What are the steps of conversion optimization is one of the age-old questions in the internet world today. Knowing how to convert your traffic into meaningful conversions (sales, contact information etc) is the name of the game for a successful business.
Here are the steps for conversion optimization
- Have a starting idea
- Test
- Analyze
- Optimize
- Repeat items 2-4 forever
1. Having a starting idea
Initially its almost impossible to know what will work for your specific traffic, and much guess work goes in to make the best possible website or eCommerce site that will accomplish all of your goals right off the bat. This is why it’s important to recognize that CRO is a process that should be prioritized at all times during your business venture.
You have to start somewhere though:
- We recommend that you do research on competitor websites to see how they have things laid out, take note of what you like and dislike from their sites and add the good ones for your own site.
- Talk to your current customers, friends and family about how they would use your site and jot dot the good ideas.
- Take yourself through the website journey and find what works for you.
- Install Google Analytics and HotJar to track your visitors’ movements on your site to learn their habits and what is working (and more importantly, what is not).
Building the customer journey.
One of the biggest elements to make this all work is to build customer journeys, or better said, what you expect and hope your customers will do when they are on your website. This doesn’t have to be limited to only sales, other goals and journeys can be to collect email addresses or get people to book a call with you.
A customer journey can look something like this:
- Customer arrives on the home page
- Customer clicks on product link 1
- Customer adds product to cart
- Customer checks out and completes purchase
This is a very simple journey and most ideal, but the flow concept works for every journey
- Customer arrives on home page
- Customer clicks on more information
- Customer books a call for more information
This is also a successful journey and one you want to plan for, meaning, setting up the website in a way that enables the customer to reach those goals that you set out for them.
When does it go raw? If the customer fails the objective or does not reach its goal. For example
- Customer arrives on home page
- Customer leaves home page to another website
This is also a journey, but not an ideal one. When it comes down to it, it’s all a numbers game. You will never have 100% of your traffic doing exactly what you want every time, and this is where Google Analytics and Hotjar come in to tell you how many users fell into which category.
A website can have 10s of journeys, it’s important to think of as many and continue to add as your customers use your website and you learn more as a company.
Build out the customer journeys that you want to see initially and continue to expand from there.
2. Test
Now that your site is all ready to go and you have your customer journeys all lined up, it’s time to test your theories out and hopefully make some conversions along the way.
A big part of the test is assessing where the your site traffic is coming from, how they are reacting to your site and note the volume of traffic coming to the site
This can get tricky, let’s take a look at an example
You advertise on Facebook for audiences 18-25 male and female for your bicycle shop, you accrue 1000 visitors in a 1 month period. 500 of them never get past the home page, 400 never make it past the second page and you achieve 100 conversions.
Now that is a 10% conversion rate, which could be better. We need to figure out if the site caused people to dash away or if the audience that was brought in simply wasn’t interested or couldn’t afford the product.
This takes us to testing stage 2. Usually you want a control factor (something that stays the same) and a variable (something that changes) to test what is the difference between the current version and something changing.
Is it possible that the site is good but the demographic targeted was not the best, or perhaps the demographic is good but the site is not optimized in the right way? These are the big questions that need solving in order to perfect the site and traffic types.
3. Analyze
Analyzing your results are key to understanding what is working and what is not. Like we mentioned above, analyzing your stats can tell you if your site is achieving its goals and which areas need improvement.
You won’t always know the missing link right away, which is why the analysis stage is so key.
4. Optimize
Now that you’ve collected data like above, it’s time to optimize! The first step is to build new theories and hypotheses that can make the change from undesirable results to awesome ones. Continuing our example from above
If we believe that the traffic type is good but the site is failing, we can look at the site and see where most people drop off. In our case 50% of the people never made it past the home page. Similar to newspapers, being above the fold (i.e. the user not having to scroll down) what is being presented in the first glance of the website, what call to actions are being presented that the user should take action on?
If the user has to scroll, that may be a big indicator of why someone may leave the site, and it may mean that you should put the products or action buttons right at the top of the site.
This is just one example of the many factors that go into the whole CRO experience.
The best part is that you don’t need to wait a whole month (or whatever the longer testing period was) you can view it in half its time or even a quarter to see if the results are improving.
This is a time consuming and lots of guessing process, but a well worth it process to make your eCommerce website successful
5. Repeat Items 2-4 forever
Optimization never ends! Unless you somehow are getting 100% of your site visitors to convert, there is always room for improvement and we strongly recommend the testing, analysis, and optimization of your website on a fairly frequent basis, whether it be weekly or monthly.
FAQs
What is eCommerce optimization?
eCommerce conversion optimization is a holistic approach to making your website better and easy for visitors to convert into paying customers.
It covers your website’s navigation, speed, design, content, usability, product descriptions, and more. The goal is to make every element on your website. We lead users towards your chosen end goal intentionally.
Your website and everything on it should bring people to purchase your products or services.
Will optimization fix my bounce rate and cart abandonment issues?
Yes.
High bounce rates are usually a result of slow page loading, which CRO can fix by removing unnecessary coding, compressing files like images, and other technical solutions.
The ideal speed should be below three seconds.
High cart abandonment rates usually occur because of complicated checkout processes, tedious shopping funnels, the need to fill out multiple information fields, far from transparent shipping calculations, and a lack of alternative payment methods.
A CRO specialist can fix these issues by studying your users and figuring out what they prefer when shopping and paying. Then, you can implement CRO changes like simplifying checkout, allowing guest checkout, shortening the purchasing processes, lessening form fields, implementing free shipping, and including as many payment options as possible.
Is CRO important for eCommerce?
Conversion rate optimization is vital for online retailers in that it allows them to maximise the site traffic they have. With CRO, business owners can effectively make more money without the need to spend much more on customer acquisition.
How many people shop on their phone?
A 2021 research survey reported that 79% of smartphone users purchased online using their mobile devices in the last six months before the study. Furthermore, 73% of the global market share is on mobile shopping.
Hence, when doing CRO, you should consider mobile if you don’t want to miss out on huge conversions.
Why do I need an eCommerce optimization agency?
eCommerce optimization entails sophisticated tools and years of experience to perfect.
Not many business owners have the expertise nor time to implement detailed testing, study and analysis, and technical work.
If you are like most business owners, you could be more passionate about your product over the details of digital marketing and CRO. If so, you need to hire an agency to do the optimization work for you.
Hiring an expert team like KAMG allows you to save your business from mistakes. You will also save up to 80% on advertising and customer acquisition costs with a guaranteed ROI of a thousandfold.
Is eCommerce optimization enough?
No.
If your website is perfectly optimized, but nobody comes and visits, you will convert no one.
You could implement email marketing to nurture your users, SEO to rank on search engines, and do some PR to get your name established in the market.
You can avail of these marketing needs with the help of our KAMG team. Leave your details, and let’s see how we can collaborate to double your metrics in 90 days.
