Top tips to improve your e-commerce conversion ratio

The retail world is evolving rapidly and over the last 20 or so years, e-commerce has come to play an increasingly important role in the sector. With industry giants like Amazon now dominating the market – and the impending death of the real-world high street – it’s more important than ever for retail businesses to have a presence on the internet.

However, while having an e-commerce site is important, it’s now not enough to just attract footfall to your site. Operating in a global marketplace with so many similar providers just one click away means you need to find ways to quickly grab the attention of each visitor to your site and convert them into a client. Here are just a few ways you can attract more visitors and improve your user/customer conversion rates.

The importance of employing Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Pretty much every internet journey starts with a visit to a search engine – usually Google. Unless your users already know your business and your web address, traffic will likely come through a search for a particular product, brand or service. Google processes an astonishing 70,000 unique requests per second – equating to 5.8 billion searches per day – or 2 trillion per year. If you want to generate new traffic, you need to engage in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), an intricate and detailed combination of techniques that helps place websites at the top of search engine results related to a company’s particular industry.

Leveraging the power of Call-to-Action (CTA) prompts

The psychological power of time-limited sales or bargain offers cannot be underestimated. Call-to-Action (CTA) prompts and pop-ups on your site can have a dramatic impact on your sales conversion rates, transforming otherwise-casual site visitors into confirmed customers. While you should never falsely pressure your visitors into parting with their hard-earned cash, a CTA can help encourage users to explore a product further and even inspire them into making an eventual purchase.

The power of customer feedback to retain clients

The first sale is always the most difficult, so, once you have converted a visitor into a client, it’s almost your obligation to retain them. Listening to, and acting upon, customer feedback and comments is vitally important – not just from a word-of-mouth promotion point of view, but also as a way to improve your overall service for subsequent clients.

Additionally, customer feedback sites like Trustpilot are becoming more common these days as a way for consumers to evaluate a business and its level of service. Having a high rating with an independent verifier can go a long way to building trust with your consumers (potential and existing).

Simplify the e-commerce journey

We’ve all been there – you finally find the product you want only to be faced with multiple pages or form fields, requesting seemingly unnecessary or unrelated personal details. Shopping cart abandonment is a real and prevalent problem with many e-commerce sites. To avoid wasting sales opportunities, you should closely study your website traffic stats and user patterns to identify potential blocking points or unwarranted steps you’re asking your clients to make. Shopping forms should be as quick and simple as possible, requesting the bare minimum of user information. Also, be sure to give prominence to a ‘buy now’ button next to products, to let consumers quickly and easily make a purchase.