Recently I was engaged in a conversation with a prospect who went on to become our client. He had his site developed just a year ago but with zero business outcome since then. He had gone with a good firm, to implement the best features but still did not deliver the intended business outcome, that of increasing customer experience or conversion. I learned all this when he approached me for a site revamp. Discussing in depth, I understood that though the business objectives outlined were met by the newly developed e-commerce site, it was just not what they needed. “Not all technical goals align with your business goals”. Many companies face this. They start off with a vendor, define business goals, get the technology in place but with no measurable outcome or impact. So, what do you do? How do you solve this? Where did you go wrong?
Having my share of experience in both Development and Sales over the past 11 years, I have observed that unless your development team has the proper understanding of your business objective, the efforts put into the site enhancement will be futile. That’s in a nutshell. Simple to understand, isn’t it? Let me elaborate further… The core objective of any page/site should be conversion. The design, development, and deployment should focus around optimizing the conversion rate.
A conversion rate is defined as the percentage of visitors who land on your website and have performed a desired action on the page. For example, this can be having the user to register for an event by submitting the form on the landing page. You need to accurately define your business objective to arrive at the conversion factor for the page. You should also be aware of the path the user takes towards the conversion point.
Ecommerce Conversion Rate
In the e-commerce world, almost 95% of the times conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors who purchased something from your online store. Even though this might be the primary goal for every business owner, there are few more activities that would contribute to goals.
This is where Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) becomes relevant for e-commerce websites. It helps you to define, monitor and optimize the conversion rate as per your goals and available resources. CRO is an activity that can be performed on various key touch points, this could be the landing page, category page, search result page and so on. Each of these points can have the user to complete a goal or move them one step towards the goal that is intended for this funnel.
Here are few Conversion Elements for an e-commerce website:
- An online sale
- A user adding a product to cart
- A user adding an item to their Wishlist
- Email signups
- Social media shares and reviews
- Any KPI your company finds valuable
What could be a good conversion rate?
As an industry standard, anything above 2% is considered as a good conversion rate. Anything between 1 – 2% can be a range which is achievable with limited efforts into CRO. If it is less than 1%, there are things to be looked into.
Check the Conversion rate for your website
It will be the percentage of the total number of visits divided by the number of visits that performed the conversion goal at any given period.
For example, if you are getting 1,000 users per day and you see 20 orders placed on your website, your conversion rate is 2%. Yet, there are analytics tools which give you a detailed info on the conversion rate of your site.
IMPROVING ONLINE CONVERSION RATE
End of the day, it is what the user feels towards performing the conversion action. But there are few factors that impact conversion rate which can be controlled.
User experience is one critical factor. The user should clearly understand the actions to be performed. The ease of navigation between pages and the presence of elements with respect to user’s cognition helps to improve conversion.
Responsiveness of the site is key. With increasing traffic from mobile and tablets, the page elements should be responsive.
Content should be relevant and appealing to encourage the user to perform the action. We have seen examples like, Hurry!, Only 10 left, Limited seats available etc. that provokes quick action.
The conversion rate is seasonal, and in few cases, you will also see a trend in the conversion rate depending on the day of the week for few industries.
If you are wondering how conversions in your website can be optimized with the help of technology, do contact me.
We at Commercebees have been partnering business to grow by enabling eCommerce websites to perform to their optimum for the past 11 years. Being the e-commerce division of Ameex Technologies, we are listed under Inc 5000 for the four consecutive years. Write to us here for consultation.
