How to Work Out Conversion Rate
It’s pretty straightforward to work out your conversion rate.
Start by finding out how many conversions we’ve had in a select time period and then divide them by the number of clicks or visits our website attracted.
Formula: Conversions/Clicks= Conversion Rate
See it’s really simple to work out, now to take it a step further you can work out your current conversion rate to see how close you are to reaching your goals.
Benchmarks:
Here is a list of ecommerce benchmarks by product type from 2014
How to Optimise Your Conversion Rate
Conversion Rate Optimization is so important, it’s got it’s own field within the marketing/ design industry. You can check out some great resources on the likes of ConversionXL and Unbounce.
With a few tweaks focusing on boosting your conversion rate you’ll also get the knock on effect on increased revenue!
Social media
One of the most popular ways to increase your conversion rate is to make use of your social media page or pages. Share your offers, deals and content. Engage with your customers and show them the human side of your business.
This will make them more empathetic towards you, draw their attention and get them to share your offers and content with others further increasing your social media following and in turn your conversion rate.
Quick note: Make sure you boost your posts. Facebook unfortunately limits the users who can organically come across your content unless you boost.
Accessibility
Accessibility is one of those less thought of or obvious methods of increasing conversion rates, but it is a very important one. Making sure your website is accessible for people with disabilities or people in limited areas can help you gain more customers.
If you’re one of the only websites they find that cater to their needs they will most likely stick by you and make return purchases.
Speed
Speed is very important for websites, especially ecommerce websites.
The average person will wait no longer than three seconds before clicking away from your website. Some people won’t even wait that long.
To ensure maximum potential sales or conversions you’re going to have to optimise your website’s speed.
This means reducing clutter from your website and keeping it fast and easy to navigate.
When you’re trying to increase your conversion rate you’re going to need to do all you can to make visitors stay on your website so that they can convert.
Also make sure your cart is fully optimised for fast and easy use so customers convert instead of last minute abandonment.
Payment Methods
There are a number of reasons why payment methods affect your conversion rates, for example a lot of people will only purchase products online if they can pay using paypal.
This is because they prefer security and want.
Not only this but sometimes customers only have certain payment methods that are available to them.
Limiting payment methods for whatever reason can and does lose conversions which in turn leads to a lower conversion rate.
A/B Testing
One of the main ways you can optimise your conversion rate is to use A/B testing.
A/B testing is the process of testing two or more different versions of the same web page or adtext to see which one works best.
This is a powerful tool for conversion optimisation as it allows you to use data like user feedback on your website usability or design to make changes to certain elements of a web page.
The two variations of each page are shown to 50% of visitors. After that you can monitor the pages to see which generates more conversions and keep the better performing page. From there you can test other features of the same web page or another web page to make more adjustments.
Remove Jargon
This goes hand in hand with A/B testing. One thing that’s always worth trying to test conversion rates is removing the jargon from one version of a webpage.
Of course in most ecommerce industries customers usually won’t have a deep understanding of the jargon used on your website, unless you’re a wholesaler who’s selling to a retailer online.
But it’s always worth testing on your website just to see if there is any change in conversion rates.
This ultimately comes down to if the majority of your customers speak your jargon or if they don’t.
Social proof
Social proof addons are addons that display social media icons on your website and show how many times your website or web page has been shared.
It’s quite important, and some websites still either miss it out completely or place it out of sight.
The reason social proof is important is because purchasing online is still seen as a risk for one reason or another, some people don’t trust the delivery times or the quality of the products.
They require proof or something to stand by what’s claimed on the website. This is exactly what social proof does.
It’s essentially a testimonial that tells customers that people have bought from your store and they were satisfied so much so they shared your product.
Conclusion
Conversion rate is one of the most important KPIs when it comes to measuring your business performance.
If your conversion rate is low you can improve it by ultimately increasing user experience through a/b testing or acting on user feedback.