Despite steady website traffic, many e-commerce store owners struggle to improve their conversion rates. Generally, average e-commerce conversion rates hover around 2.5% to 3%. To address this, e-commerce experts suggest actionable strategies encompass building trustworthiness, optimizing landing pages, simplifying checkout, running effective Google Ads campaigns, ensuring accurate conversion tracking, enhancing page speed, and refining email automation strategies.
For instance, the food and beverage sector leads with a conversion rate of 4.6%. Women's fashion sees a higher conversion rate of 3.6%, while men's fashion lags at just 0.8%. Accessories within the fashion vertical, with a conversion rate of 7.4%, outshine other fashion segments. Health and beauty products enjoy relatively high conversion rates, averaging 3.3%. Household goods have an average conversion rate of 2.1%. Let's dive into these expert tips to help you transform your e-commerce traffic into meaningful sales.
1. Trustworthiness
The main reason most people don't "convert" is they don't trust your website enough. First step is to, well, make sure you are trustworthy! Please don't sell random dropshipping stuff that will only add to the global pile of garbage. Make sure your business is respectful of the planet and the customers, which are all very ethically conscious. Then the second step is to communicate this care: sign up for 1% for the Planet or other ethical certifications, and collect testimonials from happy customers who care about your values. - Catalin Zorzini, Co-Founder of E-commerce Platforms.
2. Landing Page
You can be driving a decent amount of traffic to the site, but if you aren't driving traffic to the pages that actually convert, then you aren't going to see the amount of conversion and sales you were hoping for. Make sure that you optimize your landing pages and drive the traffic to those landing pages in order to get that traffic into the actual sales funnel. - Brittany Betts, CMO at FloridaPanhandle.com
3. Lead Magnet
Ensure your lead magnet (such as a discount code, free shipping, a downloadable guide, or an exclusive video) is highly relevant to your target audience. It should offer immediate value that encourages visitors to share their contact information. Perform A/B testing with different types of lead magnets to determine which resonates most with your audience. For instance, if you run a fitness apparel store, a free downloadable workout plan might be more effective than a general discount offer.
Once a visitor opts into your lead magnet, a well-defined lead nurturing sequence is crucial. This could involve a series of targeted emails that provide additional value, build trust, and gently guide the subscriber toward making a purchase. Each email should be purpose-driven, providing content that educates, informs, or entertains, thereby enhancing the recipient’s connection with your brand. Regularly review your email analytics to refine messaging, frequency, and call-to-action based on performance metrics like open rates, click rates, and conversion rates. - Chad DeBolt, Founder at Surchability.
4. Checkout Process
Having a complicated checkout process may become the reason for major setbacks, for online stores. You may experience high traffic and yet low sales at your online store because shoppers love ease and clarity. If your checkout process feels like a puzzle, the customer may abandon their cart.
Looking for an immediate resolution? Then, simply streamline your checkout process by limiting the steps to the purchase option. Three or fewer are mostly enough! Also, offer multiple payment pathways like Apple Pay, PayPal, and many more and you will notice an increase in conversions by up to 50%.
If you want to turn browsers into buyers, proactively keep testing your checkout process. Especially, check the analytics and try to identify the exact step where your potential customers drop off. For instance, you may use tools like Hotjar and Google Analytics to analyze where users are actually quitting. Thus, you would be able to make data-driven decisions, test changes, and improve the checkout experience. - Tom Jauncey, Head Nerd at Nautilus Marketing.
5. Google Ads
Evaluate the type of advertising you're using. While some forms may generate significant traffic at a low cost, they might not attract high-quality customers that purchase (like the Google Display Network, especially using audience expansion). There is so much garbage website traffic out there. Consider shifting towards strategies that target more qualified customers across high-quality placements, even if it means sacrificing some traffic (which isn’t purchasing anyway). Expert tip: look to see if you’re advertising within mobile apps, a common issue when activating campaigns on a display network. This traffic is cheap and high-volume, but very very often of low quality. - Adam Ortman, Founder & President of Kinetic319.
6. Tracking Code
Double-check that your website's purchase tracking is set up correctly. Inaccurate tracking can skew your reporting metrics, making it difficult to identify areas for improvement. You would not believe the rat’s nests of analytics we encounter. Ensure you're accurately measuring key purchase events to make data-driven decisions. - Adam Ortman, Founder & President of Kinetic319.
7. Page Speed
Studies have shown that even a one-second delay in page load times can significantly impact conversion rates, leading to higher bounce rates and diminished user satisfaction. This is especially true now that people's attention span is shorter than ever.
While optimizing the initial page load speed is crucial, ensuring that subsequent page loads are seamless and swift is equally essential. In a typical e-commerce journey, users navigate through multiple pages, from product listings to checkout, and every step of the way presents an opportunity for friction or frustration. Minimizing latency and reducing load times across the entire user journey can create a cohesive and immersive browsing experience that keeps visitors engaged and encourages them to continue exploring your offerings
Merchants that we work with at Nacelle, that are able to achieve superior page load speed compared to their competitors, are crushing it, with conversion rate improvements 40% and up. So to me, page load speed is just low hanging fruit that every retailer should be prioritizing. - Brian Anderson, Founder & CEO of Nacelle.
8. Email Automation
Turning those lost visitors into purchasers, now or in the future, I recommend using behavior-based email and SMS marketing. In 2023, automated emails generated 41% of all email orders and accounted for only 2% of emails sent. These messages are not only highly effective (one in three email clickers makes a purchase) but also much cheaper than paid remarketing on social and search platforms.
To accomplish this easily, brands should have an email and mobile number popup on their website that captures this data from as many visitors as possible. From there, three automated messages become your best friends: the welcome message, browse, and cart abandonment.
The welcome message can incentivize purchasing and highlight your key differentiators and value-ads. Browse abandonment messages target those who view products and then leave. Cart abandonment helps push people who abandoned their checkout over the finish line.
Automating these messages will help recapture lost sales and give store owners more time to diagnose and correct other site conversion obstacles. - Greg Zakowicz, Sr. Ecommerce Expert at Omnisend.
Conclusion
Achieving a high conversion rate in e-commerce requires a multi-faceted approach. Building trust with your audience through customer reviews, testimonials, and transparent practices lays a strong foundation for converting browsers into buyers. Optimizing your landing pages to align with user expectations, simplifying the checkout process to reduce cart abandonment, and ensuring your Google Ads campaigns are finely tuned and accurately tracked are crucial. Additionally, enhancing page speed and employing sophisticated email automation strategies improve user experience and keep your brand at the forefront of your customer's minds.
