Why Conversion Rate Optimization Is An Integral Part of the Growth Marketing Framework for Ecommerce Stores
CRO is a key tactic for optimizing the growth marketing framework for your ecommerce store.
An ecommerce website, of course, as everyone knows, is a website that allows customers to buy products or services online. Most businesses, especially retail ones, rely on ecommerce for their sales. Just like any website, ecommerce stores may get a number of visitors but very few of them get to the point where they actually consider purchasing something, letting alone actually make a purchase.
This general scenario succinctly demonstrates just why conversion rate optimization is particularly important for ecommerce stores.
The fact is, the average global conversion rate for all ecommerce websites is 2.5%.
For some businesses, a 2.5% conversion rate may be enough to sustain their business. But what about 97.5% of visitors who don’t buy anything? This represents an immense amount of potential customers that your business is losing out on. That means that there is much room for improvement in terms of getting your existing prospects to take action, let alone trying to find more and new customers from additional sources of traffic to get to purchase from your ecommerce store.
This is where conversion rate optimization, or CRO for short, comes in. CRO is a process of improving the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action such as making a purchase on your ecommerce store. It's also a vital component of growth marketing, which is focused on using data and experimentation to drive business growth.
In this article, we'll take a deep dive into conversion rate optimization and explore how it is a key and largely overlooked part of optimizing a growth marketing approach for ecommerce store operators . We'll cover the basics of CRO, including the key metrics you need to know and the different types of tests you can run. We'll also examine 18 key conversion rate optimization practices for ecommerce stores as well as look at elements of a fruitful CRO strategy that will allow you to start seeing real improvements and drive growth for your business.
Why is Conversion Rate Optimization Extremely Important when it comes to Driving Revenue Growth for Ecommerce Stores
Ecommerce conversion rate optimization is the process of increasing the percentage of visitors to your website that takes the desired action. The desired action could be anything from purchasing a product online, signing up for an e-mail newsletter, or downloading a sales flyer for your favorite ecommerce store.
Improving your ecommerce store’s conversion rate means not only more sales and revenue for your business in terms of getting more visitors to purchase. It also allows your business to get more prospects into your purchasing funnel down the road. Even without spending extra on marketing or advertising, you can increase your sales from existing website traffic simply by improving your conversion rate.
A 1% increase in conversion rate can lead to a significant increase in profits. For example, if your website currently has a conversion rate of 2% and 200 visitors per day, you are making 4 sales per day. If your estimated price per sale is $100, you make $400 in daily revenue.
Now, if you can increase your conversion rate from 2% to just 3%, you would be making 6 sales per day instead of 4. This means that your daily revenue would increase from $400 to $600, which represents a healthy 50% increase! All you did to achieve this was to improve your conversion rate by 1%. ecommerce conversion rate calculator
What is Considered to Be a Conversion Within Ecommerce?
As we briefly mentioned earlier, an ecommerce conversion is when shoppers/visitors do a particular action on an online store.
Here are some eCommerce benchmark metrics or conversion goals that brands set:
An online sale
Added products to a cart
Added items to a wishlist
Email/newsletter sign ups
Loyalty program sign ups
Subscription signups
Social media presence
Here are Some Benchmark Ecommerce Conversion Rate Statistics
An conversion rate of 2%+ is considered an average eCommerce conversion rate, although it varies depending on the industry.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) for e-commerce stores is different because e-commerce stores sell physical products, which can be more complex and time-consuming to purchase than, for example, a service-based industry, which has an average 9.3 % conversion rate across the industry.
Direct traffic sources convert the most with an average conversion rate of 3.3%
Paid search converts at an average rate of 3.2%
Referrals have an average conversion rate of 2.9%
Organic search converts at an average rate of 2.7%
Email campaigns have an average conversion rate of 2.6%
Social media converts the worst with an average conversion rate of 1.5%
Most importantly for the purposes of this article, A/B testing landing page designs increases conversions by 12%
Understanding the basics of conversion rate optimization (CRO)
To effectively use CRO for growth marketing, it's important to understand the basics of how it works. This includes knowing which metrics to measure to gauge your success, how to identify conversion roadblocks on your website, and which types of tests to run to optimize your conversion rates.
In essence, CRO is all about making data-driven decisions to create a better user experience and ultimately drive more growth for your ecommerce business. Understanding the basics of CRO is crucial for any business looking to improve their online performance and achieve their growth objectives.
Why Does Conversion Rate Optimization Matter So Much for Ecommerce Stores?
Getting potential customers to your site is only the first step. Even with a ton of traffic, if your website isn’t optimized for conversion, you will find it hard to hold customers’ attention and guide them to take further action. Learning the benefits of conversion rate optimization helps you better understand your customers, increase revenue, decrease acquisition costs, and so much more.
With that in mind, here are 6 primary benefits of Conversion Rate Optimization(CRO) for ecommerce stores.
1. Conversion Rate Optimization Allows Your Ecommerce Store to Get to Know Your Customers Better
Running user-centric CRO experiments lets you uncover customer insights you can apply to other aspects of funnel and product design. Truly effective CRO helps you understand every aspect of your customers’ journey, product experience (PX), and more, by effectively walking a proverbial mile in their shoes.
2. Conversion Rate Optimization Allows Ecommerce Stores to Decrease Customer Acquisition Costs
If you’re investing resources into driving new traffic to your site, CRO will help you maximize value from advertising spending by turning more new visitors into new paying customers. One prevalent example for ecommerce stores, for example, focuses on getting users to go from a shopping cart to actually make a purchase.
3. Conversion Rate Optimization Allows Ecommerce Stores to Leverage Their Current Website Traffic
You don’t necessarily need to drive fresh traffic to your site to increase the number of conversions. Instead, conversion rate optimization forces you to focus on optimizing your ecommerce website for your current prospect base and ultimately strives to help make the most of what you currently have to operate with.
4. Conversion Rate Optimization Allows Ecommerce Stores to Increase the Customer Lifetime Value of Existing Customers
A major advantage of CRO is that it helps you understand and segment your user to funnel them toward purchasing the products or services that will best meet their needs. This, in turn, results in more repeat customers, and more value per customer across their entire product experience.
Conducting a CRO audit will help you identify which customer journeys are successful and which need to be improved. For example, use CRO analytics and user insights to identify your most loyal customers and target them with ‘welcome back’ messages at key moments in their journey when they were return to your site, all the while providing personalized product recommendations.
5. Conversion Rate Optimization Allows Ecommerce Stores to Provide a More Functional User Experience (UX)
When optimizing a landing page for CRO, you’ll often improve your overall UX without even trying. Customer-centric CRO efforts that give you user insights, whether it involves conducting surveys and analyzing heatmaps, help you make the necessary changes necessary in the conversion process that allow it to flow logically. An overall CRO audit helps identify areas where website visitors get stuck (ex; are navigation buttons and CTAs clear, or are your users getting confused) and allows you to realize that you have an actually opportunity to make real improvement by working to fix these UX problems.
6. Conversion Rate Optimization Allows Ecommerce Stores to Provide For a Better Product Experience and Enhance its Brand Reputation
Using CRO to improve the overall customer journey shows that you truly care about your prospects’ full experience with your company. User-centric CRO isn’t just about pushing users toward purchases above all else, or increasing your company’s revenue. It’s about helping customers find value in your product and giving them confidence it will help them to fill their needs and achieve their goals.
Overall, CRO has the potential to help you both improve your customers’ overall product experience and drive revenue growth for your organization. As long as you approach CRO holistically and stay focused on understanding and addressing your customers’ needs, CRO is a great way to improve conversions, customer value, and user satisfaction.
How Ecommerce Stores Can Use Conversion Rate Optimization As Part of a Growth Marketing Approach?
As we have established in a previous post, the growth marketing framework is very much something e-commerce stores can benefit from. Without question, conversion rate optimization can be an incredibly important, almost essential part of the growth marketing process for ecommerce stores.
Let us first examine the components of the growth marketing framework as it applies to ecommerce stores.
Acquisition:
Acquisition is basically how you “acquire” visitors. For e-commerce stores, the bulk of the traffic these days comes from search engines (Google, Bing), social networks (Facebook, Twitter (X), Pinterest as well as via influencer campaigns), and pay-per-click ads through advertising giants like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads.
A: Activation:
Activation in ecommerce means either signing up for the product or subscribing to a newsletter.
R. Retention:
Retention is a huge challenge to most e-commerce stores. At the end of the day, you already went through the effort of acquiring, activating, and converting those people into customers. The trouble is getting them to re-order from you.
R. Revenue:
Revenue is pretty straightforward, but it is the lifeline for any business, including e-commerce stores. For e-commerce stores, that means placing an order. A key aspect of this is to make sure your checkout process is flawless, absolutely clean and clear, and optimized for mobile.
Referral:
The good news is that you have gotten customers to purchase from you. Chances are, they have friends and family that could also be interested in your products or services as well. This is where referral or loyalty programs that incentivize finding new customers come into play.
What Are the Best Practices for Conversion Rate Optimization Operating Within a Growth Marketing Framework for Ecommerce Stores?
When implementing a conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy, there are several best practices to keep in mind to ensure the success of your efforts. Here are some of the key best practices for CRO implementation as it pertains to those that run ecommerce shops:
Focus on your user: One of the most important aspects of CRO is understanding your user and their needs. Concentrate on creating a user-friendly website that provides a positive experience for your visitors, and make changes that align with their needs and preferences.
Test frequently: Another key to successful CRO is testing and iteration. Regularly test different elements of your website and analyze the data to determine what changes are most effective.
Keep it simple: When making changes to your website, it's important to keep things simple. Avoid making too many changes at once and focus on small, incremental improvements that are easy to implement and track.
Use clear calls to action (CTAs): Make sure that your CTAs are clear and prominently displayed on your website. Use language that encourages visitors to take action and make sure that CTAs are easy to find and click.
Optimize for mobile: With more and more people browsing the web on their mobile devices, it's important to ensure that your website is optimized for mobile. Make sure that your website is responsive and that all elements are easy to use on a smaller screen.
Analyze your data: Regularly analyze your website data to track your progress and identify areas for improvement. Use tools such as Google Analytics to track metrics like conversion rate, bounce rate, and time on site that demonstrate in and of themselves, the quality of a prospect’s experience with your ecommerce store.
Of course, Google Analytics should be just one of the many CRO tools you use to maximize the efficacy of your ecommerce store. Later in this article, we will delver into several more that can complement Google Analytics in terms of maximizing the experience of prospective customers to your ecommerce stores.
By following these best practices, you can implement a successful CRO strategy that improves your ecommerce website's performance and drives growth for your business. Remember, CRO is an ongoing process, so it's important to continually test and iterate to keep improving your website over time.
Why Is Ongoing Conversion Rate Optimization So Important for Your Ecommerce Store?
In today's competitive digital landscape, it's not enough to simply optimize your website once and call it a day. To achieve sustained growth, it's crucial to make continuous optimization a priority. Moreover, this is part and parcel of the growth marketing process.
There are several reasons why continuous optimization is so important for sustained growth:
The digital landscape is constantly changing: With new technologies and platforms emerging all the time, it's important to stay up to date and adapt to the latest trends and best practices. By regularly testing and optimizing your website, you can stay ahead of the curve and keep up with the latest industry standards.
User needs are always evolving: As your business grows and your user base expands, it's important to continually re-evaluate your website to ensure that it meets the evolving needs of your users. By regularly testing and optimizing your website, you can make sure that your user experience stays fresh and relevant.
Continuous optimization can lead to long-term success: Making small, incremental improvements to your website over time can add up to significant gains in the long run. By constantly refining and optimizing your website, you can achieve sustained growth and set yourself up for long-term success.
Overall, continuous optimization is essential for achieving sustained growth in the digital landscape. By regularly testing and refining your website, you can improve its performance, meet the evolving needs of your users, and stay ahead of the competition.
What Are Some Key Metrics that Determine the Efficacy of Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization?
When it comes to conversion rate optimization (CRO), it's important to track and measure the right metrics to determine whether your optimization efforts are successful or not. Here are some key metrics to consider when measuring the results of your CRO efforts:
Conversion rate: This is the most important metric to track. It measures the percentage of visitors who take the desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form. By monitoring your conversion rate, you can determine if your CRO efforts are positively impacting your bottom line.
Bounce rate: This measures the percentage of visitors who navigate away from your website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate can be an indication that visitors are not finding what they're looking for on your website, which can hurt your conversion rate.
Time on site: This measures how long visitors are spending on your website. The longer they stay, the more engaged they are with your content. This in turn, means that they are more likely they are to purchase from your ecommerce store.
Exit rate: Measures the percentage of visitors who leave your website after interacting with a specific page. By tracking your exit rate, you can identify which pages may be causing visitors to leave your site without converting or taking any action.
Click-through rate: Measures the percentage of visitors who click on a specific call-to-action (CTA) or link. A high click-through rate can indicate that your CTA is effective and that visitors are being put in a position to take the desired action (i.e.; making a purchase at your ecommerce store).
By monitoring these key metrics, you can get a better understanding of how your website is performing and identify areas where you can make improvements to boost your conversion rates.
How to Identify Potential Conversion Roadblocks that Exist On Your Website?
Now that we have established what sort of metrics are needed in terms of optimizing your ecommerce store’s conversion rates, its important to know conversely how to identify potential conversion roadblocks inherent within your ecommerce website.
Conversion roadblocks are obstacles on your website that prevent visitors from taking the desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form. Identifying and removing these roadblocks is essential for optimizing your website for purchase/conversion.
To identify conversion roadblocks on your website, there are a few things you can do. First, put yourself in your visitor's shoes and take a critical look at your website. Are there any confusing or unclear calls-to-action? Are there any technical issues that may be preventing visitors from converting or even consider browsing your website?
You would certainly be well served to analyze your website data to identify specific pages or elements that may be causing visitors to drop off. Look at your conversion funnel to see where visitors are exiting your site, and try to determine what might be causing them to leave.
Another effective way to identify conversion roadblocks is to ask for feedback from your visitors. Consider using surveys, on-site polls, or user testing to get feedback on their website experience. This can help you pinpoint specific issues and make the necessary changes to improve your conversion rates.
Once you've identified your conversion roadblocks, the next step is to address them, by making changes to your website design, reworking your calls-to-action, or simplifying your conversion process. By removing potential obstacles such as these, you can create a more user-friendly website experience that encourages visitors to convert at a higher rate.
CRO Tests Your Ecommerce Website Needs to Use As Part of its Optimization Efforts
When it comes to conversion rate optimization (CRO), there are different types of tests you can run to determine which changes will lead to higher conversion rates. Here are some of the most effective types of CRO tests:
A/B testing:
This involves creating two versions of a webpage, an original version (A) and a variation (B) where traffic is split between the two versions in order to determine which performs better. A/B testing is a good way to test small changes like headlines, button text, or images.
Multivariate testing:
This is where you test multiple variables at the same time. Instead of creating two separate pages like in A/B testing, you create multiple variations of different page elements (such as headlines, images, and buttons) and test all possible combinations.
Split URL testing:
This type of CRO test involves testing entirely different versions of a webpage on different URLs. Split URL testing is useful when testing large-scale changes, such as a complete redesign of a page or testing the effectiveness of a new landing page.
User testing:
This is a more qualitative method of testing that involves recruiting real users to experience your website and provide feedback on their experience. User testing can be done in-person or remotely, and is a good way to get more anecdotal, qualitative data on how users are interacting with your site.
Heat mapping:
Heat mapping is a way to track how users interact with different areas of your website. It can help you identify which elements on your page are getting the most attention, and which may be causing confusion or frustration for visitors. An example of a popular heat mapping software would be Hotjar.