You are a conversion rate optimizing champ; you just might not know it!
In your shop, what do you do to make sure certain retail items sell? If you’re selling plants in your shop, you know by using best practices, grouping your plants will sell more plants. You put your best sellers up front, the quick compulsive items next to the register, and chocolate at eye level, not up on a high or low shelf. These are examples of retail best practices when selling. This article is a quick best practice selling guide to your other business model… your online business.
Below is a list to check if your website is following best practices concerning your site’s conversion rate. We at epicShops strive to create websites that follow internet best practices. We focus even further on internet best practices so that you can obtain, convert, and keep your customers forever.
CRO (conversion rate optimization) is defined as a method of taking user feedback and analytics to improve the performance of your website. In other words, CRO is making it easy for your clients to spend money on your website supported by psychology, analytics and testing. If a viewer is not buying, we need to know why and fix it.
If your eCommerce website can answer yes to the list items below, then your site is positioned and prepped to make you the most possible money:
1. A Beautiful Website That Loads Fast
The number one trust factor to a viewer is how your site looks. Does it look old, outdated or confusing? Does it load quickly? Every second longer it takes
increases the percentage of visitors who will leave.
2. An Easy and Quick to Use Website
Your website needs to be intuitive and crazy simple for a viewer to get through the checkout. The checkout should be a one page checkout, which also offers a guest checkout sprinkled with trust signals.
3. Beautiful Product Images
Your products have to look beautiful to you AND your viewers. It may hurt one’s pride to not put your shop’s custom product images up, but if they’re not awesome to the viewer, it won’t help conversion.
4. Mobile Friendly
Mobile sales make up 20% of Epic site sales. Four years ago, they were at 3%. By 2018, we expect all mobile sales to increase to 50%.
5. Make it Clear What You’re Offering
You need GREAT calls to action, an easy to understand message, and value proposition.
6. Create Urgency
How can you entice your visitors to take action now!?! What incentives, offers, tone, and presentation will move them to action immediately? Maybe a pop up coupon before they leave, or a count-down timer showing that if they order within three hours, for example if you own an online florist, they can have their flowers delivered today!
7. Merchandising Your Categories Correctly
If you know your top-selling categories are Birthday, Sympathy, and Best Sellers, then make sure they’re clearly VISIBLE and up top. Also, offer a Below $40 price range. We conducted a simple A/B experiment where we made the primary BIG banner very prominent, which said, “Buy Under $40 Arrangements.” Want to guess what the percentage of $40 and below orders was? 12%. Guess what they were before we added the BIG banner? No change, 12%. Conclusion? For example, if you own an online florist, when a flower buyer comes to one of our sites, they already have an idea of how much money they want to spend.
8. Customer Testimonials (reviews)
As you might already know, social proof is a powerful conversion tool in your brick and mortar shop (word of mouth). Your site should make it incredibly easy to capture customer reviews; these reviews need to easily show up on your website as testimonials.
9. Create Confidence
Make sure your customers feel instantly secure once on your site. You must have trust signals! It is imperative to show icons such as: security locks, 100% Guaranteed, PayPal logo, Visa logo, etc…
10. Anxiety
Make sure elements on your page (or missing from your page) do NOT create uncertainty in your customer’s mind. This is highly related to #9 and trust signals, yet also applies to poor design #1 or broken pages #2. For your customer to feel at ease requires a combination of conversion best practices.
Glossary:
A/B or Split Testing: The testing of one version of a page or interface element against another version of the same thing. Each element is measured by its effectiveness in comparison to the other. For example, a red button measured in effectiveness to a green button. In A/B testing, only one variable is tested at a time.
Call to Action: The primary button, link or other user interface element that asks the user to take an action that leads to (or towards) a conversion. A “Buy Now” button on Amazon.com, a “Sign Up” button on an email registration field, and a “Download Now” on an app landing page are all examples of different Calls to Action.
Conversion Funnel: The primary pathway (or flow) of the user experience where visitors complete a conversion. On Amazon.com the funnel may be: home page > search results page > product page > checkout.
Social Proof: Social proof, also known as informational social influence, is a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior for a given situation.
Trust Signals: Trust signals are cues derived from the website that could encourage or discourage people from making transactions with the company. With making transactions online, there is a limited amount of interaction between the consumers and the company or the people behind the website.
Value Proposition: an innovation, service, or feature intended to make a company or product attractive to customers.
