How to Increase Shopping Cart Conversion Rate?
Increase your conversion rate with these conversion rate optimization tips
Generate more revenue from your existing traffic by optimizing for conversion rate.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of testing and improving elements of your website to increase the percentage of visitors who take the desired action, such as signing up or purchasing something.
If you aren’t optimizing your website, you could be leaving money on the table and your site could be missing out on valuable traffic opportunities. If you want to learn how to increase your conversion rate with CRO, keep reading!
- The Importance of measuring conversion rates
- Multiple Payment and Checkout Options
- Follow up on cart abandonment
- Reduce the number of clicks to complete a sale
- Use an exit pop up
- Use a live chat function
- Create a sense of urgency
- Improve User Experience
- Identify the highest converting goals
- Use images in your copy to increase conversion rates
- A/B Testing Tips for Improving Conversion Rate
- Create Strong Calls to Action
The importance of measuring conversion rates
Understanding how conversions are driven and attributing them to specific actions is very valuable. Different marketing channels have different strengths and weaknesses, and knowing where you are getting value (and where you’re not) will help drive improvement.
Tracking and attributing conversions to specific actions is very valuable when optimizing conversion rates. For example, it’s good to know that someone who clicks on a sponsored Facebook ad is 10 times more likely to buy something than a person who doesn’t click on an ad.
On their own, those two sentences don’t provide too much useful information—but when we start looking at conversion rates as part of a bigger picture, it becomes much easier to draw actionable conclusions about what works and what doesn’t in our digital marketing efforts.
Multiple Payment and Checkout Options
A pet peeve of mine is where you have to sign up for an account with a company to buy. I’m there, I am in the cart, I’m ready to buy but you stall my process for what? You want me to create an account so you can further market to me (fair enough) – that can be a big roadblock for some users.
Add a guest checkout option.
By adding a guest checkout option you remove a critical roadblock for some users. This helps to increase your conversion rates. You can further target people via email once they have become a customer and have more brand loyalty.
Adding additional credit card payment types will help with conversion rates.
Paypal also offers customers the option to buy now and pay later, which the merchant can choose to enable. For some types of products, this will significantly help with converting buyers that are on the edge of conversion at the cart.
Follow up on Cart Abandonment
When someone puts something in their shopping cart but doesn’t follow through and actually buy it, that’s called cart abandonment. The United States’ average abandonment rate sits around 70% which means that most of your target audience isn’t even making it to checkout.
This is especially bad news if you’re running an e-commerce site. To convert shoppers into buyers, make sure you have an effective cart abandonment strategy in place.
Sending out emails to those users that put an item in the cart but didn’t complete the sale can help to increase conversion rates.
Reduce the number of clicks to complete a sale
Most e-commerce websites have an overly complicated checkout process. Visitors are forced to enter their contact information or payment details multiple times before they can complete their purchase.
This often happens because e-commerce companies use separate pages to collect all of these details rather than placing them on one page—the landing page.
To increase your conversion rate, you should try reducing the number of clicks it takes visitors to complete a sale.
Make sure that you keep customers’ personal information secure by moving it off your landing page and onto a secure form, which can be accessed once they’ve reached their destination (and are ready to buy). Your conversion rate will thank you.
Use an exit popup
Exit popups are a form of conversion rate optimization (CRO) that you can use to increase your conversion rates and drive more customers from your website.
There are several factors that influence where, when, and how you use exit popups on your website. In some cases, it’s wise to limit their visibility to certain browsers or devices (for example, only showing them on desktops).
But in other cases, it might be best to show them to everyone—or not at all.
Don’t let them leave your site! Hit them up with a killer offer to keep the sales funnel alive.
Use a live chat function
People like to interact with people, that’s basic human psychology. Having a faceless website without any interaction can be intimidating to some users and can leave them with questions.
Sure an FAQ page is helpful, but really when have you ever had a question at checkout, gone to the FAQs and then thought ah right that fully answered my question now I will go back and add that product to my cart.
If you have a friendly and knowledgeable chat agent on the other end of a live chat, you can quickly and easily help a user with their queries and shepherd them into the sales funnel and complete the purchase.
Create a sense of urgency
The first step in optimizing your landing page for conversions is to create a sense of urgency. The faster someone sees value in your product or service, the more likely they are to act immediately.
We’ve all seen landing pages that don’t do anything but try to sell us on a product without explaining why we need it. Not only are those useless (because they fail to explain value), but they’re also counterproductive.
If you want people to convert, then you have to make them feel like they absolutely have to have your product right now! There are several ways you can do that…
Improve User Experience
Improving the general user experience on an eCommerce site can have an effect on your shopping cart conversion rate and entice people to buy your product.
This is really powerful since you don’t need any more traffic, you just need to convert the traffic you have better.
There are many ways in which you can improve user experience. One significantly underrated technique is just to watch someone try and complete a purchase.
Things that may be obvious to you and the eCommerce store developers may not be so obvious to the general user. The simple act of watching an untrained user complete a task can be enlightening for an online store owner.
Identify the highest converting goals
What are your goals for your website? You might want to generate leads, increase sales or simply drive traffic.
Regardless of what you’re trying to achieve, it’s a good idea to work backward from those goals and identify how much traffic you’ll need in order to achieve them.
According to research, 1% of web surfers will become customers if they visit a website three times—so if you want that 1%, figure out how many total visitors it takes to deliver on that goal and optimize accordingly. Identify your funnel :
Funnels refer to any step-by-step process that users must go through in order to convert (e.g., sign up). Web pages usually have multiple funnels, each containing steps and screens that lead toward conversion.
Use Images in Your Copy to Increase Conversions
Using images in your website copy can increase conversion rates. Here are a few reasons why you should use images on your site.
If you want to improve sales, one of the best ways to do so is by using effective and persuasive text to encourage purchases.
Well-written and well-edited copy often outperform other types of online marketing, but it is only part of a successful strategy.
Your copy must also be visually appealing in order for it to maximize its effectiveness.
Do not underestimate how vital images are for drawing attention as people scan through their social media feeds or search engines results pages.
A/B Testing Tips for Improving Conversions
Try A/B testing. Split testing, which is also known as A/B testing or conversion-rate optimization (CRO), lets you do just that: test various versions of a landing page in order to determine which version performs best.
The beauty of A/B testing is that it enables you to set up a scenario where you test several versions of a landing page and then track conversion rates (i.e., sales).
Although there are no guarantees in terms of how much an A/B test will improve your conversion rates, they can certainly help you optimize and determine what works best for your audience by comparing two or more potential landing pages based on different elements.
Create Strong Calls to Action
It’s no secret that a strong call to action is important to any successful campaign.
The stronger your call to action, however, the more likely you are to convert visitors into customers.
There are many ways you can craft effective calls to action, but here are three simple ways you can ensure they’re as strong as possible.
Include keywords – Optimize calls to action by including relevant keywords in both your title and text. Include your primary keyword phrase at least twice in both areas and make sure it appears as close to the top of the page as possible (ideally within 30-40 words).
Keep it short – People are drawn in by headlines and don’t always read all of an ad or advertisement.