There are more brands than ever before that are investing in advertisements. According to Statista, digital advertising expenditures in the United States will increase by approximately 83 percent between 2019 and 2024. In other words, digital ad spending will grow from 132.46 to 242.8 billion dollars.
The question is whether Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), who have less financial capacity, can afford these paid advertisements and catch up with the big brands?
This isn’t something to be worried about as there is another cost-effective way in which these businesses can increase revenue per visitor and also acquire more customers. That is by increasing the conversion rate for their Shopify stores. Around 68% of small businesses fail to develop a comprehensive conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy.
So the question is how to develop a winning strategy?
Check out the strategies mentioned in the article to wisely improve your conversion rate!
Table of Contents
What is conversion rate? How is it measured?
Before we talk about the tips and tricks, we first need to develop a clear understanding of what exactly is conversion rate and how to measure it.
A conversion rate is the percentage of those unique visitors who have bought something from your store.
Note that the metric is only used for unique visitors and NOT for repeat ones. This is to make sure the data is accurate.
To calculate the number of conversions, divide the number of conversions by the total number of visitors to the e-commerce store in a fixed time period. Multiplying it by 100 will give you the conversion rate.
Conversion rate = (conversions / total visitors) * 100%
As a Shopify store owner, you can easily find the conversion rate and save time. Just click on the “Analytics” tab in the left sidebar from the view of Shopify admin.
You will then land on a page where you can see different statistics related to your store, I.e., total sales, online store sessions, returning customer rate, etc. By scrolling down a bit, you can see the “online store conversion rate.”
If your conversion rate doesn’t meet your expectation, the other metrics (such as returning customer rate, average order value,…) in the analytics might be helpful in understanding the reason behind low conversions and to give you an idea of how you can increase it.
4 Tips on increasing conversion rates for Shopify Stores
1. Optimize for mobile commerce
In 2021, 53.9 percent of all retail e-commerce is expected to be generated via m-commerce in the USA”, Statista. This speaks volumes about the importance of optimizing your Shopify store for mobile phones
Mobile optimization encompasses a lot of things. First and foremost, you must ensure that the website loads on mobile devices in the least possible time. No matter how good your Shopify store is, if it takes a lot of time to load, visitors won’t hesitate to shift to another one to look for their favorite products.
Additionally, the layout of the website needs to be mobile-friendly, I.e., the text and images must be clearly visible. Most importantly, the buttons should have enough space between them.
This will ensure that the visitor doesn’t accidentally click on it, which is a common problem for mobile phone visitors.
2. Create personalized offers
This is one of the best ways to increase the conversion rate. Personalized or targeted offers often work better than not. There are multiple ways to do so.
You could create bundled offers for your customers or cross-sell. These offers can be placed anywhere on your Shopify store. However, if you want this strategy to give the best return, consider placing these offers whenever a visitor adds a product to the cart or when he is abandoning it.
Creating personalized offers means you’re providing a better shopping experience. It will also help in optimizing the call to action for the Shopify store. Check out the 5 tips on how you should provide a personalized shopping experience. In addition, to add icing to the cake, use Shopify remarketing apps to reach out to customers who visited your store but left without purchasing anything. Remarketing is another quick way to increase the conversion rate.
3. Grow your customer base by blogging
It is estimated that there are more than 500 million blogs in the world.
As such, you might be wondering whether or not it is worth putting effort into a blog? Let us share an important statistic in this regard.
60% of customers said that blogs played a significant role in their decision-making journey.
Do you still doubt the power of blogging?
A blog can be used in multiple ways to increase the conversion rate. You can create a basic troubleshooting guide for the common problems that customers might face while using your product or service.
Additionally, you can invite guest bloggers related to your industry and ask them to share their views of the current problems that the industry is facing. One of the important things for a business to gain credibility and trust is to form good relations in the industry.
A guest post will allow you to do exactly that. The credibility will then go a long way in increasing the conversion rate of your Shopify store.
One important thing that you should keep in mind while using blogs is not to focus all of your content on marketing your products. Instead, as we mentioned in the guest blogger’s part, you should also talk generally about your industry or e-commerce.
Otherwise, people will deem your content too salesly or pushy, significantly reducing the blog views.
Remember, the ultimate purpose of starting a blog should be to provide value to the customer, rather than to solely talk about the benefits of your product/service.
4. Optimize the checkout page
Keeping your e-commerce store simple is one of the basic things you can do to increase conversion. Ask any UX designer, and he would tell you that a simple store has much higher chances of conversion than a fancy one with lots of navigational paths.
In fact, research by Marketing Experiments witnessed a 681% increase in conversion by just reducing a two-column website into a single column.
As simple as that!
Therefore, perform a thorough audit of your checkout page to find out any obstacles that might be preventing the visitors from clicking the “buy now” button.
The audit must be performed on the complete website, but special attention should be given to the checkout page.
You can also use Google Analytics to find out which pages are having a high bounce rate and then work on improving them.
Google Analytics provides a number of other statistics that you can use to improve the performance of your Shopify store.
Don’t forget to explore them!
Top 3 benefits of improving conversion rate for Shopify Store
Now that you know the tips and tricks to increase the conversion rate for your Shopify store, you might be wondering why I should put in the effort to improve it?
Why not use paid ads instead?
Well, the fact is that paid ads can only bring in traffic to your website. It does not guarantee sales.
In order to increase the chances of sales, you need to couple the paid ads and other marketing tactics with the four steps we mentioned above.
The biggest benefit of increasing conversion rate is increased sales per visitor. In addition, it comes with other benefits as well, which are as follows.
1. Reduced cost per acquisition
This refers to the cost it takes to acquire a customer. This cost could be the paid ads you are running, the cost of running a blog, or any other marketing expense.
As you have more visitors converting into customers than those who leave without purchasing anything, the cost of acquiring a customer reduces significantly. So does your marketing budget.
3. Improvement in search engine ranking
According to Bright Edge, 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search. Therefore, if you are not investing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and not appearing organically in the top 10 results, you are missing a huge chunk of traffic.
Among various SEO factors, user experience is one of the most important ones. When you work on different factors to increase conversion rate, you are improving the overall customer experience and reducing the bounce rate.
These two things also improve your Shopify stores ranking in search results.
That’s like killing two birds with one stone.
3. Increase customer lifetime value (CLV)
Again, this is a very important metric that every business (whether physical or online) strives to achieve.
In simple terms, CLV refers to the total amount of money a customer buys the products/services of your business during their lifetime.
For example, you run a fashion e-commerce store and a customer spends $8000 over his lifetime. This figure is called CLV. A CLV refers to the value a customer brings into the business over the life of the business. When you work on increasing conversion rate, you are basically addressing different pain points of the customer, which ultimately increases their engagement and the money they spend for your business.
Conclusion
Tip #1: Keep iterating to increase conversion rate for Shopify store
Increasing conversion rate is not a one-time job. You should keep working on it throughout the lifetime of your business.
Keep publishing blogs every week, create personalized offers from time to time and work on optimizing the checkout page every time you feel there is room for improvement, among other things.
There is a chance that things might not work the first time. For example, the first few blogs might not bring in a lot of traffic, or the first time you optimize the checkout page might not seem to be beneficial.
However, keep iterating and trying different tactics. Maybe you could add more value to the blogs by increasing their word count or optimize the checkout page in a different manner.
Keep trying, and things will definitely improve.
Looking for a Shopify expert to increase conversion rate by optimizing your store? Let’s get in touch with HappyPoints, we are happy to answer your inquiries or questions at any time!
