Understanding eCommerce Conversion Rate Optimisation: A Comprehensive Guide

You may have a professional website, an exciting product, and a dedicated team. But if you miss opportunities to convert web visitors into paying customers, you’ll never be able to scale your eCommerce business at the rate you’d like.

Improving your conversion rates may feel like a gruelling, uphill battle at times, but with the right strategies, tools, and insights, you can easily set your company up for success.

In this article, we’ll be discussing what conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is, how you can identify areas for optimisation, and how modern solutions can help you get your CRO game plan rolling.

What is eCommerce Conversion Rate Optimisation and Why Is It Important?

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eCommerce Conversion Rate Optimisation is the process of increasing the percentage of customers who perform a desired action on your site. For most businesses, this will be purchasing a product, but it could also be signing up for a newsletter, requesting a call back, leaving a review, or even following you on social media.

*Spoiler alert*. Mastering your eCommerce conversion rate can’t be done by taking shortcuts. There are no quick fixes and copying what works for other companies often isn’t helpful. The best way to tackle e-commerce optimisation is to gain an in-depth knowledge of the people who visit your site and give them exactly what they need.

If you’re a bit of a data nut like us, you may obsessively track your conversion rates and visitor numbers – perhaps while wringing your hands in frustration. The more swept up you get in the numbers, the more disconnected you’ll become from the individuals behind each figure. CRO takes eCommerce businesses away from the numbers in favour of a more qualitative approach that considers the individual needs of each site visitor.

What is the average ecommerce conversion rate?

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Now for the maths bit. To calculate your current conversion rate and set a baseline, divide the number of current conversions you register by the total number of visitors. Then, multiply the result by 100, and you’ve got your percentage figure.

The average conversion rate for an eCommerce website is around 2.5% to 3% [1], but that doesn’t mean that this is a figure you need to be aiming for. Conversion rates will vary greatly between industries and the specific goals of your business.

Establishing Your Conversion Metrics and eCommerce Goals

As we said, there’s no fast track to turning more visitors into paying customers. To find the magic eCommerce conversion rate formula for your business, you’ll first need to take a step back and think about your long-term goals.

Your goals should be SMART; specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. When you’re realistic and relevant with the goals you are setting for your business, the chances of you achieving those goals is much higher.

Some common conversion goals for an eCommerce business include:

●     Increase product sales.

●     Increase page views and sessions.

●     Boost subscriptions to your company newsletter.

●     Gain more engaged social media followers.

●     Improve the shopping cart completion rate.

●     Increase the number of visitors adding items to their carts.

●     Lower cart abandonment rates.

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When you identify what conversion metrics are the most important to you, you can then map those goals to the customer journey. By considering what you want to achieve in line with how your shoppers traverse your site, you should be able to pinpoint roadblocks and challenges which prevent your visitors from taking the desired action. 

An appropriate eCommerce conversion rate optimisation strategy will help you to remove that friction and make it easier than ever for your site visitors to take the desired action. 

Rome wasn’t built in a day and, similarly, you can’t fix all your website problems straight away. Although there may be some low-hanging fruit that can be quickly resolved, it’s better to focus on areas of your website that generate the greatest amount of traffic. Once these are improved, you’ll notice change much faster and it will have a much larger impact on your overall business performance.

Your analytics platform will help you identify those priority pages. Use it to identify pages welcoming the highest volume of visitors, but not performing as well as you’d like in the conversion stakes. This may be your homepage or popular product pages.

For example, you may see that one of your products is getting thousands of page views but only a very small number of those people go on to actually make a purchase.

Similarly, your homepage may have a high number of visitors, but a high bounce rate, with few people moving deeper into the site. That could indicate a poor layout or internal linking – these are areas that you will want to quickly address if you want to hit your goals.

How is AI Shaping eCommerce conversion rate optimisation?

It probably won’t come as too much of a surprise to learn that AI is transforming the art of eCommerce conversion rate optimisation. AI empowers eCommerce sites to collect a larger volume of more specific customer data. No more do you need to manually scroll through lines and lines of data. Instead, AI offers deep insights into consumer behaviour in an instant. This intel can be put to use right away to inform data-driven decision making for higher conversion rates and an improved customer experience.

Considering that 50% of companies find getting accurate data for personalisation an enormous struggle, AI is a powerful tool that can streamline the process.

AI-driven tools, like QUIN, help you to quickly delve deep into datasets, detect patterns in how your customers interact with your website, and understand your customers’ preferences at every touchpoint. This advanced information is far more detailed than what a marketing team could collect themselves. It also plays a critical role in the development of personalised marketing strategies that offer prospects tailored product recommendations and other relevant content.

Not only can AI be used to collect information, but it can also be used to facilitate CRO strategies. For example, AI chatbots and virtual assistants can offer customers real-time support, at any time of the day, guiding them through the buying process and ensuring the final sale. 99% of B2B marketers already agree that chatbots increase lead conversion rates by resolving queries promptly and reducing friction without any interference from a physical person.

Efficient Testing Can Help to Create High Converting eCommerce Sites

Although it’s a nice idea to think that you can come up with an eCommerce conversion rate optimisation strategy that will solve all your problems instantly, this isn’t typically the case.

If you want to ensure the success of your optimisation efforts, efficient A/B testing will play a pivotal role. By conducting systematic A/B tests, you can try two different strategies at once.

This gives you double the insight into customer preferences, patterns, and pain points. 58% of companies are already using A/B testing for their conversion rate optimization strategies so, if you want to get ahead, it’s time to adopt the same approach.

As you go, you can iterate your strategies and refine your offering in real-time to swiftly adapt to your customer’s needs. QUIN’s smart algorithms quickly switch between different tests depending on how a customer is behaving, eliminating the guesswork around what your customer will do next.

The Future of CRO

eCommerce Conversion Rate Optimization is an important tool for any business that wants to make its mark online. With the help of cutting-edge technologies and customer-centric strategies, businesses can analyse vast amounts of data and predict consumer behaviour accurately in the blink of an eye.

If brands want to succeed in the future, personalising consumer experiences will be paramount for conversion rates. The brands that are able to deliver hyper-targeted content, tailored recommendations, and dynamic pricing will be the ones that stand out from competitors and provide frictionless transactions.

Ultimately, successful CRO efforts will require brands to be agile and on the ball when it comes to utilising emerging trends to enhance user experiences and cultivate long-lasting customer loyalty. It may seem like a long road ahead, but it’s all about continuous improvement and constantly being on the lookout for how you can improve customer experiences.

Want to start leveraging the power of AI and real-time data analysis to boost your eCommerce conversion rates today? Contact us to learn more about how Quin AI can help you understand your customers better and transform your eCommerce business.