and concerns and secure the sale. Doing this is an efficient way of providing customer support and can have the most significant effect on your conversion rates.

• Phone Support: Though you may not want to deal with the hassle of answering phone calls, having phone support for customers is a big deal. This is especially true if you run a high-end eCommerce shop. Sometimes people just feel more comfortable talking to a live person.

As you can see, having multiple channels for people to contact you on is a great way to reach out to your customers, give them the support they need, and encourage more sales.

Final Thoughts

Growing a successful online store isn’t something that happens right away.

There are a lot of moving parts that need to come together in just the right way to drive the right kind of people to your site.

And then there’s the part about getting people to convert and spending their hard earned money on what you have to offer.

The thing is, if you concentrate on some of the small things, such as product images, customer support, and site speed, you can give your conversions the boost they need to make you a successful online retailer.