We’ve heard it time and time again, you’ve set up a Shopify website, created some branding and found yourself a product to sell… GREAT! You may have started some paid advertising through social media or maybe some content marketing, or even SEO and you have a decent amount of traffic coming through to your website, but you still don’t seem to be selling all that much product. What gives?!
Creating a website and getting traffic to it is an awesome start, but there needs to be a focus on conversions to ensure that you aren’t letting all of that quality traffic fall through the cracks. This is where Conversion Rate Optimisation comes into play, by improving the rate in which your traffic converts, you are making it more likely for potential customers to make a purchase on your website. This is often an oversight for business owners and can be one of the fatal reasons that your business is unsuccessful. Luckily, Shopify is a very adaptable platform with plenty of tools and hacks that can improve your overall conversion rate:
- Product Pages are Key - Shopify creates beautiful product pages that are normally formatted very nicely and encourage users to buy, but without quality content and information on these pages, you don’t have enough to win over online customers. The product page is the most important page as the user has made their way to the final step before making a purchase, so this is where a conversion can be won or lost.
Focus on making your product pages full of rich and unique content to ensure that your user has everything they need to make their desired action on the website and eventually convert into a purchase.
- Activate Live Chat - Believe it or not, just by having live chat you can potentially improve your conversions. Think about it, most customers don’t want to buy something without getting as much information as they possibly can before making a purchase and often they don’t have the time to call a business. This is where live chat comes into play, it is the perfect balance of non invasive communication, but with your potential on your website looking to make a purchase.
Shopify has plenty of live chat options in their app store and most of them have enough customisation to be able to trigger when the live chat box appears for a user on the website, which allows you to pick certain high converting pages for live chat to be triggered. If you have a product that needs a slightly more in depth explanation of how it operates, live chat is a no brainer for you to help with conversions.
- Upselling and Cross-selling - Similar to the urgency of product pages in hack #1, all your selling happens on product pages and having a prominent cross selling or upselling strategy can be the key to increasing your average order value and therefore improving conversion value on your website. Adding feature snippets on the product page with “things you may like” or “other customers purchased these items” may increase the likelihood of visitors looking at more products to potentially purchase.
The other thing that works well in industries such as fashion is putting 2 or 3 products together in a discounted package, which works well for clothing as you can put a pair of pants, a shirt and some shoes together which will all look nice as a bundle. The best part of this is that you are offering your customer value, but you are also enticing them to purchase 3 items instead of possibly just grabbing 1 of those items initially.
- Display social proof - Reviews, ratings, testimonials, customer feedback and anything that promotes your brand in a good light is extremely important for ecommerce stores to gain trust from your audience. Shopify has lots of integrations that can display this data easily, but you have to do the leg work and get people to submit these pieces of information to you to be able to utilise them. With information so easily accessible online, most online customers will look at a minimum of one review or testimonial prior to making a purchase, which means that if you don’t have this displayed on your website, you are at risk of losing a potential sale.
There are so many platforms to get reviews on, from Google to social media to specific third party review websites and there are easy ways to show off your testimonials online, so you have no excuses in getting quality social proof on the website and the rewards can make a huge impact on CRO.
- VIDEO VIDEO VIDEO - It’s 2020, let’s get real for a minute. Video is a really important way to get your message across and to advertise/sell products. A stock image with 2 sentences of words and some product specifications isn’t good enough anymore, every single competitor of yours has that set up and more now and you have to be better than that. Video content is the perfect compliment to your imagery and wording on a page as it creates a different level of professionalism that other types of media can’t.
With thousands of different video editing programs available and an in built high quality camera in every smartphone out there, hiding from video content isn’t something you can do anymore and you need to force yourself to upload video content on all appropriate pages possible on your ecommerce website.
