Double Even Triple Your Conversion Rate

Now that’s a headline, but before I can tell you how to grow your conversion rate, we need to establish a “what is a good?” conversion rate. According to Monetate Ecommerce Quarterly:

These are blended conversion rates, i.e. Registered and Guest users. And if we’ve talked for more than five minutes, you know I heavily push to measure both as separate segments - they act differently on your website!

In Olivia Ross’s most excellent article 21 Ways to Triple Your B2B E‑Commerce Conversions, Ms. Ross provides different methods for doing just that. I want briefly discuss a few of her suggestions as I’ve seen them successfully work out in the wild.

1. Fix Your Analytics. It goes without saying that most everyone does not have 100% analytics coverage on their website. Most often they do not have eCommerce tracking enabled, and certainly not the aforementioned User Type dimension to track Registered vs. Guest users. How can you manage what you can’t measure?
2. Implement Hotjar. Yes! It is amazing to see heat maps and customer usage recordings to validate design decisions and call to action focus points. The mouse tells you where the eyes go on the page, and Hotjar has a free plan. Simply signup, add the javascript code to Google Tag Manager, and Publish.
3. Use Detailed Product Descriptions. People browse websites because they do not want to talk to sales representatives. Give them all the available information to easily make a purchase decision. Plus, it’ll help with Search Engine Optimization, too!
4. Fix Your Site Search Engine. It may require revamping your product taxonomy. If a customer can’t find the product, they can’t buy it. Enable site search tracking and do the manual verification of searching the terms your users enter in the search box and validate that the search results page reflects the visitor’s intention.
5. I am a super big fan of personalization. Amazon just does it right with their “People who viewed this product also viewed…” product highlight section. Providing complementary products can easily lift your average order value. You can do this manually, or with Machine Learning - the ROI is there!

Ms. Ross lists 16 more recommendations, and truthfully some of them are focused on the Consumer space, but as a whole you can read her article and get some good ideas to employ in your strategic marketing plan with the goal of increasing your eCommerce conversion rate.

Remember, if you need help setting up your Google Analytics, Tag Manager, and Search Engine projects (or installing Hotjar) please let me know. I’d love to help you with your website strategy.

Tags: analytics