29/10/2021
How to Improve the Conversion Rate of Your Web Store: Part 1
A powerful way to maximise the profitability of your ecommerce website is to increase the percentage of website traffic that your store converts to buyers. In other words, optimise your ecommerce conversion rate.
Do you Need to Hire an Agency for Conversion Rate Optimisation?
Not necessarily. If you’re able to put yourself in your customer’s shoes, and have time and resources to invest in trial and error, you could make significant improvements to your conversion rate without professional help. However, hiring an experienced agency can save you time and money - without the learning curve, an experienced ecommerce marketing agency can get you results faster.
Over the next 4 articles, you’ll learn to apply a step-by-step process we use here at Studioworx to increase our customers’ conversion rates.
In this first article, we’ll unpack some key concepts and explore benchmarks and goal setting to get you started on your conversion rate optimisation.
What is a Conversion in eCommerce?
An ecommerce conversion is when a website visitor buys one of your products. i.e. a transaction.
There are other steps in the buyer journey that can be defined as a conversion, like opting in for an email list, getting a promo code, or adding a product to a wish list. That said, avoid getting into the weeds with preliminary steps in the buyer journey. These actions are in service of your ultimate goal of selling more products, so it’s important to be clear at the outset exactly which actions directly result in a revenue increase.
What is eCommerce Conversion Rate?
The degree of success you have in converting website visitors into buyers is your conversion rate.
It’s your number of sales expressed as a percentage of website visits over a set period of time.
How do you Find Your Conversion Rate?
Consult your Google Analytics for data on site visits and conversions.
Google Analytics has a range of other stats that will help with your conversion rate optimisation - we’ll dig into this rich data source when we take you through the CRO Audit in part 2. At this stage, you’re simply establishing what your ecommerce conversion rate is and understanding what that number means.
So now you’ve got your conversion rate. The next step is to interpret it.
What is the Average eCommerce Conversion Rate?
If your ecommerce conversion rate is sitting between 1% and 2% then you’re bang on global average - most web stores won’t convert more than 2 visitors out of every hundred. Average conversion rates differ slightly by vertical and location, so it’s a good idea to research your industry for more strategic benchmarking.
What is an Acceptable eCommerce Conversion Rate?
In an increasingly competitive ecommerce landscape, ‘average’ won’t cut it. We’d urge you to set your sights on a conversion rate that’s aspirational but achievable in your vertical.
For our clients here at Studioworx, we aim to achieve a minimum ecommerce conversion rate of 5% which we achieve with CRO combined with other marketing services. If you'd like us to audit your website and create a plan to get your conversion rate to Studioworx levels, please get in touch or read more about our Web Usability and Auditing services.
Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimisation
To estimate how many more sales you will make once you hit your target conversion rate, simply multiply your website visits for a given period by your target conversion rate and divide by 100.
This should make it clear that your revenue will increase as you improve your conversion rate, but it’s worth noting that the process of optimising your ecommerce website for conversions can also improve the effectiveness of your marketing. In essence, conversion rate optimisation is the data-driven process of improving the buyer journey on your website. This happens to be in line with the rising importance of user experience in organic and paid marketing.
As monoliths like Google and Facebook become more obsessed with user experience, their algorithms award more impressions to websites that put the customer first. So if you’re looking to improve your SEO and paid ads performance, optimising your website for user experience could pay huge dividends beyond simply improving your ecommerce conversion rate.
How Do You Improve Your Ecommerce Conversion Rate?
If you're not happy with your conversion rate, significant improvements could be achieved simply by improving the buyer experience on your website. In the next article, we’ll show how you can identify sources of friction for the site visitor and create a plan to implement strategic improvements to the user experience (UX).
Don’t miss Part 2! If you’d like to go the agency route and get started with your CRO right away, please reach out to our team.