Almost all newly opened stores are obsessed with increasing their traffic. But, they aren’t as obsessed with how to increase their conversions. While traffic is essential, seeing some influx of visitors won’t directly translate to sales. You need to drive conversion.
Boosting your conversions will help you push your visitors further down into the sales funnel. The more people you convert, the more people you bring closer to purchase. After all, your end goal is to get people to the end of the funnel.
To increase your conversions, we’ve carefully considered that you’re a beginner so this guide won’t require some high technical aptitude and knowledge mastery. All you need now is your desire and effort to boost your conversions.
After this post, you will already be equipped on how to boost your conversion and get you to win more customers for your newly launched online store.
How to Increase Your Conversions
1. Make it easy for your visitors to find the right products on-site
One of the major obstacles that shoppers face is when they can’t find the products they’re looking for. Shoppers could easily get frustrated when they type a product but an unrelated item is shown on the results page.
Getting your customers exactly what they want is key to improving your conversions. The better your on-site search results are, the higher the chances of converting your shoppers. This is echoed by a study by eConsultancy where the conversion rate is 1.8 times more effective for those online stores that optimized their on-site product search capabilities.
To make your store more search-friendly for your visitors, here are some tips to help your visitors find exactly what they are looking for:
- Improve search results relevance
Configure your on-site search to automatically correct common misspellings and provide alternative synonymous terms to refine the search results relevance. This means that you need to apply live search so when the user is typing the product names will start to appear in the drop-down instantly. Visitors can directly click on the relevant search items instead of going to search page.
For example, Target automatically resolves misspellings and also offers search terms related to what the customer is looking for. Moreover, it also displays the right category where the item is under. You can do this by using the live search features from Algolia to develop unique search and discovery experiences for your customers.
- Implement a faceted search and navigation
Using a faceted search and navigation options for your products will help customers narrow down their searches by several product attributes. These attributes can be product category, size, color, etc. This makes things a lot easier for visitors because there’s no need to perform multiple single searches.
Filter Menu by Power Tools will help you set up layered product navigation to help shoppers more conveniently and quickly find a product based on category, price range, color, size or any other available product attribute.
2. Write quality product titles and descriptions that convert
People read product titles and descriptions before buying a product because they want to know if it matches their needs and preferences. If you’re using product title and description from the manufacturer’s product manual, the tendency is it will sound too technical.
You must invest in writing product titles and descriptions that are relatable to your target audience. They should sound as if you’re just conversing with someone else. Crafting better quality product contents will help you improve the conversion rate by up to 78%.
You need to ensure that your products are named and formatted properly. This will increase the chances that they will be found by shoppers easily. The more shoppers finding your products, the higher the possibility of generating sales.
The following elements and formats are important to consider when writing your product title and description:
Basic Format for a Product Title:
- Brand Name
- Variant / Color / Flavor
- Size / Quantity: size refers to the size chart (small, medium, large) or unit of length (centimeter, inch) for clothing or accessory. Quantity is the number of units in a bulk package
- Keywords: what an average searcher will type to search for a product
Here are some examples from Amazon:
| Product Category | Product Title Format | Example |
| Cookware, Cutlery | Brand + Line + Size+ Product Type | Sabatier Precision 14-Piece Stainless-Steel Knife Block Set |
| Tableware Sets | Brand + Pattern + Product Type, Amount | Spiegelau Authentis Collection Burgundy Wine Glasses, Set of 6 |
| Television | Brand + Model Number + Product Type + (Color/Pack Size) | Sharp LC-20E1UB 20-Inch LCD Flat-Panel TV (Black) |
Basic Format for a Product Description:
- Formatting (paragraph type, bulleted type, mixed)
- Features
- Benefits
- Keywords
A study revealed that formatting your product description properly will influence the perception of your customers toward your product. In summary, the results of the study showed that the formatting of product descriptions varies from one product category to another.
For instance, a paragraph or a text format is suggested for technical or specs-driven products like computers or smartphones. On the other hand, bulleted type product descriptions are generally gain more attention from visitors. Plus, people spend more time reading them compared to paragraph types.
Naked Wines shows their personality by using cheerful and humorous copy on their product page. The product description is written in a bulleted manner.
3. Display visually stunning and high-quality product images
Because people are highly visual creatures, your product images should be optimized for conversion too. Unlike physical stores where customers can inspect a product closely, online shoppers rely heavily on photos.
Make sure that they have high resolution. In fact, visitors who seen high-quality product photos are three times more likely to convert compared to those who have not. Low-resolution images will hinder shoppers to examine products attentively. Plus, they make your store seem amateurish and deceitful.
You can also use a zoom-in or 360-degree product view feature to allow your visitors to inspect your products more closely. 38% of online customers are more likely to buy a product from an online merchant with a zoom feature of its products. While eCommerce stores have experienced a 6% lift in sales for the products with 360° images.
If you have either a zoom-in or 360-degree product view feature, this will signal your shoppers that you’re transparent and not hiding anything from them.
For example, Wiggle.co.uk integrates 360-degree and zoom features on their product pages. This helps visitors to zoom, rotate, and alter the viewing angles of the product.
You can use the Magic 360 Spin to create 360-degree product views. Alternatively, the Magic Zoom Plus will help you enable a zoom-in feature for your product images.
4. Be frictionless with a single-page checkout
Imagine yourself in a supermarket. You’re about to pay for your grocery items. You check on the checkout lanes, there are only two counters open: one with a short line and the other with a long queue. Will you choose the former or the latter? A sound mind will always choose the short line because it’s a quicker way out.
This is also true with your checkout page. If you make it too long and with so many pages for your visitors have to go through, you’re just prolonging their path to purchase.
You must optimize your checkout page so that customers can pay their checkout items as fast as possible.
A single-page checkout will help your bring shoppers closer to conversion. Because it occupies less real estate, there is lesser information for your customer to fill out.
Plus, compared to a multi-page checkout, a single-page checkout is normally faster and shorter. The fewer clicks to make and fewer pages to visit, your customers will have a quicker way for conversion.
For example, A.N. Other only has a one-page checkout, removing the additional steps shoppers have to fulfill. The lesser the page to go and the fewer steps to make, the faster for shoppers to place an order. Thus, it’s a lot quicker for you to secure those sales.
You can use plugins like Shopify One-Click Checkout to reduce the time to check out.
5. Offer compelling content-based lead magnets
A content-based lead magnet is a compelling offer that you can trade to your potential customers in exchange for a specific action.
Lead magnets in the form of contents vary according to what will be effective in your industry and to your audience. The most popular ones are downloadable content like whitepapers or DIY guides.
While the conventional approach is to pair up a lead magnet into your email opt-in strategy, you can also use this as a value-add to your sales.
Plus, distributing relevant content is beneficial to sales conversion as 61% of consumer buying decisions are influenced by quality content. For example, an in-season lookbook can be offered as a lead magnet for every purchase of in-season items.
Here’s a creative example of a content-based lead magnet from Crafter’s Companion. They offered new visitors with free and downloadable designs to create cards, frameable art, and gift. These free lead magnets can be redeemed for every successful purchase.
6. Get your customers to buy more with upsell and cross-sell products
As much as possible, you want to maximize every opportunity that knocks on your door. Whenever shoppers show high interest to buy a product, make sure they won’t just purchase one item.
Maximizing your customers’ average order value will push your shoppers to buy not just a single product, but even more than what they initially planned to purchase.
Upselling and cross-selling are two highly effective marketing disciplines that are often combined to increase average order value.
An upselling strategy is simply promoting other items that are superior or an upgrade to the product a customer is currently browsing. Cross-selling strategy, on the other hand, offers complementary or supplementary items such as accessories.
Boost Sales has a machine learning and big data technology that helps you automatically pick the relevant products to upsell or cross-sell just like above.
7. Display social proof to establish trust and authenticity
Social proof explains that consumers will consider the opinions and recommendations of other people in their purchase decision-making process.
Shoppers want to know first if an item is worth it to purchase or even legitimate to buy. The more people recommending a product, the more probability that potential customers will make a purchase.
You can display social proof in a lot of ways. You can add customer reviews and product feedback. These types of social proof will ease your potential customers’ doubts. They humanize the transaction and bring authenticity to your products and store because other people have tried and tested them before.
But, since you are a newly opened store, you still don’t have customer reviews to showcase. For now, what you can do to bring your social proof to your store is by simply showing recent on-site activities done by other shoppers.
For example, you can show the number of people currently browsing a product. This will signal a potential customer that he/she is not the only one looking at the item.
Sales Pop allows you to automatically sync your eCommerce store’s on-site activities to let you showcase recent browsing behavior or notify other people of recent sales. This will help undecided buyers to buy from your store with trust and confidence.
8. Convert abandoning shoppers with last-minute deals
7 in every 10 visitors have abandoned their shopping carts. This high cart abandonment is a huge detriment to your conversion. Don’t let your traffic go to waste. Make sure that you salvage these abandoning visitors with enticing last-minute offers.
You can use exit-intent technology to track visitors’ behavior when they’re about to abandon a cart. Once it detects visitors of closing the exit button, a popup message will immediately appear. This will momentarily catch your visitors’ attention. Within your popup message, make sure to include a last-minute deal that will entice them to continue their purchase immediately.
Checkout Boost has exit-intent technology that will help you display last-minute offers to motivate your abandoning shoppers to continue their transaction.
9. Add a countdown timer to your promotions to convert customers faster
37% of customers reported that they were just browsing and not ready to buy yet. In fact, even if you provide huge discounts and enticing promotions, your visitors will still delay their purchase. This is because 94% of online customers won’t buy until they find the cheapest price possible.
However, if you add some serious time pressure, their decision-making process becomes a lot easier and faster. Online stores offering discounts and promotions should add time pressure such as setting an expiry date.
You can also add a countdown timer to your promotions. This will help increase your customers’ sense of urgency. If customers know that they have a limited time, they will be motivated to make a purchase decision quicker.
To drive your customers more closely to conversion, the Countdown Cart. will help you display a countdown timer of your product page.
10. Write guides or tutorials to highlight your products
Content marketing is another effective way for your long term conversion strategy. You can produce and distribute different contents for various marketing objectives such as traffic or sales generation. But, if you want to use your content to boost conversion, write something that will showcase your products.
Writing guides or tutorials will not only help your potential customers with their day-to-day dilemma, but you could also use them as a means to promote your products. For example, you can start a makeup tutorial which subsequently highlights your own makeup products.
A perfect example is Birchbox’s “How-to Stories”, a blog of makeup and skincare tutorials to help their potential customers on their makeup and skincare problems. These tutorials always feature their products to drive their readers to conversion.
Boost your conversions
It takes mastery and skill to have a successful online store. For budding entrepreneurs like you, launching your online store doesn’t end with creating a website and getting traffic. A crucial component to your success is knowing how to boost conversions.
Achieving a highly converting online store starts by making sure that your potential customers can easily find the perfect products that they’re looking for. Optimizing your product page is also a conversion driver. Plus, you also need to make it convenient for them to purchase through a seamless and simple checkout process.
When you’re ready to expand your eCommerce business, we’ve also written an amazing Conversion Best Practice Checklist to make sure you’ve got everything covered and planned for. Leave your email in the box below to download the checklist!
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