10 Ways to Improve Your E-Commerce Conversion Rates

In 2019, e-commerce sales comprised more than 14% of all retail sales around the world – amounting to roughly $3.53 trillion. Sound like a lot? Brace yourself, because that number is projected to grow to more than 22% by 2023 and close in on roughly $7 trillion!

Even with the e-commerce industry growing so rapidly, it’s not enough to be generating lots of visits to your online store. To claim your slice of the e-commerce pie, you need to convert! That’s what we’re here to help you with today.

Get the full breakdown of what conversion rates are, why they matter, and how to improve them – just below!

What is the average e-commerce conversion rate?

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that made a purchase (or completed some other desired action). It’s fairly easy to calculate your e-commerce conversion rate – simply take the number of conversions and divide that by the number of total visitors.

You’ll likely end up measuring a variety of different conversion rates from across your e-commerce website. The type of conversion you aim to measure will depend on the type of page you’re looking to optimize and what the goal of that page is.

For example, your online store may have web pages that are designed to result in:

• Sales
• Adding items to a shopping cart
• Signing up for email lists
• Sharing across social media platforms
• Etc.

Generally speaking though, when discussing e-commerce conversion rates, what is really being discussed is the number of sales as a percentage of total visitors to your website. The conversion rate of website visits from around the world hovers around 3% – and the same is true for the average conversion rate between different sectors. So what about mobile e-commerce conversion?

How to determine your mobile e-commerce conversion rate?

By 2021, roughly 54% of all e-commerce retail sales are projected to be completed on a mobile device. That seems particularly promising when you consider the ever-increasing spread of smartphones around the globe. But a higher percentage of total sales doesn’t necessarily mean a higher m-commerce conversion rate.

In fact, as of Q2 of 2019, the e-commerce conversion rate on mobile phones stood at less than half the conversion rate of online shoppers on desktop computers. It’s clear that there’s some work to be done to improve e-commerce conversion rates for mobile shoppers – but before you can take that task on, you’ll first need to determine your own mobile e-commerce conversion rate.

How do you determine your mobile e-commerce conversion rate? Simply calculate the number of sales completed by mobile users (over a given period of time) as a percentage of the total number of mobile visitors your website has had (over that same period of time). For all intents and purposes, the calculation for m-commerce conversion rates is the same as it is for desktop conversion rates – it’s just a matter of separating visitors by the device they use.

Once you’ve successfully measured your conversion rates, you can get down to brass tacks and start improving e-commerce conversion rates. Keep reading to find out how!

How to improve your conversion rate

If you’re looking for actionable tips and tricks on how you can generate more conversions and increase your business’s profit, you’ve arrived at the right place.

Here are the top 10 ways to improve e-commerce conversion rates:

1. Offer coupon codes

Digital coupons are one of the most common tactics for e-commerce conversion optimization. Not only can coupon offers be used as an effective form of marketing to draw in new customers, but they can also help to reduce shopping cart abandonment by giving customers that final push to complete the purchase.

Top tip: Make coupon codes time-sensitive as a way to instill a sense of urgency in your customers while they’re shopping on your website. Making deals available for a limited time only can help improve e-commerce conversion rates.

2. Use high-quality content

Long blocks of text, typos, and language that’s too technical can all be factors that bring conversion rates down. Be sure to avoid using heavy content, proofread everything for spelling and grammar, and have your website’s language match the tone that resonates best with your intended audience. Those three steps will help keep your e-commerce website looking professional and can contribute to improving your e-commerce conversions.

3. Optimize your website’s loading time

Nobody (and we mean nobody) likes to shop on websites that take a long time to load. First off, it’s intensely frustrating for the customer to feel like they’re wasting their time – after all, time is money. Second of all, if your online store takes too long to load, customers can get the impression that your website simply isn’t very professional. Those two results of a slow-loading website can naturally lead to lower conversion rates – so be sure to use some of the following tips to speed up your website:

• Compress your images
• Reduce redirect links
• Use browser caching for returning visitors
• Find bottlenecks in loading and fix them

4. Personalize your customer experience

There are a number of ways to personalize the customer experience for your online store’s visitors. Here are a few:

• Use placeholders throughout your website so that customers are addressed by their first name
• Find tools that track your shoppers’ interests and present them with relevant offers either on their next visit or even through email marketing
• Diversify the payment methods customers can use in order to reduce the number of shoppers who are disqualified from completing their purchases

5. Make returns easy and/or free

The fact is, there’s always a bit of risk when shopping online (aside from cybersecurity concerns). Customers know that, but you can help reduce their resistance to make a purchase by offering return policies that work in the customer’s favor. At the end of the day, if someone wants to make a return, they’re already dissatisfied.

If you want to recover from that negative experience and perhaps convert that returned item into a returning customer, start by making the return experience easy and (if possible) free.

6. Use high-quality images and videos

When images are blurry, it’s clear (pun intended) that conversion rates will suffer. Not only does it look very unprofessional, but it also stops your customers from actually understanding what it is that they’re considering buying. The textual description could be perfect by all measures – but if the image or video showing up next to it is of poor quality, you can basically kiss that conversion goodbye.

Bottom line: Improving your image and video quality will help your e-commerce conversion optimization.

7. Price competitively

In order to effectively use pricing strategies to improve e-commerce conversion rates, you’ll need to carefully consider what you’re selling, how well-established your competitors are, who your customers are, and so on.

Remember though that ‘value’ reflects more than just the usefulness or quality of the goods you sell. The price that customers are willing to pay will also be influenced by things like the quality of your website, the responsiveness of your customer support, and more.

8. Appeal to emotion

This is one e-commerce conversion optimization strategy that some may find intimidating to start working on, but it’s a lot easier than you might think. To begin with, you can instill a sense of trustworthiness by displaying customer reviews on your website, including easy-to-reach contact details for customer support, and including trust logos if possible.

Another tip is to keep the emotional appeal aimed at the customer – not your product(s). If you’re selling electronic goods, try using phrases like “this webcam will make you look energized” instead of just telling the customer how the webcam is “awesome” or “easy to use”. You’re telling a story, and the customer needs to be the main character.

There are tons of ways to weave emotion into your e-commerce advertising strategy to help improve your e-commerce conversion rate. Be creative!

9. Be informative

An emotional appeal is undeniably effective, but you can’t be all about feelings when you’re trying to improve your conversion rates. Proving yourself as a valuable and reliable source of accurate and useful information will also impact your conversion rates.

Of course, item descriptions should have all key information and any highly relevant details that will help turn over more conversions. But you can take it even further and provide more valuable info for your customers in the form of blogs, videos, infographics, and more. Additionally, original content is a crucial part of a successful SEO strategy as well as establishing brand recognition.

10. Implement multi-channel selling

Want to improve e-commerce conversion rates? Bring in more customers! To do that, you should expand the number of channels through which customers can make purchases from your online store. That could include opening accounts on different e-commerce platforms, using social media platforms that support e-commerce (i.e. Facebook and Instagram), finding mobile apps to sell through, and so on.

Keep in mind that, depending on which channels you sell through, you may want to employ different digital marketing strategies (e.g. social media marketing, PPC, email marketing, etc.).

Looking for more tips to increase your e-commerce sales? Read this: ‘How can I boost the sales on my e-commerce website?‘

How will you improve your e-commerce conversion rates today?

E-commerce conversion optimization takes time and consistent effort – it’s not a one-and-done sort of thing. Don’t feel pressured to use all of the strategies above right away. You can choose a few that you feel are easiest to put into action and focus on those efforts first. As your conversion rates improve, you can start expanding the number of strategies you use and strengthen your conversions even more. Are you ready to get started today?

In addition to conversion rates, there are other metrics that are crucial to e-commerce businesses. Get the answer here to what are the most important metrics for e-commerce companies?