eCommerce CRO: Things You Must Know For A Better Business!

What is the one thing that every entrepreneur seeks upon setting up an eCommerce store or any online business for that matter? Certainly, it is eCommerce Marketing!

Marketing is one of the most crucial steps towards the success of the new establishment as well as the existing business giants. Every business into marketing activities follows the same old marketing conversion funnel to analyze the efforts and convert the leads into potential customers. The potential customers are further moved through various stages before they are finally converted and recognized as loyal customers.

The aim to do marketing is to get better traffic and engagement with every passing day. And, it is obviously great to get a new traffic base. But is it recommended to ignore your existing customers while you’re busy luring in your new customers?

The answer is NO.

You can’t just ignore your converted customers and expect them to be loyal to you and your products/services. Therefore, it is important to keep considering your existing customers too along with welcoming new leads and traversing them through conversion processes. Yet again, it is not functional to get all your leads converted.

Considering the facts, the ideals conversion rate is expected to be 1-2% fora store getting high traffic and regular leads. However, the stores are getting only a 0.2-0.5% conversion rate and that too when they think that they are doing the best possible marketing efforts. Allow me to enlighten you here that it is not your strategic effort that is not performing. Rather the problem can be back there at your store itself. And it is here when eCommerce CRO techniques hop in.

1. What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?

An eCommerce CRO or conversion rate optimization is a process to reconsider your existing customers and increase their rate of conversion. It is a more systematic manner to analyze your consumer’s behavior and optimize your site/landing page accordingly. Hence, providing a better consumer experience driving them to perform the desired action on your page.

Since we are talking about eCommerce CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization in this blog, it is must that you are well-aware of “Conversion Rate” first.

Conversion Rate: Things You Must Know

What Is The Conversion Rate?

Conversion is a specific action (in terms of your business) you want your visitors to take when they land on your website (pages). It can be a sign-up or download a file or a transaction, depending upon the nature of your business. The rate at which these activities are performed is considered as “conversion rate”.

How To Calculate Conversion Rate?

It is fairly easy to calculate the conversion rates. All you need to have is the data about the total number of visitors & conversion count. Also, a basic knowledge of mathematics. When you have it all, you just need to place the values in the given equation and you have your results in no time.

Conversion Rate = (Total Conversions/ Total Visitors) * 100%

For Example, if you have 25000 total visitors (in the past 3 months) and conversions count is 17500, then substituting the values into the equation, Conversion Rate=(17500/25000)*100% = 70%.

Why Conversion Rate Shouldn’t Be Your #1 Goal?

We as marketers thrive to focus on the conversion rate only. It’s not you or me. It is a common tendency among marketers to consider the sales as conversion and making it a top-priority goal to achieve more sales. But is every sale always a profit?

Now, you’ll say yes, it is and here you go wrong. We all are seeing that marketers are running various offers round the year to lure in the customers and to convert them. But analyze carefully here, lending offers do affect your revenue. How? Take an example of that.

You have a product X of MRP $25. Now, if you’ll sell out the 50 pcs of product X, then you’ll earn $1250. Here, in this case, your total earnings are $1250; your actual profit. Now, to increase the conversion rate, i.e., your sales, you have lent an offer on the product X and now you are selling at the price of $20. And you earned $1200 by selling 60 pcs.

Consider, that you have increased the sale by lowering the price but your ROI is also decreased now. Instead, if you would have sold the same quantity of product X, i.e., 60 pcs at the price of $25, then your ROI would have been $1500.

This example doesn’t signify that giving discounts and offers is wrong. It only lays focus on attaining the benefits of efforts put in the business by measuring the valued data, not vague information.

Where conversion rate as the primary goal will not get you any appropriate results, you must include conversion rate in the plan to analyze your business progress. And, also to analyze the pain points that need modifications and updates for generating better progress reports. It is where eCommerce CRO techniques move in.

2. Conversion Rate Optimization: Assets For eCommerce Retailers

CRO techniques do have an infinite set of benefits and importance for an eCommerce marketer and retailers that we’ll discuss further in this section.

Importance Of Implementing eCommerce CRO

eCommerce CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization is immensely important to implement for efficiently handling your eCommerce store on the following grounds –

1. Excessively growing PPC and other digital marketing costs
2. Increasing competition in digital marketing and online businesses
3. The traffic you get from Social Media and the effects of your social campaigns
4. Shortening the consumer attention span
5. Justifies and streamlines your business
6. Effective and efficient utilization of money invested in the business
7. Improves the affiliate and other marketing efforts
8. Improves the look and feel of your online store.

We now know that eCommerce CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization is very important for the online business to grow and flourish along with its existing and new customers. It’s now time to figure out how it benefits the online entrepreneurs in the upcoming section.

Benefits Of Implementing eCommerce CRO

As a business owner, you can leverage the benefits of eCommerce CRO stores in the following ways –

1. CRO helps you in understanding your customers better.
2. A better understanding of customers will help you in attracting more customers.
3. eCommerce CRO techniques upscale your profit bar many times.
4. The CRO techniques help you in leveraging the benefits of your current traffic while lowering customer acquisition costs.
5. Improved website layouts increase the attention of Google with better rankings on SERPs.
6. eCommerce CRO techniques improve brand perception among your customers and increase customer lifetime value.

3. eCommerce CRO Techniques: It’s Time For Some Hands-On

Finally, we’re at the course of implementation now. The listed below are some of the best eCommerce CRO techniques that will surely boost your conversion rate.

1. Add clearly visible and highly convincing text-based CTAs
2. Display your products from various angles for better customer understanding
3. Display short product demo videos in the product variation image gallery
4. Check and Re-check your product description to be precise and crystal clear
5. Allow your customers to search your site with the products they want rather than navigating through heavy pages
6. Monitor your site search to re-design your feature page and category header sections
7. Provide options for customer benefits and loyalty programs like “use points”, “add promo code”, etc.
8. Build workflows for your sales team to convert leads into marketing-qualified leads (MQLs)
9. Create a product benefits section and provide considerable suggestions.
10. Perform Market-basket analysis to define association rules for providing suggestions
11. Connect with your customers in real-time via chat windows and chatbots.
12. Entertain your customers with your cultural values and recognitions
13. Leverage retargeting to re-engage your e-store visitors, passives and detractors.
14. Build trust among your visitors and customers because when they’ll trust you only then they’ll purchase from you.
15. Add your refund/return policies, clientele reviews, awards, and accolades, etc.

4. eCommerce CRO: Wondering How To Get Started?

It’s been long since we are discussing the concept. And I know, you are very excited to initiate CRO for your eCommerce business ASAP!
But… there is still a question in your mind about how you should start with the implementation phase?

Since we’ve been talking long about it, I’m sure you must have observed that analytics plays a vital role in the eCommerce CRO implementation process. If you’re all convinced and ready to start implementing CRO techniques for your eCommerce store, you must follow the steps below:

Step 1: Analyze Your Website

Analyze your current website status while acknowledging your previous years’ data. Data is very important to identify the problem areas on your website. You can analyze the data that your site generates with tools like Google Analytics, Heat Maps, Google Search Console, Surveys & Feedbacks, etc. These tools may not give you the exact reasons but will surely give you an accurate idea of the bounce rates, exit rates, conversion rates, high and low-interest areas, etc. With a clear picture in hand, you’ll know what you need to improve and for what reasons.

Step 2: Choose The Right Method To Test

After the successful completion of the first step, I’m sure you know the key areas to improve. But, how do you know that the changes you are implementing will interest your customers more than what was previously there? Maybe you’re aware; maybe not. However, this 50-50 situation will get you great results if you monitor them closely by accommodating various testing methods that best suit your requirements like A/B Testing and Multivariate testing. You can even let your customers decide which layout they feel is better for you. And that too not hypothetically but in real-time by monitoring the conversion rates.

Step 3: Optimize Your eCommerce Store

There isn’t any particular right way to optimize your eCommerce stores for better conversion. Sometimes, it is gut feeling and other times it is calculated moves that fetch in great results. Hence, choose the eCommerce CRO techniques that you’re willing to implement wisely. You don’t need to implement them all together. Select what is best for your business.

5. eCommerce CRO: Is It The Right Time To Proceed?

Well, if you are looking out for the answers to the same, you must know that there isn’t any fixed time that is right. Implementing CRO for your eCommerce business is dependent on your business’s current position graphs and observations.

Top marketers and trendsetters in the corporates like HubSpot have a different verdict on implementing eCommerce CRO techniques and their beliefs are available in structured formats and examples. But on the other hand, the CRO agencies like “The Good” have a completely different outlook on the same.

Opinion 1: 

According to HubSpot, “Once your sales and marketing engine consistently attracts website visitors — and at progressively high amounts — you should start thinking about CRO to convert those visitors into leads for your sales team.”

HubSpot clearly signifies the importance of revenue, traffic, pricing and most importantly the goals you set for your business to analyze conversion rate. Hence, HubSpot offers to consider the three formulas below while you are planning to initiate conversion rate optimization for your business.

1. New revenue goal ÷ average sales price = # of new customers
2. # of new customers ÷ lead-to-customer close rate % = lead goal
3. Leads generated ÷ website traffic X100 = % conversion rate

In short, HubSpot recognizes conversion rate optimization as leveraging more benefits from what you already have and utilizing the same to work better for your business.

Opinion 2:

The Good, the CRO agency, considers implementing the conversion rate optimization in stages divided round the year as quarters. It says, “two different companies in the same industry will have different clientele with different needs and different opinions. Blindly mimicking another company without understanding that principle will waste your time and your precious traffic”

Hence, The Good, itself follows a Quarter-by-Quarter plan to implement conversion rate optimization techniques considering the business’s seasonal needs. And, also, covering them in round the year practices to continually upgrade their business. Because the seasonal patterns of the business fluctuate the reaching-out capacity of different businesses to implement CRO.

Summing Up!

The eCommerce CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization is a re-designing process to attain the potential benefits that were lost earlier. Some mere and major efforts, when combined together, can fetch you a better conversion rate and customer satisfaction. Successful analytics-based CRO strategies reflect instant results in terms of the number of conversions, number of sessions and number of users. eCommerce conversion optimization triggers lead conversion activities and online marketing efforts.