15 elements that influence conversion rate optimisation

Conversion rate optimization has reached the lips of every marketing and business specialist in Romania. Today, more and more entrepreneurs want to sell online and need to know exactly what conversion rate, ROI, or CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) means.

Also, for marketers, conversion rate is a very important performance indicator. It tells you, obviously, how many percent of the people who enter your online store are sold on your products. After all, that’s the purpose of your eCommerce – to sell!

To sell, you need a good, competitively priced product – but you also need a well-designed eCommerce site. For that, we recommend working with specialists in the field – we recommend WebWave. Creating an online store with such an easy-to-use tool will help any business save time and money for their next projects.

Article content:

  1. What is a conversion?
  2. What is a conversion rate and how is it calculated?
  3. Why is it important to focus on conversion rate optimization?
  4. The 15 things that influence your conversion:
    1. Technical aspects of your online store that keep customers from converting
    2. Marketing your business
    3. Aspects that give user confidence in your store
  5. What are the next steps to optimize your conversion rate?
    1. Installing important shop modules
    2. Maintaining a constant air of novelty on your online store
  6. Closing remarks

What is a conversion?

As already mentioned, in today’s article we will discuss conversion and conversion rate optimization for an online store. Before that, let’s see – what is a conversion?

Conversion on an online store refers to when a user takes a specific action. In general, conversion is represented by the purchase of a product – especially in the case of an eCommerce, whose main purpose is to sell products online.

For other websites, a conversion may be represented by a customer offering their personal email in exchange for an e-book or discount. For other niches, a conversion occurs when a visitor makes an account on the site.

Basically, conversion is the primary goal of some of the marketing your team does. Like it or not, you need your online store to have as many conversions as possible – otherwise, something isn’t going according to plan.

To see if your plan is working and conversions are coming to your site, you need to pay attention to one extremely important metric – your online store conversion rate.

What is conversion rate and how is it calculated?

But…how do you calculate the conversion rate? To find out your online store’s lifetime conversion rate, the calculation is as follows – find the number total of users on your site and divide that number by the number of orders. The result is the conversion rate of your website.

The eCommerce experts at GPeC come out every year with a report about the eCommerce market in Romania and how it is evolving. According to this report, the average conversion rate of online shops in Romania is over 2%. Specifically, on mobile it is 1.88% and on desktop 2.55%.

Your online shop’s rate should be somewhere around this figure. Of course, the conversion rate depends on several factors – an online store that only sells luxury products will probably have a slightly lower conversion rate.

Either way, at the end of the day you need to optimize your conversion rate to ensure your business is profitable. If you’re selling too little, but spending good money to get lots of people to your site, you need to rethink your marketing strategy.

Why is it important to focus on conversion rate optimization?

As mentioned above, conversion rate is the main indicator to track if you want to see the effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing strategies. If you don’t track this, you might find yourself throwing money out the window.

So, you need to calculate the conversion rate that now exists on your website and then set a goal of improving your conversion rate over the next few months.

Conversion rate optimization should be done professionally. You only want the best from your online store, so give it your attention instead. Conversion rate optimization will mean less money wasted on marketing for your website and more orders on your online store. Trade off on fair trade, right?

In the rest of this article, we want to look at what elements can optimize your conversion rate so you can be competitive in a more open market.

The 15 elements that influence your conversion:

Optimizing your conversion rate can be achieved with a number of important elements – marketing, technical aspects or elements that convey trust to the user when they enter your online store.

Using these elements together to attract a large number of users is crucial if you want your store’s conversion rate to be competitive. Show your customers that you’re ready to serve certain wants and needs, and they won’t leave you anytime soon.

Marketing your business

Marketing is very important in many ways for your business. Without well thought out marketing, your sales will be slow to come in. Also, the image of your business depends on how you promote yourself, both offline and online. Marketing also influences the conversion rate of your website – and in the following points we’ll describe in more detail how this happens.

The price of your products/services (1)

Price is considered, in many cases, one of the most important decision factors when it comes to purchasing a product. Let’s see how it influences the conversion rate of your website, though.

Price too high for delivery

Let’s say you got an extremely good price for your product. Maybe it’s a little higher than the competition, but you offer free 30-day returns – an important factor for many customers. The customer is determined to buy your product, but when they get to the check-out area, ooops – the delivery price is 25 lei.

At that point, the customer suddenly weighs all the options put in front of him. Why would they pay more money for the same product? Well, he gives up the shopping cart and buys the product from the competition.

How can you regulate this case? Make sure you get competitive offers from several courier companies around the country. At the moment, all courier companies in Romania can come up with very competitive prices, especially for general eCommerce whose packages do not exceed 2 kilos. Don’t jump at the first offer, because that might not be beneficial for your business!

Much more affordable competition

If the delivery price doesn’t necessarily lie 100% in your hands, the price of the products depends solely on your decision. Of course, the price is calculated according to many economic factors, but in the end you decide the price.

When the competition comes with a very good price and well thought out marketing, there is a chance that your product may not have so many takers. That’s why you need to keep up to date with new pricing trends in your field.

Keep an eye on the competition, see what they’re doing with their prices, but don’t wait for them to decide. Proactivity can get you out of many unpleasant situations. Make decisions for your business early, not reactively.

If you think a price drop is necessary – make the decision and don’t look back. But take ownership of whatever decision you make.

Implementing a recommended product module (2)

Another marketing element that can optimize your conversion rate is implementing a featured product module. It works like this – on the product page, when the customer looks at the pictures or inquires about the product details, somewhere on the page some recommended products will appear for that customer.

These modules can generally be based on the history of the online shop or can also be manually set by you, but if you have a large eCommerce with many products, it will be very hard to set all the featured products yourself.

With such a product you can increase the average value of a shopping cart, because you are recommending the customer a product that can help him, especially in combination with the product that was already of interest to him.

Online fashion stores benefit greatly from this, as they can recommend certain outfits to customers – with the help of such a module – thus greatly increasing the value of the average basket.

Lack of remarketing (3)

People’s attention is nowadays demanded by so many different environments that our brains can’t cope. Because of this, the average amount of time we can spend concentrating on a particular thing has fallen dramatically – now down to about 8 seconds.

No matter how good your marketing is, the attention it demands from a customer is too high for a single encounter between your brand and your prospect to be enough.

That’s why we need remarketing. It involves looking for people who have already been interested in your online store in other digital environments. Generally, remarketing takes place on Google, Facebook or other social media platforms.

Some time after the first visit to your website (it can be a few minutes), it will receive an advertisement from your online shop. While some may seem annoying, advertising done correctly and targeted where it should be will never be considered annoying – but useful – by the customer.

Poorly highlighted CTA that doesn’t lead the visitor to action (4)

CTA comes from English and refers to Call-to-Action – specifically, the prompt that the customer receives from your online store to a specific action. In general, the CTA in online shops is Buy now – Makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, all online stores have as their ultimate goal profit.

However, the text on the CTA alone is not enough. In general, that button stands out in all online stores. Different colors, irregular shapes, clear placement on the site in the center. All this to make it easier for the customer to press that button.

If your CTA is poorly highlighted and doesn’t lead the visitor to action, the conversion rate of your online store will be low.

Testimonials and reviews (5)

For customers, testimonials and reviews are very important in the decision process of whether or not to buy a particular product. People who leave testimonials are honest and show, in concrete cases, how the product works. If you have a good product, you should want as many testimonials and reviews on your online shop as possible.

These can increase people’s trust in your online store and convey to future customers that the products you sell are worth buying because there is already a market for them and happy customers.

So, to get testimonials and reviews in as large a number as possible, think of some solutions to give customers benefits when they leave a review. For example, a discount code for the next order can be a good argument for a customer who is not yet convinced whether to leave a review or not.

Product description (6)

We’re sure your products can sell themselves, but still, you need to do your best to display them in the best possible light. Optimizing your conversion rate can also be done with the help of well-crafted product descriptions.

Highlight the strengths of your products to make sure the description convinces customers on first reading.

Formatting the description is also very important. Long paragraphs are boring for the human brain to read. Large spaces between paragraphs, catchy words and graphic elements turn a description into a compelling marketing piece for any customer.

Technical aspects of your online store that keep customers from converting

Besides marketing, there are other niches of your business that need optimization to ensure the best possible conversion rate. One important area to keep in mind is the technology behind your website.

Too many pop-ups (7)

Pop-ups are those forced notifications that appear on any website and push you towards a certain action. Generally, the action is about signing up for a newsletter or pushing you to take advantage of a certain discount.

These pop-ups are important marketing elements, but overdoing them can mean a significant drop in your conversion rate.

For many customers, an avalanche of pop-ups means one thing – searching for X as fast as possible! No one wants to be besieged by pop-ups – and too many certainly won’t mean more orders.

The mobile version of the store isn’t optimized well enough (8)

Over 50% of online traffic comes from mobile. For some websites, mobile traffic exceeds 80%. Smartphones are common and very many people may have one with an internet connection these days.

So websites need to be built with the mobile experience in mind at all times. Many sites focus only on the desktop experience, but when you visit them from mobile, they either don’t load properly or don’t work at all.

A professional web builder like WebWave makes this transition – from desktop to mobile – extremely easy. You don’t have to build a new site from scratch – after all, we want the experience to be as seamless as possible, no matter what device the online store is accessed from.

Lack of option to buy without creating an account (9)

Creating a customer account has its benefits for both the customer and your business. A customer can set up a wish list, receive preferential discounts in certain cases, and keep track of all their orders in one place.

However, this account shouldn’t be mandatory for everyone. There are customers who only want to order once from your website – and that should be enough. You don’t have to make them go through the whole experience of creating an account.

Multiple broken links (10)

Non-functioning links are not ideal for any site, but if you have an online store and certain links don’t work, you need to fix these problems immediately.

The most important links are the purchase links, which with the right settings and the help of some modules should work correctly. However, there are other links that may not seem so important at first and can be omitted, but whose non-functioning can cause problems for your website.

Terms and conditions, return policies, blog, additional pages of the site – all can be omitted, but not working will give a clear message to customers – that trust can’t be too high.

Loading speed too high (11)

As already mentioned, people’s patience is getting shorter and shorter. Customers want web pages to load before click. Yes, it would be nice if it could, but it’s not yet the case. However, they are not happy if your site takes too many seconds to load.

What is too many seconds? Anything over 4 seconds is already a problem for your conversion rate optimization. If you don’t know what you need to do to get the best speed for your website, contact a developer or create your website with a properly optimized web builder.

Things that give users confidence in your store

Leaving aside all the aspects discussed above, at the end of the day you need to consider that the transaction that needs to take place between the customer and your online store must be based on a relationship of trust.

Lack of a return policy that puts the customer first (12)

Today’s customer is becoming increasingly accustomed to product returns. Perhaps in the early 2010s, returns weren’t as common and customers didn’t take advantage of them, but now every online store needs to have a clear returns policy.

Normally, the law requires any online store to offer a 14-day return policy. However, many online stores choose to offer a 30-day return policy – or even longer.

Whichever decision you choose, the return policy should be in place and very easy to find in your online store. Generally, customers look in the footer for the return policy because that’s where it belongs in most online stores.

Lack of contact details on the website (13)

In order to develop a trusting relationship we have to get to know each other, don’t we? Well, for a customer to get to know you, they need your contact details. Your phone number, email and address are enough.

Also, your Terms and Conditions page should have your company details – your VAT number, registration number, company name and other important data that your customers need to know.

Missing “About us” subpage (14)

If contact details are necessary to build a relationship based on trust, the “About Us” page should hide the story of your company and brand.

Create a safe space by telling the details of how your brand evolved, why you entered the market, and what recommends you and your products?

Lack of an SSL certificate (15)

Online security is necessary for any online store. A first step to that would be installing an SSL certificate. It helps you keep your customers’ data as secure as possible.

How?

The SSL certificate encrypts all the data in your database. This way, it is all protected and hidden from hackers.

What are the next steps to optimize the conversion rate?

These were some of our tips for optimizing your conversion rate, but here are a few tips on how to consistently maintain a good conversion rate for your online store.

User behavior analysis

There will probably be other aspects that influence the conversion rate specific to your online store in addition to the aspects listed above. In order to identify these aspects it is important to analyse user behaviour and there are a few modules that can help you do this.

With the help of these modules you will be able to identify weaknesses and thanks to feedback from users you will find out how to solve them. It will take some research and analysis – but you will certainly succeed.

Plus, you don’t have to do much work to set up the functionality of these modules:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is currently the best analytics module. It’s also offered for free by the folks at Google – absolutely free. Based on this module you can observe all the data of your online store – number of visitors, sources of visits, bounce rate and, you guessed it, conversion rate.

Hotjar

The first recommendation is Hotjar – a tool that can help you track how people spend their time in your online store: where they click, how far they scroll down the page, etc. This module will help you figure out where the bottlenecks in the user experience occur.

Chat module for support

Give your customers the chance to contact you, and quickly, via chat. That way, they’ll only call or email for big problems, but any smaller issues can be quickly resolved by an automated chat.

Keep a constant air of novelty about your online shop

To be able to hold your own in the marketplace you need to keep coming up with something new. An online shop needs to make the most of what’s new if it wants to achieve its goals. This isn’t just about keeping up with design trends, but continually updating the design and content to ensure the user that you’re managing the online store with care.

Closing word

Conversion rate optimization is the first step to expanding an online store. To learn more about setting up and optimizing an online store see this link: https://webwave.ro/magazin-online.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.