2019 is just around the corner, and we are pretty sure you are working super hard to take your e-commerce Store experience up a notch.
But despite all the groundwork, we presume that conversion rate optimization (CRO) continues to be Achilles’ heel. Why? Is it really that difficult? Technically, no, but you need to really work at it to see noticeable improvements.
In this article, we will see 7 CRO tactics that would boost your conversion rate and skyrocket your e-commerce sales in 2019.
1. Reward Loyalty
Your customers are your greatest assets; therefore, companies that are good at delivering excellent customer experience have a high customer retention rate. In fact, according to an article by HBR, acquiring a new customer is 5-25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. Furthermore, if you successfully increase customer retention rates by 5%, your profits rise up by 25-95%.
Offering exclusive discounts and offers to your existing customers is a great way to reward customer loyalty. You can do it by promoting these offers through emails, running social media ads for your email list and through remarketing campaigns.
Another effective way to promote customer retention is by offering exclusive coupon codes and referral discounts. Referral discounts is a proven way to increase sales while reducing customer acquisition cost.
2. Highlight Discounts and Offers
Buyers visit multiple websites before zeroing down on a particular store to complete the purchase. They will always prefer stores that offer competitive prices and provide top-notch customer service. With the e-commerce industry being saturated with so many companies, you need to deliver something unique that compels the shoppers to buy from you.
Showcasing discounts and offers on the homepage carousel is a surefire way to attract your visitors’ attention and nudge them to explore your store further.
In the following example, the carousel prominently highlights the Buy One, Get One sale on their homepage followed by the Shop Now CTA. The website also features a banner at the top of the webpage featuring the same offer.
3. Install Live Chat On Your Website
Since products on e-commerce stores are not tangible, no matter how well you describe them or put up high-res product images, your buyers are still going to have queries about them. Being able to resolve any product query they might have as soon as it occurs will definitely reduce any hesitation and increase the chances of completing the purchase.
To accommodate this, you can install a live chat application such as Olark, LiveChat, Acquire, or Zendesk on your website. Customers can use this interface to ask any product or service related question, and you can provide answers right away. One major benefit of live chat is that you can interact with your customers in real time as opposed to email which causes a bit of lag in response time due to the shortcomings of the medium.
The only concern you need to take care of is to allocate sufficient people to live chat so that the response time is not delayed, defeating the purpose of the cause.
4. Hop on the Bandwagon of Conversational Commerce
Conversation has been foundational to the commerce trade from the time of the barter system. Technology has evolved rapidly in recent times changing how we interact with each other. The term conversational commerce was coined by Chris Messina (Inventor of hashtags and then Developer Experience Lead at Uber) in a 2016 blog post. He defines the term as,
“Conversational commerce (as I see it) largely pertains to utilizing chat, messaging, or other natural language interfaces (i.e. voice) to interact with people, brands, or services and bots that heretofore have had no real place in the bidirectional, asynchronous messaging context.”
Two of the biggest applications of conversational commerce e-commerce store owners can benefit from are chatbots and voice search.
Chatbots
Chatbots have been an enormous time saver for the customer service department. Powered by AI and machine learning technology, chatbots keep getting smarter with every interaction. Chatbots are capable of answering basic customer queries allowing the customer service executives to focus on more complex queries.
Along with websites, chatbots are also available on messaging apps. Since the number of messaging app users has already outnumbered the social media users, chatbots are going to see a massive spike in their adoption.
You can integrate chatbots with messaging apps and keep your shoppers informed on order shipping and delivery, seek feedback, initiate returns if required and find cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
Voice Search
ComScore has predicted that by 2020, 50% of the searches are going to be voice searches. This brings a perfect opportunity for e-commerce store owners to optimize their website content around voice search queries. Although e-commerce store owners have to compete against Amazon Echo, they can carve their niche by creating content around Google’s micro-moments especially for I want to buy moments.
5. Make Customer Experience (CX) Your Top Priority
2019 is the year when brands need to prioritize customer experience. Delivering a top-notch customer experience means providing a positive experience to the buyer throughout they purchase journey and beyond. Here are 2 ways in which you can offer a fantastic customer experience to your shoppers:
Make Important Information Easy to Find
Don’t let your visitors sweat to locate important information such as contact information, chat option, order tracking, shipping and returns policy, etc.
Zappos does a brilliant job by placing links to the important information at the top:
Offer Free Shipping
Reiterating the point of e-commerce market saturated with fierce competition to convey the importance of standing out in the crowd. If you are not giving something unique, shoppers have plenty of other stores to buy from. Offering free shipping is a great way to get the necessary edge in the game.
Of course, if it is not entirely feasible, establish a bare minimum purchase amount to qualify for free shipping.
6.Provide Data Security Assurance
Shoppers these days are really worried when it comes to giving their banking/payment details due to incidents of data breach. This is a legitimate reason to worry, and it’s your responsibility to assure your shoppers about keeping their data secure. Here are a few ways in which you can emphasize data security on your website:
- Install SSL across your site and accentuate it specifically during checkout
- Display logos of all the payment institutions that you accept on your website
- Show security badges in the footer section of your website
7. Use Recommender Engines
In the age of personalization, every e-commerce website is trying to deliver sophisticated personalized services through their websites and emails. Using recommender systems on your website gives you immense opportunities to upsell and cross-sell products.
Whenever you’re on a product page, you might have noticed a few product suggestions below product details under titles such as Frequently Bought Together. That’s recommender engines in action. They give you an opportunity to personalize the user experience based on their purchase history and enhances the overall CX. Here’s an example by Amazon:
Wrapping Up
2019 is the year when e-commerce companies will have to rise to the challenge. These 7 CRO tactics are a bit different from the traditional tactics and will require you to invest a significant amount of effort in each of them, but the return will certainly be worth it. Start small and gradually build-up on each tactic.
The post 7 CRO Tactics to Boost Your E-Commerce Sales in 2019 appeared first on HumCommerce.
