Insights
Head of CRO
CRO
If you’re getting more traffic than ever, but online revenue still isn’t where it needs to be, it’s time to look at Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO). CRO removes barriers to conversion, reducing the likelihood that a user will abandon your website without making a purchase, or completing a different action depending on your website’s goal.
CRO can add value to all other digital marketing efforts by turning visits into conversions. It is a great way to boost your ROI for each stream of activity, grow online revenue and increase profitability.
In this blog, we run through ten conversion rate optimisation features that can be added or optimised on your website, with the goal of improving your overall conversion rate.
Is there anything as frustrating as a customer who gets all the way to check out, and then abandons the cart at the very last minute? We doubt it. One of the ways CRO can help reduce the number of visitors doing this is by removing unnecessary navigation links on the checkout pages.
These links serve as a distraction and the more links available, the more likely it is that someone will click on one and leave the checkout. They might come back and continue their purchase, but they may not. By removing links that are not necessary, you make it less likely for users to leave a page before they’ve completed a purchase.
For a user, filling in a form and getting all the way to ‘submit’, only to be told at that point that part of the form is invalid is frustrating. Worse still if the user then has to scroll all the way through the form to check which field is wrong.
A way conversion rate optimisation can help to avoid this happening is adding in positive and negative validation. This increases visitor confidence and improves the rate visitors recover from an error in the form. This means by the time users read the ‘submit’ button, they are able to go straight through to the next page and making it more likely they will continue with their purchase.
Messages of urgency can influence visitors into taking action, rather than going away and thinking about their decision. There are several ways you can use urgency messaging in the product pages:
As consumers cannot assess if a product is suitable for their needs, like they can in a physical store, shopping online can pose risks. But being able to picture your products effectively can increase the likelihood customers will buy. So, utilising lifestyle imagery alongside high-res product shots can help people envision how products might fit their own lifestyle.
Product reviews are another way of helping your customers decide whether something is right for them and having positive reviews can build trust in both the website and the product.
Hosting the reviews within the product page means visitors have no need to leave and head to external review sites, where they could easily get distracted and never come back.
Being met with unexpected shipping costs at the checkout can cause visitors to leave without finishing their purchase. By being transparent about shipping options from the start, for example by pulling in shipping information onto the product pages, you can relieve customer anxiety about unexpected costs and ensure that they know exactly what they can expect to pay from the beginning.
Search filters improve a website’s usability and make it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for quickly and efficiently. Without a search function, consumers are required to manually look through the website, often to no avail; this may cause your visitors to get frustrated and leave your site in favour of a competitor with search filters.
Adding in a detailed search filter functionality is a fail-safe way of improving the user experience. By making it easier to find the product, you make it easier for them to buy the product.
Giving visitors the option to add products to a Wishlist is a great way of encouraging visitors to stay on site for longer and return to the site at a later date, particularly if they’re currently in the awareness and consideration phase of their journey.
It also means that products they are interested in are easily accessible when they want to make a purchase.
Ecommerce USPs are a great way for businesses to communicate value to their visitor; having a sitewide banner or promotion displaying these USPs ensures your website visitors can easily identify them, no matter how deep within a site structure your visitor is.
This is particularly important for traffic which lands directly on a landing page, as they may not be aware of your brand’s differentiators if they are predominantly mentioned on your website’s homepages.
Single page checkouts can improve conversion rates for desktop visitors but translate poorly to mobile devices, appearing as an extremely long page that requires a lot of scrolling. Testing on all devices is essential when deciding whether to go for single or multi page checkout, to ensure that your page is optimised for all visitors.
Want to drive experimentation and growth through CRO?Stream our on-demand webinar with Optimizely
Insights
Insights
Insights