Learn what the Conversion Rate is, how to calculate it and a series of tactics or strategies that you can implement in your online store to improve conversions in your online store, that is, to increase the Conversion Rate.
For an online store, sales are everything.
You can carry out an endless number of actions to attract traffic to your website: ads, focus on improving SEO, or post funny videos on your e-commerce social networks...
But, all that doesn't matter if nobody buys your products.
They are just actions and a waste of unnecessary and wasted money and resources.
It is right at this moment when the Conversion Rate makes sense.
Converting that traffic that you have managed to attract to your store thanks to your marketing efforts into customers is the most important thing.
For this reason, it is vitally important to know and analyze how many visitors finally make a purchase in your ecommerce and implement different strategies and improvements to your website that help you take your ecommerce to the next level.
First of all, it is to understand what the Conversion Rate consists of.
So let's start by defining what "Conversion Rate" also known as "Conversion Rate" means in English.
What is the Conversion Rate?
The Conversion Rate, which you will surely have seen on many sites like CR, is the percentage of visitors to your website that perform a certain action.
Depending on the business objective that you have defined, a "conversion" could refer to different actions, beyond the fact that a visitor finally makes a purchase in your store.
Here are other examples:
- Form submission, such as a contact form
- Have a customer make a call to your company
- Sign up for newsletters
- Sign up for a loyalty program
- To download an eBook, for example, a mobile application from the website...
- To add products to the cart or to the wishlist (wish list)
- Share your online store on social networks
These are just some of the conversion actions that visitors can take on your website, but I think they give you an idea of what the word "Conversion" means.
What formula is used to calculate the Conversion Rate?
Once you know what it means, it is important to know how to measure the Conversion Rate, that is, what is the correct way to calculate this rate.
Calculating this rate is very simple.
All you have to do is divide the total number of conversions in a certain period of time by the total number of people who have visited your website and multiply that result by 100%.
Formula for “Conversion Rate”:
(Total number of conversions / Total number of visitors to your website during the same period of time) X 100
I am going to give you an example, which is always easier to understand.
If your online store had 15,575 visitors and 1,851 conversions last month, the Conversion Rate is 11.88%
It is as simple as applying the formula:
(1,851 conversions / 15,575 visitors) X 100 = 11.88%
What is considered a good Conversion Rate?
What does a high or low Conversion Rate mean?
Once the Conversion Rate has been calculated, do you know how to interpret what the result you have reached means?
Easy!
A high Conversion Rate indicates that you are convincing many visitors to buy your products or services or take the action you want them to take in your store.
While a low Conversion Rate means that there are few customers ready to buy or perform the desired action, or that the traffic that comes to your website is not correct.
The question now would be, what figure is considered a good Conversion Rate?
The answer varies, as it depends on the type of industry you work in, whether you are from one country or another, or the device you use to visit the website.
But, it can be said that the average ideal Conversion Rate of electronic commerce is between 1% and 4%.
What is the Conversion Rate in ecommerce in Spain?
As I have already told you, it depends on many factors, such as the sector you are targeting or the product you sell in your store, but on average it can be said that the ideal Conversion Rate is between 1% and 3%.
What does this mean?
Well, out of every 1,000 visits to your page, only between 10 and 30 users will end up buying.
As you can see in the graph in the year 2020 in Spain, the sectors "Hardware and gardening" and "Service provider" are the ones with the highest Conversion Rate, standing at 4.37% and 2.9% respectively.
While the sectors with the lowest Conversion Rates are "Computer Equipment and Electronics" and "Insurance" with 0.21% and 0.12% respectively.
As you can see in the table, there are differences between the Conversion Rates depending on the device used to access the web page.
In all sectors, the highest conversions occur on the desktop and as a general rule, mobile is where the lowest Conversion Rates are located.
This can give you an idea of the different actions or strategies that you can carry out to improve conversion in your store.
Why is Conversion Rate so important?
Knowing how to measure the Conversion Rate of an online store is very important because it allows you to have an idea about the performance of your website.
Seeing how many of your visitors perform the previously defined conversion action helps you measure the success of your page and thus identify areas that need improvement.
In this way, you will be able to define what actions or strategies to carry out on your website to improve the Conversion Rate.
Do you want to know some tactics that can help you improve the Conversion Rate?
Keep reading!
10 ways to improve the Conversion Rate of your online store
1. Improve the loading time of your website
Load time refers to the time it takes for your web page to load in a browser.
And every second counts.
2 seconds.
If your website takes more than 2 seconds to load, 53% of customers lose interest.
Which is a big problem that negatively affects conversions in your store and ultimately the smooth running of your business.
What can you do to improve the time your page takes to load?
The first thing you should do is “Test your loading speed”.
For this you can use Google PageSpeed which is a free tool.
You just have to enter the different URLs of your page and wait for the result.
Let's analyze the Amazon Homepage.
To do this, you just have to enter Amazon and copy the Start URL.
Then access Google Pagespeed and paste the URL and click Analyze.
There you will see the loading results on both mobile and computer of the Amazon Homepage and the different actions that you can carry out to improve the loading time.
Make sure that your images and files are not too large and that your web host can offer the speed you need.
2. Use high-quality images and videos on your product pages
Think for a moment...
What would you like to see when you are shopping?
...
Surely it would be to see the product, touch it, try it...
But when you are shopping online you cannot touch the product or try it.
For this reason, it is so important that you show detailed images and videos of the product to facilitate the customer's purchase decision.
I suggest you use high quality images and videos on the product pages so that the customer can better see what the product looks like.
You can include images of the product from different perspectives, images with the product in use, etc.
In addition, if you want to generate a greater impact on the client, it is advisable to include a video in which you can see what the product is like, how it is used, its characteristics...
3. Offer free shipping
Today, we are used to buying from different online stores that offer free shipping on their orders.
So if we enter an online store that does not offer this type of shipping, we end up looking at any other store that does offer it.
You may think that it is impossible for you to offer your customers free shipping but there are different ways to make it happen:
- You can increase the price of your products to cover the cost of shipping.
- You can offer free shipping for orders over X amount to make it more profitable for you.
- Offer free shipping for orders over X quantity during a certain period of time using a discount code.
- Offer free shipping only for those who subscribe to your newsletter, so in this way you are getting an extra email to be able to do email marketing later.
If I've finally convinced you to offer this shipping rate in your store, make sure it's visible to customers at all times on your page.
4. Include reviews from other buyers on product pages
Who has not looked at the opinions of other buyers before buying a product in an online store?
People read and trust the reviews that other buyers post about the product.
Allowing your buyers to publish their opinions about the product they have purchased in your online store gives greater credibility to both your page and your products.
For this reason, it is important to include these comments on the product page, to encourage users to buy the product, which translates into improving the conversion of your store.
“An extremely valuable tip to improve the Conversion Rate of the online store is to include authentic social proof (reviews, testimonials, images) on the product pages.” - says Robert Remark of Art of The Gentleman .
In addition, these customer comments can also help you improve your business, by seeing what people think about the product you sell, both positive and negative opinions.
You always have to know how to take advantage of negative things and transform them into something positive.
5. Allow users to shop as a guest
Forcing users to register in order to make a purchase in your store is giving them another reason to leave without completing the purchase.
So it is advisable to allow users to buy without having to create an account.
It is what is known as "Buy as a guest" or in English "Guest Checkout" and more and more ecommerce offer it in their stores as an alternative.
6. Accept multiple payment options in your store
Nowadays, and especially in the ecommerce world, there are a wide variety of ways to make payments.
For this reason, it is important to offer more than one payment option in your store, so that customers can freely decide which payment method to use.
There are people who simply do not want to enter their credit card details when making an online purchase, so if you do not want to lose customers you should offer other options.
87.5% of online shoppers use Paypal as a payment method, which is mainly used as a fraud prevention measure. So it is recommended to include this option in your store.
It is also interesting to include other payment methods such as Apple Pay, Amazon Pay or others such as Klarna or Afterpay that allow buyers to buy now but pay later.
Try different payment options and see the conversions in your store.
Do not forget to include the logos of the different payment options that you offer in your store in view of the customer so that from the first moment they are clear about which payment methods they can use.
7. Offer discount coupons for a limited time
Discounts can increase conversions considerably, but as I have already mentioned in other articles, you should not abuse them.
The reason?
Because if you use discount coupons very often in your store, customers will learn it and wait for those discounts every time they want to buy, which means that you end up losing money.
Therefore, you have to learn to use discount coupons with a well-defined marketing strategy behind it.
For example, using discounts to get new visitors into the sales funnel, to build a stronger relationship with existing customers, or to reward referrals, among others.
Leaving aside that they should not be abused, how can you use them in your store to increase conversions?
You can create discount codes that customers can use at checkout for a limited period of time to get a discount on their final purchase, either a specific amount or a percentage of the purchase.
When the coupon is about to expire, it generates a sense of urgency in the customer that increases the chances of buying in your online store and therefore increases its Conversion Rate.
8. Implement cross-selling and up-selling strategies
Another interesting way to increase the Conversion Rate of your e-commerce is to use cross-selling and additional selling techniques, known in English as Cross-selling and Up-selling.
These types of techniques are based on making it easier for customers to add more items to the cart before they make the payment, which will help you increase sales and therefore conversions in your store.
If you want to learn more about these techniques and more specifically about cross-selling or cross-selling, take a look at our article "Complementary selling, how to arouse customer interest?" .
9. Create Simple and Easy Navigation
Do you want visitors to your store to have a good experience, without any problem when browsing your store and to be able to find what they are looking for?
If the answer is YES, what you need is to make navigation as easy as possible.
It is also important to include a search bar in your store to make it easier for the customer to find what they are looking for.
Between 10-40% of the visitors to your ecommerce site will use the search bar, which are usually more willing to make a purchase and therefore become customers.
Speaking of navigation itself, it is very important that the products you sell in your store are well classified into categories to make it easy to find them so that customers do not have to spend a lot of time finding the product they are looking for, thus avoiding leave the store without buying.
That is, you have to structure the products into categories in a logical way, but make sure to use as few subcategories as possible to get to the product as quickly as possible.
In short, the faster a customer finds the product, the more likely they are to buy from your store, which helps increase the Conversion Rate.
10. Reduce the number of steps in the checkout process
In simplicity is the success of an ecommerce.
If you want them to buy your products, you need to have as simple a payment process as possible.
You have to make the payment process easy, without endless forms to fill out in order to buy.
Long payment processes, with many steps and information to fill in, often make customers get tired and end up abandoning the cart without completing the purchase.
Therefore, I recommend simplifying the payment form and requesting the data that is strictly necessary, because if your checkout seems like the never-ending story, you may lose a possible purchase by asking the customer to spend too much time filling in data.
Conclusion
These are just 10 actions that you can implement in your business to improve the Conversion Rate of your online store and thus increase your income and continue growing.
Try to apply the maximum possible and see how these changes affect your e-commerce, to know how to continue improving.