20 Data-Backed Tips to Increase Conversion Rates
In today's volatile e-commerce environment total site traffic can often be a deceitful metric when measuring success. In reality, you will want to focus on how each site visitor is converting to a customer. We have compiled 20 data-backed tips to increase your conversion rates.
Although the majority of commerce remains in the physical world, internet-based companies continue to grow at a rapid rate. Even with the immense market share of Amazon, there are many hungry entrepreneurs vying for their piece of the pie. The eCommerce business model is conducive to these enterprising upstarts able to rely on countless resources, tools, and relatively low startup costs.
The surrounding ecosystem is also a major contributing factor to the sustained growth online business has experienced over the last two decades. For example, social media has allowed nearly anyone to access billions of consumers which was once reserved for only the largest corporations with their massive advertising budgets and infrastructure. These tools are readily available to build your empire, but first, you must learn how to harness the power they wield. Although the opportunities appear endless for your online business you must learn how to compete for the gold standard of eCommerce, conversions.
It is not enough to merely attract site visitors in today’s state of constant digital churn, you must have the ability to convince the visitor to stick around long enough to make a purchase. With average industry conversion rates remaining stagnant below 5 percent, it’s important to optimize this metric for your store before attracting more traffic.
Many factors contribute to the psychology of the eCommerce consumer, often they are a series of micro-influences like loading speed, image quality, and even font color. It has also been discovered that humans make their decisions on emotion and not logic. This is why you should aim to influence the consumer’s pathos, which is an appeal to emotion instead of logos or appeal to logic.
It’s also interesting how quickly humans pass judgment on a first impression. When introduced to a new person, it takes less than one-tenth of a second for someone to make a judgment on facial appearance. It most likely is not much longer for a first impression to be made when reaching your website. In fact, over 40 percent of site visitors will abandon the page if the loading time exceeds 3 seconds.
You may be wary of large and expensive web redesigns when you think about optimizing conversion rates, but it’s more commonly the minutiae that you need to worry about. For example, 88 percent of shoppers believe a site to be more secure if a security emblem is displayed.
We have compiled 20 tips that have proven effective for both the Davids and Goliaths of the eCommerce industry. Remember as you implement these tips to constantly measure your success and truly understand how each modification affects your bottom line before implementing another. The optimization process is a slow and steady process of implementation, measure, tweak and repeat.
