The ecommerce industry is booming and there is a lot of opportunity for online sellers to make money, but there is also a lot of competition. That means every visitor to your store is important. To stay in the game, you must capture their attention, provide an engaging experience, and make your products appealing.
If you’re seeing a good amount of traffic to your site but few conversions, there may be room for improvement. Let’s look at what might be causing online shoppers to leave your store without buying, and how to fix it.
Capture Shoppers’ Attention
The first step to a conversion is getting the attention of potential buyers. If you aren’t attracting shoppers to your online store, it may be due to one of the following reasons:
1. Your website needs work. One common reason for a low conversion rate is that people don’t like the way your website looks or, even worse, they can’t find what they are looking for. When you have traffic but no conversions, or your bounce rate is high, then it’s a good idea to troubleshoot your website design.
Solution: Work on decluttering your website. Make sure it’s easily navigable and your search filter results match what visitors want. Start tracking your conversion rate, bounce rate, and user flow to see if you can determine exactly where the problem lies.
2. You don’t know your customers. Another reason for low conversion rates is you’re not clear on who your customers are. If you are not marketing to the right audience, then you won’t see growth in your sales.
Solution: The key here is to find out what your customers want. That can be accomplished by looking at your site analytics to understand customer behavior, and social analytics to see what they like and share. It’s also important to look at customer reviews, analyze customer service interactions, and use surveys to see what your customers think about your store and products. This information will help you learn about your target customer base.
3. Your website isn’t optimized. If your traffic numbers are low, it may simply be a matter of potential customers not finding your store. When someone searches for a product you sell, you want your website to show in their search results. If they can’t see it, they can’t buy it.
Solution: Focus on your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts to ensure that your web pages show when people search online. Research keywords that are related to your products to produce articles and other types of content to generate traffic to your site.
Provide an Engaging Experience
Customer engagement is quite the buzzword these days. Online shoppers are looking for ecommerce stores that offer them more that just products, they want an experience. Here are a few customer experience-related reasons that you’re not getting the conversions you should be:
4. Your content isn’t engaging or persuasive. The content on your website, marketing emails, and on social media matters. It needs to be well-written, informative, descriptive, persuasive, and emotional.
Solution: Create content that has all the characteristics listed above, targeting the audience that you discovered when working on point #2 (above). Make sure that your content is error-free and that it includes the appropriate keywords.
5. You’re not engaging shoppers who abandon carts. Did you know that over three-quarters of shopping carts for online stores are abandoned with products in them? Think about how much money is lost in those abandoned carts. What can you do to make sure that your online store keeps your abandoned cart rate lower and your conversion rate higher?
Solution: Send emails to engage shoppers who have left your store with products in their shopping carts. It’s recommended that for every abandoned cart, there are three emails sent: one within an hour of the shopper leaving a site, to address any technical issues that may have kept them from making a purchase. The next one within 24 hours, warning that their cart will expire soon. And lastly, one within 48 hours that provides a discount or other incentive for purchasing the items in the cart. Also, target these customers with Facebook retargeting ads that combat abandoned carts.
Making Your Products Appealing
Customers making purchases online are different than brick and mortar customers in two key ways: they cannot touch and examine the products, and they have access to an endless number of sellers to buy from at their fingertips. Let’s look at how those two things can affect your conversion rate.
6. Your product images are poor or limited. Because customers cannot touch or handle the products they purchase from your store, you must make it possible for them to see every aspect of them on your product pages.
Solution: Avoid tiny, low-quality, grainy images in favor of large, clear, and interesting photos. You can also use product videos to win customers. Video is proven to increase engagement, and the longer people stick around, the more likely they are to convert.
7. Your pricing strategy isn’t working. Pricing is extremely important to the majority of shoppers. Many will shop around until they find the lowest prices and least expensive shipping before making a purchase. That means your pricing strategy must include keeping prices competitive.
Solution: There are a lot of repricing solutions available to help you keep prices competitive without having to do any extra work. Look for one that allows you to set parameters that work best for your business. For example, you can choose to have your repricer set prices to match your competitors’ pricing or undersell them by a specific percentage.
Conclusion
A low conversion rate isn’t the end of the world, or your business. Act quickly to determine the root causes and make appropriate adjustments. If your online store is experiencing higher traffic but the conversions aren’t increasing, remember the three major areas to look at: capturing potential shoppers’ attention, providing an engaging experience, and making your products appealing. Fix those three areas and you will see your conversion rate rise.
Ecomdash is an inventory and order management software for online retailers. They focus on providing small to medium-sized businesses with actionable tips and strategies for building a lucrative ecommerce business.