How to improve conversion rate?
Hello everybody, it has been a while since my last post. There are two main reasons: I was on vacation all August and I was very busy with my jog all September with little time for my family so I decided not reduce that time more by working on the blog. Now, it is getting better and I have a bit more time.
I decided to start posting again with an article about conversion rate. This is an highly important subject for any online business because this is the best way to increase any online business. It commonly accepted that conversion rate in the industry is between 2% and 3%. At a first glance, that number makes me desperate. Only 3% of the traffic of any web site generate a sale! But if you consider it, I find it very interesting: It can only be better.
The fact is that increasing conversion is a very difficult and complex task to achieve. The biggest problem in my point of view is that there isn’t only one thing to do to increase conversion but a multiple tasks to be performed, sometimes in parallel, sometimes one after the other. I am not pretending giving any “magic” in this article, just some ideas and most of them are obvious ones.
Before we start our journey, let me add that increasing conversion rate is not a task which should be done ones and then forgotten, it has to be a continuous activity otherwise the benefits won’t be visible.
I would say that there are four main activities to be performed in order to improve conversion: Analysis of your website, users and traffic; optimization of your website and processes and measurement of success.
1. Analysis
This is obvious that the first step to increase online conversion is to understand your business and your customers as well as defining what you want to achieve. And this understanding can only be done based on analyzing your business.
Before you start your analysis process, you should define clear goals. This is like athletes, they need to have clear objectives in order to adapt their preparation and be ready to succeed. Take a piece of paper and define the major objectives you want to achieve: Do you want to increase your sales in a given category of customers or a specific category of products? or do you want to increase the number of customers subscribing to your newsletter? Defining your objectives will help define the strategy to achieve your goals.
To be able to measure the success, you should also define your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). KPIs shouls be some easy figures to monitor which will help your understand if your strategy is successful. Here are some examples of KPIs:
- Traffic should increase by 3% year over year
- Attach rate (percentage of accessories sold with a parent product) should be at least at 6%
- Conversion rate should be 5% within 12 months
- Marketing campaign conversion rate should be 15% in 6 months
As you can see, this is not rocket science, these are clear and simple objectives. The more these KPIs are simple and understandable by everybody, the more chance you have to monitor them on a regular basis.
When you have clear objectives, this is the right time to analyze your customers and their behavior. You can use any analytic tool in order to see how your customers behave on your web site. Are they always leaving on the product page, do they add products to the shopping cart but they never check out … This is key to identify where your customers are leaving your web site because you will understand on which part of your web site you will have to focus your efforts. I know this is obvious but how many of us do it on a regular basis?
You should finish that step with a list of things to improve. Of course, you will probably end with dozens of needed improvements and nobody has unlimited resources. This why it is important to categorize improvements by priority.
The last step in my opinion would be testing some improvements on your web site. The best method in my point of view is using A/B testing and analyzing the results on a web analytic tool. It doesn’t mean that you have to develop all your ideas completely but you can try some little change, not consuming lots of resources and see how your customers react to changes.
On key rule is that you should do testing with an open mind. That means that on the paper, an idea could seem perfect and brilliant but the results could show very bad results. Don’t think your idea is good but your customers are stupids, this is probably because you did not consider every aspects of the problem. And you customers are always right, they are the one paying 
2. Optimization
When the analysis phase is finished (including of course some testing to validate some ideas), this is the time to make the most of the data collected. This is also the right time to think about your overall strategy. Here are some clues where you could optimize the conversion.
Stay in touch with your customers by creating a mailing list. You could use that list to inform your customers about new products, promotions or events. It is highly important to offer different ways to subscribe to a newsletter like having a lightbox displayed at the end of the checkout process or a box always visible inviting your customers to subscribe to get special deals.
You second focus should be to reduce the number of customers abandoning the checkout process. As this is part of the first phase, you should now have understood where, when and why customers are leaving during the checkout process. It could be that your force your customers to register on your web site: this makes sense if you have a strong email marketing strategy but if you don’t use that emailing, why bothering them with registration. Or it could be that your checkout process is unclear or too long: A good way is to have a maximum of 3-4 steps with a progress indicator so that your customers can visualize where they are at a given step. Finally, your basked should be easy to use and clear: delivery cost should be visible, quantity and link back to the product page should be there as well and also, this should be easy to remove a product or change the quantity. I have seen some basket where it is nearly impossible to change anything in it: this is a good way to loose customers as nobody would like to read the help manual to remove a wrong article.
3. Measure the results
The last and final stage is to measure the success of your improvements. The best way is to compare analytic data over a similar period of time as well as during a similar business activity. It doesn’t make any sense to compare one month of sales conversion one during July (assuming a low period) and the other one during December (assuming peak season). Of course, you should measure your success based on the KPIs defined during the first stage.
Another good way to measure is to perform regular customer’ surveys. You can use the same survey and run the survey on 25% of your customer base every quarter. That means that every customer will be requested to answer a survey once a year.
I tried to keep the article as short as I could but there are a lot of things to say about conversion. If you are interested in getting a more detailed article, let me know and I will spend some time working on a longer and more detailed version.
