Improve Your Conversion Rate in 36 Hours With These 4 Tips
Running an online store is hard, and there are so many things that you have to keep track of if you want to build a successful and profitable online store. You have to keep in mind the basics like
- Having a great product
- Sending the right traffic to your store
- Making sure that your website is built to convert (critical)
While all these things are equally important, improving your conversion rate is one thing that will make your return on ad spend (ROAS) and overall profitability increase. This post will cover the ways you can boost your conversion rate in 36 hours (or less) depending on how efficient you are.
We’ll cover the following techniques you can implement today to see your conversion rates soar
- Minifying your photos
- Creating better product pages
- Adding social proof
- Retargeting cart abandoners
Minifying photos
Photos and videos really sell a product online. The more photos the better and if you can have a video demo of your product, you will probably sell more items.
The problem is that these photos and videos take up SO MUCH SPACE. In fact, they take up the most space on any web page.
Why you should care..
If you have way too much data being loaded, your website load speed will suffer. You want to reduce your load speed because it is an important ranking factor for Google and other search engines and it helps with your user experience.
Google says that as page load time goes from:
- 1s to 3s the probability of bounce increases 32%
- 1s to 5s the probability of bounce increases 90%
“Optimizing images can often yield some of the largest byte savings and performance improvements for your website” — Ilya Grigorik
Better performance equals a favourable ranking and an optimized user experience!
How to solve this issue (1 to 5 hours)
There are a couple ways you can solve this issue. The tip you should use if you already have 1000s of photos on your e-commerce store and the second tip you can use going forward.
- Use a image compression service
- Only use progressive JPEGS on your website
Image compression services
If you have thousands of photos and need a quick way to compress them all, you should really consider using a service. These services are great because it costs fraction of pennies per image to reduce your file size and the cost is totally worth it.
I personally use Minifier SEO Image Optimizer on my jewelry store, Alora Boutique to reduce my images every so often. They have a Shopify app and are super easy to use. Other apps that you can use online to reduce the size of your images and improve the speed of our website are
DIY progressive JPEG images
Going forward, you will want to make sure that whatever image you upload onto your website is compressed and progressive. For example, you want to use a progressive JPEG in your blog photos and homepage photos so that your images
- Load faster
- Are more pleasing for website visitors to look at
Progressive JPEGs load blurry, but at least the whole image is visible. Unlike a baseline JPEG that loads row by row. If there is important information in your photo, it is better to have the whole image load so the user is aware of the photo than to have it load piecemeal.
Find out the technical differences between a progressive JPEG and a baseline JPEG here.
Some free tools that I like to use to reduce my images for blogs and make them progressive are
Minifying your images is a quick and easy way to improve your conversion rate because it will reduce your site load time and reduce your bounce rate!
Make your product page enticing
Product pages are the heart of any e-commerce store. People are looking to buy the amazing products that you have and most of your visitor’s time spent will be on the product page.
Why you should care..
Displaying and presenting your products in the best way possible is essential to making more sales online.
The most important thing you need to do is to make your product page highly optimized for conversions. This is an essential step in the customer buying process and you want to make it seamless.
How to solve this issue (4 to 12 hours)
The most important thing to do on the product page is answer any objections that the customer may have. You can do this with
- Quality photos
- Quality product descriptions
Let’s go through them all and how you can make them better.
Use quality photos
I won’t spend too much time on product photos because that is an entire blog post in its own, but take a look at this video so you can see the types of angles and software you should be using to nail your product photos.
Basically, your product photos should,
- Be taken with natural light
- Use multiple angles
- Showcase how the product is used in real life
You can use your phone or DSLR camera to take photos and use Canva or SnapSeed to edit them.
Remember, having all these things (and making sure they are compressed images) will help your buyer make an informed decision since they can’t see the product in real life.
Write quality product descriptions
While photos are important for your product page having a great description helps your web visitors understand exactly what they are looking at.
For example the gemstone bracelet that I mentioned in the video looks great but a customer may wonder “How big are the beads?” Adding this information to your product description will help your web visitors understand the details of your product.
Remember, your product description isn’t just about conveying dimensions, it’s also about helping your website visitor understand what scenarios they can use your product in and to be a digital salesperson.
In my product descriptions I like to include our brand story and shipping information in a tab format. Utilizing this format really helps visitors understand what the brand is about and answer any questions that they may have about shipping without having to leave the page!
Use social proof
Adding social proof to your website helps to recreate the in-store buying experience online and can take on many forms like
- Reviews and testimonials
- Recent sales pop-ups
- Customer photo walls
Why you should care..
Recreating this experience helps shoppers understand that your brand is trusted by other shoppers and that your product is worth considering.
86% of Americans look to reviews and other people’s opinions to help them make their buying decisions. If you don’t have social proof on your website, you are not building trust with your shoppers.
And let’s face it, most shoppers will trust other shoppers before they trust you.
How to solve this issue (10 mins to 2 hours)
You can solve this issue in a number of ways, depending on the products you sell.
- Add testimonials and reviews to your website
- Utilize low stock and viewer counters
- Showcase customer photos
Adding testimonials to your e-commerce store
Adding testimonials and reviews on your e-commerce store is the number one way to let customers know that you are trustworthy.
You can strategically place your testimonials on the homepage, product page, or at checkout to help shoppers gain an understanding of how others like your product.
If you are a Shopify merchant, you can take a look at this video to see how you can add testimonials to your store.
Remember, you always want to use authentic reviews. Customers can see right through fake reviews, and you don’t want your customers to lose trust in you when they find out you are trying to trick them.
If you aren’t quite sure how to gather reviews and testimonials, take a look at this post for a step by step guide to gathering good social proof.
Utilize low stock and viewer counters
Low stock and viewer counters are the ultimate mix of social proof and urgency. What is a low stock/viewer counter?
Well they are the content that you can put on your products page to show a few things like how many people
- Are viewing the product
- Have recently purchased a product
- Have the product in their cart
You can combine this with the low stock counter which will trigger when your inventory falls below a certain amount.
Not only does this increase urgency for customers but it demonstrates social proof. When somebody sees there are five items left but 30 people looking at that item, they are more inclined to buy and this can improve your conversion rate!
Display user generated photos
The last thing that you want to do to demonstrate social proof is to display customer photos on your product page. I like to have a customer photo wall so that people can see how great the product is and that it is been enjoyed by people who are just like them!
The important thing about customer photo walls is that you want them to be authentic. Make sure you use photos that represent your target market and that were actually taken by customers. Don’t add any professional looking photos to your photo wall as this can seem inauthentic.
How to add social proof?
To add all this social proof you’ll want to use a social proof app. I personally use the Fera social proof app to gather, manage, and display all my social proof, but there are lots of other apps to choose from. Take a look at this video to see the best social proof apps on the Shopify.
Set up an abandoned checkout sequence
Lots of shoppers are in the middle of a task when they are shopping online. They may be grocery shopping, at dinner, or about to board a flight. It is so easy to get distracted online, and they may have forgotten about their attempted purchase if you don’t follow up with them. An abandoned checkout email reminds a shopper that they left some of your products behind.
Why you should care
If you want to improve your conversion rate, you need to set up a cart abandonment sequence. This will help increase your conversion rate because you’re not communicating to a cold lead you’re communicating to somebody who is almost at the bottom of your marketing funnel.
They have already expressed so much interest in your product, why abandon the sale now?
How to solve this issue (4 hours)
You’ll need to set up some amazing emails or sequence of emails to win that customer back.
Remember, if somebody has added something to their cart but abandoned their purchase then that means that they
- Forgot about their purchase
- Didn’t have their objections overcome
- Wanted to get a discount for abandoning their cart
When you are setting up your abandoned cart email, make sure that it has the following three elements
- Stunning visuals
- Persuasive copy
- Multiple links
Stunning visuals
Abandoned checkout emails get up to 45% open rates! If that many people are opening your emails, you want them to look good!
With a service like Spently, you can create a customized abandoned checkout email and follow up sequence that can include wonderful photos and colours that match your brand.
When you make an email in Spently, you can showcase the wonderful products that the shopper left behind to jog their memory.
Persuasive copy
Sometimes people just need a little push to check out and this is where good copy comes in. If it is the case that your shopper’s objections weren’t met, now is the time to address them.
Try keeping your copy short and to the point and highlight the benefits of your product. You can elevate your copy by doing the following,
- Play on people’s fear of missing out on a great product. This is where you can add in a time-sensitive discount or mention that there are only five left in stock
- Use photos of past customers enjoying your product. Adding this will help your potential buyer feel understand that people just like them LOVE your product too
- Personalize your email to make it seem like you are talking only to your shopper. This will help make them feel valued
Read this blog for more information on best practices for abandoned checkout emails
Multiple links
You want to make sure that your shopper can find the information that they are looking for in your email quickly. That is where links come in.
Depending on your product you can add links that,
- Explain a money back guarantee policy
- Push them to finish their checkout by providing a link to automatically apply a discount code
- Offer them a free gift
Wrapping it all up
We’ve gone through four simple conversion rate boosting things to do. All you have to do now is map out the time in your day to do them. For me, I have found that the easiest things to do in order of simplicity are
- Minifying your photos
- Adding social proof
- Retargeting cart abandoners
- Creating better product pages
If you need any help with any of these things feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn!
Originally Posted on the Spently Blog as a guest blog post
