Festivals are an auspicious occasion when many online stores offer something new to their customers. Being an owner of your online store, you might be always thinking about boosting your website traffic and conversions. You might be trying out different strategies to increase the sales but it can still be challenging to decide on the marketing tactics that will work for you.
Did you know that the eCommerce industry has been growing rapidly since past few years? The marketing experts predict that it will hit a global revenue count of $4.88 trillion by 2021.
It’s 2019 and is the time to think about how you can boost your eCommerce conversion rates for keeping your eCommerce business ahead in the competition in the coming years.
The real thing is that you can’t wait for conversions to happen automatically. There is some type of optimization required for them. Only driving more traffic won’t be helping. You will also need to think upon getting more sales from the traffic.
The world is getting digitalized rapidly and so, there are some things that you can do for motivating customers to react as well as engage with your business. May you be a beginner in the online business world or a marketing head of your business, you will need to be skilled in the latest eCommerce trends.
Dive deep into the 15 ways to boost your eCommerce conversion rate for 2019 and beyond!
Let’s set the road to your success!
Wait, Do You Know About Conversion Rates?
Are you wondering what am I talking about? Let’s take a look on conversion rates and the examples of it.
In simple words, the conversion rate is the percent of visitors on your website or landing pages that convert.
Conversion can have different meanings based on your business goals. Below are some of the examples which can be called as conversions when a customer:
- Makes a purchase.
- Slides into your DMs
- Adds an item to a wish-list.
- Starts an online chat.
- Signs up for a subscription.
- Downloads content.
- Participates in a poll and or survey.
- Upgrades services or products.
- Leaves comments.
- Shares content.
- Uses a sale code.
- Any KPI your company finds valuable.
You will find several ways through which potential customers can engage as well as get converted on your site. Basically, you can measure conversions and those display the progress of the potential customer towards purchase.
Steps to Calculate the Conversion on Your Website
It’s very easy to calculate the conversions, I guarantee.
You simply need to divide the number of conversions you get for a certain time frame by the total number of people who visited your site or landing page and multiply it by 100.
(Conversions / Total Visitors) X 100% = Conversion Rate %
For example, if you get 10,000 visitors to your site in one month and have 4,320 conversions, your conversion rate is 43.2%.
That’s so easy right?
Related: Tips to Increase Sales Conversion Rate with Few Actions
Top 10 Ways to Boost Your eCommerce Sales this Festive Season
1. Help People to Get the Needs Completed
This is the simplest thing to start with on your website. There are several businesses which struggle to have clear calls to action (CTAs) on their homepage and other places.
No matter, it is not having a call to action or having too many CTAs, even the wrong CTA approach can lead to confusion for your potential customers. What if your site visitors need to put stress on their brains to find out your business purpose or who you are and what they need to do with you? This might lead to missing of sales opportunities.
It is important to have a clear CTA that people can find within 3 seconds. People’s attention span is very short. Also, when it comes to websites, you have very little time to gain their attention and for them to take action.
So, typically for any eCommerce, one type of CTA per page is a must in the below form:
- Add to shopping cart
- Checkout now
- Buy now
- Access/Redeem coupon code
Just 4% of the site visitors convert on first visit based on the website and other 96% might return to purchase on some other website in the future or not return ever. Hence, it is important to have a clear and easy CTA for those 4% of visitors who are sure to purchase your product on their first try.
The first three seconds of a visitor are important after landing on a page as here he or she gets what the one was searching for. CTAs should have the ability to enhance the product pages to expand the conversion potential within these three seconds.
2. Run a Short Time Offer
Have you ever came through a limited time offer? You might have purchased the product quickly prior to the time gets over. Same is the case with your potential customers.
Build a limited period offer on your landing pages as it will prove to be effective to push the prospects that are hesitant and convert them. You can do it via setting up the countdown timers that will let the customers know the exact time left for the offer or you can even design the banners for promoting specific offers such discounts and free shipping.
3. Reduce Abandoned Carts
It’s a harsh truth that you will keep losing money every time visitors abandon their cart without making a purchase.
Many times visitors add items to their carts but don’t complete the checkout process. As per the research, 69.23% of shopping carts are abandoned.
It is always better to directly address the hesitations the maximum you can, because sometimes the shoppers who abandon their carts get a reminder to complete their purchase from the online store. Maybe you can convince them to buy by offering a discount or free shipping, for instance.
I have a simple and effective eCommerce marketing idea and that is decreasing the frequency of abandoned carts which will help to recover an email recovery campaign. This will encourage your visitors to revisit and complete their previous purchase.
Related: Best 5 Shopping Cart Software To Run eCommerce Website
4. Get People Talking
Get the social proof for your brand. For being successful on your eCommerce website, you will need to have a social proof somewhere.
You shouldn’t be surprised to learn that 63% of customers first check the user reviews and then select a store for purchase.
Why should I do that? This is because it displays that you and your offers are trustworthy. If you do it in a right way, it can make a huge difference to your business. Testimonials and reviews are the best and simplest way for adding social proof on eCommerce website. As per the research by some marketing firms, customer reviews help in increasing the sales by 18%.
Being a business owner, you need to include the user rating, comments, photos, etc. on your products pages but also, include customer testimonials on your page somewhere else so that the visitors move to the cart.
After the visitors confirm that your product is appreciated by other buyers then you are the king! The seal of approval helps people to feel more at ease, highly confident and so, they are likely to buy the product.
5. Offer Free Shipping
Since it’s a festive day, you can offer free shipping on that day or maybe extend it from 3-5 days. Amazon, the big shopping brand has made people habitual of free shipping and therefore, they have started expecting that from other stores too.
If you apply shipping charges, customers are more likely to visit another store. So, remember free shipping is a must.
Also, see to it that the orders get delivered as quickly as possible.
6. Love Yourself Some Discount Codes
What if you get a coupon while shopping online? You make sure that it gets applied, so that, you get some discounts. It means all of you love coupon codes and so, do your visitors. Hence, don’t miss to offer coupons to your customers to let them save discounts at least during holidays.
E-Commerce businesses that use discount codes get the benefits because those:
- Improve customer happiness and shopper’s loyalty.
- Support new customer acquisition.
- Promote newly-launched products and less sold products.
- Offload excess inventory.
So, may it be the holidays, a new product launch or just for the heck of it, you should include promos are a must! You can create discount codes successful by offering limited time discounts as it creates an emergency and forces shoppers to go through with the purchase and not get distracted.
Some codes that you can consider are:
- Cash for credit.
- Free offers.
- Referral programs.
- Instant discounts at checkout.
- Gifts with purchases (freebies).
- Buy one get one free.
- Post purchase discounts.
7. Let Customers Check Out as Guests
The next important factor after apart from creating a simple checkout process is allowing customers to checkout without the sign up process.
But prior to doubting this, you should go through your personal experiences. There are many of us who might fear to mention their names, address, credit card information, etc. just to avoid getting those spam emails.
If you force the users to register, you are giving another reason for them to leave your store. But if you make the things easier, people will remember you as you made their shopping easy and will surely return to your store for their next shopping.
8. Focus on Technical Issues
Check if your online store is working well. It shouldn’t take more than a second to load the website. Since festivals are a special occasion, visitors are in a hurry to buy the product. So, they expect your website to load faster.
In case, visitors get an error such as 404 not found or if your website takes a long time to load, they would turn to your competitors. This means you will lose your sales. So, be alert for the technical issues on your website and ensure that it offers good speed, security, mobile optimization, etc. Your website needs to load properly on smartphones and other devices as people are more used to them.
Online sales are at highest peak during festivals as site security is important to boost customer confidence.
9. Tempt Customers by Displaying Attractive Products
Have you ended up getting doozies while buying things online? No, but I have. The products that I purchased online have always found to be ultimate.
There are several stores that sell stuff online, but those can’t guarantee quality product. This is one of the reasons that people doubt while buying stuff online. Therefore, you need to inform people and offer such a comfort that they will click on the “Buy” button.
Your products’ uniqueness and brand’s trustworthiness is many times judged by the quality of your visual content. It means you should post the high-quality and beautiful product photos to drive more sales for your business.
Think about your reaction when you might have came across a bad or low quality product photo, and then decide on the display of products.
10. Build Long Term Customer Relationships
Festive seasons or days bring plentiful of opportunities for the online retailers for earning profits. Many do try hard to create an excitement about their brand by promoting offers and discounts on social media. The big brands such as Amazon, Flipkart, etc. have already built a large customer-base so, they don’t need to think on the customer relationship maintenance.
But as your business is small or not competitive with such giant online retailers, your main focus should be on maintaining a friendly relationship with customers. So, do keep a watch on your customer requirements. Also, track your reviews and see to it that you convert the negative reviews into positive by getting the customers’ issues solved.
Turn your customers’ experience into a long-term relationship.
Last But Not the Least
Finally, coming to the end of the article, I would say that getting yourself ready for the festive season won’t be so hard, if you keep customer satisfaction as your top priority. Simply staying focused and organized will help you to a great extent. Also, the tips mentioned here will help you a lot in boosting your online sales easily.
Have a great festive year ahead!
