Turning visitors to your site into customers is key to commercial success, says Andrea Manning of Virgin Media

If you run an online retail store, conversion rate is the number one metric you should focus on. Your conversion rate is the percentage of all visits to your website that produce the desired action or conversion. For an e-commerce retailer, the most desired conversion is a purchase.

Many e-commerce retailers get their site live, see it’s working, breathe a big sigh of relief and relax. But there are always improvements to be made to make it easier for people to convert on your website, lifting your conversion rate and significantly boosting your revenue.

What is a good conversion rate?

As lockdown starts to lift, we know that online revenue and traffic for retailers is starting to decrease, so now is the time to add value to your business by optimising conversion.

As a pre-Covid baseline, according to Wolfgang Digital’s 2020 study of digital marketing KPIs , a conversion rate of 1.8% was considered standard for online retailers.

What impact does conversion rate have on revenue?

Starting from an average order value of €100, if your monthly traffic starts to drop, improving your conversion rate only slightly can make up for the loss of traffic.

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If we look at traffic of 30,000 sessions a month and a conversion rate of 1% that equates to revenue of €30,000 monthly. But if traffic decreases to 25,000 sessions and we improve conversion slightly to 1.25% we’ve already made up the revenue from those missing 5,000 sessions. You can use this approach to measure your own metrics and to see what impact even a small increase in conversion rate can mean in terms of revenue.

Here are eight proven tips to improve your conversion rate.

1. Highlight delivery and returns policy on the homepage
The homepage is often the first touch point for your new customers. Highlighting your delivery options, delivery costs, returns policy and any discounts you offer right here saves your customer the hassle of having to search for them.

Delivery costs are one of the main reasons for carts being abandoned, so stating these costs upfront before the customer begins the purchase process may prevent them from dropping off when they see the additional delivery costs in the checkout.

2. Improve your website speed
Website speed can be the difference between a customer shopping on your site or one of your competitors. It’s estimated that 70% of users will leave a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. 

In a recent study, a 0.1 second improvement resulted in an 8% increase in conversion rate for retail sites and a 10% increase for travel sites.

3. Invest in quality product images 
Product pages are the virtual shop windows to showcase your products. With 55% of visitors spending less than 15 seconds on any given web page, it’s critical to catch your visitor’s attention within those first few seconds.

Your images should be high quality on any screen resolution, should show the product from multiple angles and also in context. People love to envision themselves wearing or using a product, so helping them paint that picture is key to encouraging them to purchase.

4. Give detailed product descriptions
Your product descriptions should focus on its unique value proposition — what sets your product apart from its competitors?

Your product description should focus on the benefits, not just the features — you have to emphasise the result, not just the product. 

Ideally, the description should be a combination of a short, easy-to-read summary and a longer product description for more engaged customers. Be sure to make text scannable and digestible. Add as many details and specifications to the longer description as possible, so that no questions go unanswered.

5. Allow customers to chat with you in real-time
Phone support and e-mail have traditionally been the most common techniques used by e-commerce websites to assist their customers. Today’s customers expect more and conversational commerce, such as live chat, is enabling customers to engage with sales support in real-time without having to leave the page. 

According to Forester research, live chat is about 17-30% cheaper for businesses to manage than phone calls. Live chat enables a trained agent to attend to many customers at the same time, saving the company a significant amount in staff costs needed for phone support. And the American Marketing Association says websites that use live chat have conversion rates that are 20% higher than websites without live chat.

6. Clearly display all relevant information
Cart abandonment can be as high as 70% and the basket stage is the most common drop-off point. To discourage this, it’s essential to display all the relevant information, so users don’t need to go back and check on any details.

Don’t forget to include:

• Product thumbnails (large enough to see the product clearly)
• Product name (especially important if you sell similar products)
• Size (extremely important for fashion, clothes and so on)
• Colour (one of the leading factors behind product returns)
• Specifications (e.g power, capacity, memory, features…)
• Quantity (allow them to edit the quantity in the basket)
• Reassure customers with trust seals

It’s estimated that 18% of shoppers don’t purchase because they are concerned about security according to Baymard Institute. Trust seals and reassurance can help give users the extra push to press that ‘Pay Now’ button.

Including security badges on your checkout is a proven method to instil confidence and reduce cart abandonment. It’s also important to reassure shoppers that their personal information is protected. Even the largest, most trusted brands can benefit from labelling buttons with the words ‘secure checkout’. 

8. Provide an express checkout option
Consumers expect your online store will offer more than one method of payment and up to 50% of regular shoppers would cancel their purchase if their favourite payment method isn’t available. 

Retailers providing payment methods such as PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay or Stripe are excelling at mobile conversions, allowing customers to bypass the traditional credit or debit card checkout.

By using PayPal or another trusted payment method to cut to the chase and placing ‘Checkout with X’ on the payment page, you allow customers to skip typing in shipping and billing information and dramatically reduce the cart abandonment rate for mobile customers. Offering this option as part of a guest checkout option can also help to increase conversions, by up to 2.5% according to one study.

Use these tips as a checklist to make your online store focused on converting more customers and getting ahead of your competitors.

Once you’ve pinpointed the main issues that may be causing a drop in conversions, take the time to fix them one by one, leaving everything else as is. 

Once you’ve resolved the issue, you can move onto the next area of improvement — and keep on going until you’ve created a well-oiled, conversion-generating website.

• Virgin Media is hosting a webinar with John Maher on August 21 on how to accelerate digital sales. Register here.