As an ecommerce agency, we understand that improving your website’s conversion rate is paramount to success.
Considering that Shopify and Shopify Plus accounts for 10.32% of ecommerce stores across the globe, it’s clear that Shopify is a top ecommerce platform that can drive fantastic results, when its done right! Surprisingly though, the average Shopify store has a conversion rate of just 1.4%, far below the ecommerce average at 2.5-3%. When it comes to conversion-rate optimisation (CRO) for your Shopify store, we’ve got a few tips and tricks up our sleeves that could transform your site from being the underdog, to seeing significant growth. Whether you’re just setting up shop or you’ve been in the ecommerce business for many years, our tips for improving your Shopify website’s conversion rates are imperative to driving success. Without further ado, let’s dive in!
1. Streamline Navigation
First things first, navigation is one of, if not the, most important elements of your Shopify store. If you haven’t already, ensuring that your website’s navigation is clear, intuitive and easy to follow is absolutely paramount to improving your conversion rates and driving success for your ecommerce store. It’s absolutely key to create intuitive product categories and subcategories that make sense to your audience, this will make the online shopping experience feel easy and enjoyable. Imagine landing on a website and not instinctively knowing where a product may sit within the mega-menu, it would instantly make your experience feel disjointed and create a sense of friction. This is to be avoided at all costs!
2. Build Trust
Instantly building trust with your website visitors and prospective customers is imperative to improving your Shopify conversion rates. There are many different ways to do this including by integrating a verified reviews platform to your Shopify store that displays star ratings and customer testimonials throughout your web pages and particularly product pages. Additionally, by incorporating user-generated content (UGC) into your website, whether through an ‘as seen on you’ carousel that displays photographs real customers wearing or using your products or video clips of customers interacting with your products, showcasing real, tangible social proof is a sure-fire way to capture your audience’s trust and improve conversion rates.
3. Create Urgency
Urgency is a crucial element of digital marketing that shouldn’t be overlooked by ecommerce managers. Creating a sense of urgency in your website visitors is one of the best ways to capture impulse purchases and increase that important conversion rate. Urgency can be created quite simply with time-limited offers, countdown timers for next day delivery and persuasive messaging like ‘sale ends soon‘ to drive customers to take action quickly.
4. Automate Cart Recovery Emails
Shopify offers the functionality of sending automated cart abandonment emails to customers who leave your website after adding products to their baskets. This is a great retargeting marketing strategy that re-engages customers who have an active interest in your products and automation allows you to strike while the iron is hot!
5. Implement Smart Search
As we touched upon earlier, intuitive navigation is crucial to improving your ecommerce conversion rates. Many Shopify templates already have smart search or at least advanced search capabilities that enhance the browsing experience for customers. For example, when a customer begins to input a search term, smart search will present suggested products, autocomplete or synonym suggestions to get the user to their desired product, as soon as possible. This speeds up the search experience and gets customers further down the buying funnel, increasing the likelihood of conversion and offering an enjoyable experience that will also improve loyalty.
6. Add A Live Chat Functionality
Offering exceptional customer service is key to increasing conversion rates as it helps to build customer trust and if a user has a question about a product, providing an almost immediate answer can get them across the finish line in just a few minutes. Considering that 52% of shoppers claim that a live chat functionality would improve their loyalty towards a brand, it really is a no-brainer!
7. Conduct A Technical Audit
Conducting a technical audit will help you to identify any technical aspects of your Shopify website that are impacting sales such as page speed and mobile responsiveness. A thorough technical audit will allow you to identify key issues related to internal linking, duplicate content, crawlability and performance, and allow you to fix these issues. Ultimately, technical aspects of your website directly impact the user experience and in turn, make or break sales on your website.
8. Add Up-Sells & Cross-Sells
Upselling and cross-selling seem like terms that have been around for a long term, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less important to your conversion rates! Shopify allows you to add related products in many different ways so be sure to experiment with cross-selling similar or complimentary products when a customer adds something their basket.
9. Review Friction Points
Using heat-map user tracking tools such as Hotjar can help you to analyse where and when your customers are experiencing friction that may be causing them to abandon your website. By identifying these friction points, you’ll be able to fix any issues, improve the user experience and boost your conversion rates by ensuring the buying journey is as smooth and frictionless as can be!
10. Offer Valuable Features
Valuable features that help customers to determine things like how much wallpaper they’ll need to use to finish their master bedroom are super important in terms of driving conversions. Calculators and quizzes can help the user experience ten-fold and really drive customer loyalty.
And there we have it! Our top 10 ways to boost your conversion rates on Shopify. If you’ve implemented all of the tips and tricks we’ve outlined above but your conversion rates aren’t improving, you might not be reaching your ideal audience. In that case, we’d highly recommend incorporating some dedicated Shopify SEO strategies into your overall marketing mix to ensure that your site is reaching your target customers and driving sales. Need a helping hand? Don’t hesitate to get in touch!
