It’s hard work to seal the deal.
Actually, everything up to sealing the deal and making an e-commerce sale is hard work – gaining your ideal customer’s awareness, cultivating their interest, and showing them all the differentiators that make you the right choice
You’ve poured your resources and energy into advancing the relationship this far. Don’t you want to make sure you can finalize and convert your site visitors from browsers to buyers?
We want to make sure you get the sale also, so we’ve put together some of the top conversion rate optimization trends we’re seeing, along with some tips on how to leverage them on your site.
1. Hone In On Prospects With Ultra-Targeted Messaging And Personalization
More than 2.5 quintillion pieces of data are produced daily – trackable information that comes from millions of consumer interactions.
When you have access to a wealth of information specifically about what your prospects want, what attracts them, what keeps their attention – you need to use it! This is why first-party data is such an important part of effective online personalization.
While most companies are doing some level of personalization, you can take it and your conversion rates to the next level. You can deepen connections and expand the opportunity for engagement by implementing more advanced rules and creating specific touchpoints that can be applied across a wide variety of very specific behaviors.
Build campaigns that use a variety of different rules to analyze your data and to group customers with similar preferences and propensities. Customers who are using a desktop computer might be more likely to interact with center pop-ups, for example, while mobile users might be more likely to add to cart additional recommended products and increase their overall spend with you. You’ll have to A/B test your audiences to find the winning combination for every segment.
When customers feel like you know them and you understand what they want, they’re more likely to stay engaged. They move more seamlessly through the buying process, and they’re more likely to convert and remain loyal.
2. Take All The Feedback You Can Get (And Use It!)
When a customer has a bad experience, they’re not always vocal. Most of the time, they just walk away.
Only about four percent of customers take time to submit a complaint, even though they’re obviously experiencing strong enough feelings to make changes and start looking elsewhere for services.
What does that mean for prospects? Because people have short attention spans, particularly when using technology, even a small roadblock can push them out of the buyer journey and leave you with no understanding of why they chose not to convert.
If that sounds discouraging, there’s some good news, though. Technology has made it much easier to gather specific pieces of customer feedback.
Instead of asking consumers to come in for a focus group or sending out lengthy surveys to collect feedback, you have the opportunity to capture their views with quick surveys on everything from net promoter scores to how easy or difficult the site is to use. Questions can be easily incorporated into their experience through features like pop-ups or even through automated SMS flows.
And, they can be designed to be very non-intrusive, taking mere seconds to answer yet providing valuable feedback about what your buyers are considering, the quality of their experience, or the reasons they chose to abandon their purchase.
You can also gather feedback through more subtle means, like tracking a user’s pathway through your site. When you know the pages they visit and which portions of the site are most useful to them, you can re-shape the way they move through your content and apply the right, personalized encouragement to get them to the finish line.
Some options for managing this tracking process include:
- Using analytic data to find bounces and assess the value of certain pages or pieces of content in the buyer journey
- Installing a lightweight heatmapping tool to see where people are clicking through on key pages
- Conducting A/B testing to consider large-scale changes to your processes
- Conducting multivariate testing to optimize and fine-tune key pieces of the buyer journey
- Adding point-of-sale offers or exit offers and tracking how successfully they convert (learn more about how one client increased their conversion rate by 187% using this tactic!)
3. Surprise And Delight
Going back to the idea of personalization, people love when they feel like they’re more than a number. They know you can access their data and they’re okay with it when you use it for something that benefits them.
In fact, they’re more than okay with it. 71 percent of buyers expect a more personalized experience from the online providers with whom they interact.
Through gamification, you can also surprise and delight your prospects, and increase their propensity to engage with you. For example, consumers may view a traditional opt-in box with suspicion or simply an annoying interruption even when offered a discount or freebie.
Add a spin-to-win or other interactive game, and you’re far more likely to move people through the process and gain their continued interaction. Give them a little opportunity to feel connected to you, or to feel like they’re missing out if they leave the site, and you have the potential to boost your conversion rates significantly (often to double-digit levels!).
Gamified promotions aren’t a fit for every brand, but are a great opportunity to bring fun and customization into your onsite marketing, for a memorable first impression.
4. Meet/Exceed Expectations Of Speed And Efficiency
Having a technically solid site will always be on-trend. Even if you have a great product and a great marketing funnel, bad technology can still prevent a conversion from happening.
Dedicate some time and resources to an audit of your site, including:
- Ensuring optimal load times
- Assessing how easy the site is to navigate (a major key for CRO)
- Balancing SEO needs with the need for streamlined content that drives action
- Fine-tuning analytics tracking tools to ensure you’re capturing the most useful data
- Optimizing the buyer journey for leads who come to your site from paid ads
- Making the cart and checkout process as easy as possible
It can be mind-blowingly frustrating when buyers drop out of the process at the last minute; however, they often do so because they’re hit with something unexpected. For example, many buyers abandon their carts because they didn’t factor a high shipping cost into their purchase. Others leave because the checkout form itself is more onerous than expected.
Using payment and BNPL providers can help streamline checkouts through saved billing and shipping information, taking a four-step process to simply one or two.
Making processes faster and more efficient increases the probability that buyers will convert. And, at the minimum, no one ever decides NOT to convert because the website is just too good and too easy to use.
5. Don’t Just Sell To New Visitors
Every business wants new customers to buy their products, however, the real revenue growth comes when you have the same customers buying your products again and again.
How do you increase conversions and lifetime value from the people who already know and like your product? You add functionality and resources that take them from buyers to fans and advocates.
Personalized data and targeting can support your efforts. When you give current customers specific recommendations based on their previous interactions with your brands, you make it more likely they’ll convert again or with additional items in their cart.
In addition, when you’re able to create very specific audience segments, your messaging can highlight your appreciation or make them feel like an insider, both of which create the long-term loyalty that you want for your business.
You have prospects and customers who are interested in what you have to offer, and who’ve put in the work to learn about your offerings and shop your products. If they’re getting to the figurative last mile of their buyer journey, optimizing your conversion processes can push them over the finish line and ensure a big win for you too.
To learn more about optimizing your buyer’s experience and boosting your conversion rates at the same time, start a free trial and explore your options for conversion rate optimization with Justuno.
