If you have an ecommerce site that’s bringing in plenty of visitors but is underperforming when it comes to your conversion rate, there are some simple strategies you can try.

Average conversion rates for ecommerce stores tend to hover at around 2-3 percent. If your site comes in below that, then improvements can be made. If your conversion rate is around that level, then there are still plenty of steps to boost your ecommerce conversion that you can take to get the edge on the competition. 

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  1. Apply persuasive design

One change that you can make which has the potential to have a big impact on your conversion rate is to introduce new elements of intuitive and persuasive design. Anything that makes your products and services easier to interact with and shows your customers how they can improve their lives will be successful. 

As an example, the online lending website wonga added an interactive slider onto the homepage of its website (it still exists on their homepage today largely unchanged for over ten years). It’s a simple way to show prospective borrowers how the cost of loan changes as the loan amount and term are altered. 

Anything that lets visitors explore, tailor and visualise your products in such an intuitive way can have a big impact on your conversion rates. The wonga slider was so impactful and popular when it launched that just about every online lender in the 2021 market is using something similar. 

  1. Personalise your offering to every customer

Generally speaking, there are two ways to personalise your ecommerce website to meet the specific tastes of your visitors. You can either provide them with content that is personalised based on their demographic, on-site behaviour, previous purchases and geographic data. Alternatively, you can let customers personalise their own journeys by giving them different pathways within your website, emails and other marketing campaigns, that they can take. 

You can read more on personalisation strategies to boost your conversion rate here courtesy of sleeknote.

  1. Identify and eliminate website usability problems

When trying to identify usability issues on your website, it can often be a case of not seeing the wood for the trees. Often you know the website too well, so you navigate it seamlessly without noticing the stumbling blocks that other visitors might experience. 

There are a couple of objective ways that can help you to uncover the usability issues on your site. You can use CRO tools to give you unrivalled insights into how visitors interact with your site. They can even record behaviours such as ‘rage clicks’, which are rapid clicks on a website or app, usually made when users are frustrated.

Alternatively, if you don’t have the budget for specialist CRO tools, take a look at your Site Content report on Google Analytics. Open the Behaviour report from the side panel, then click the sub-report Site Content and All Pages. This will provide you with comprehensive metrics for every URL on your website.    

  1. Make speed a priority

The statistics say that if a page on your website takes more than two seconds to load, you’ll lose 53 percent of your visitors. When your customers can easily go elsewhere to buy the same or very similar products that you offer, they’re not going to wait around for you to get your act together. 

There are simple tools such as Google PageSpeed and Pingdom that can help you calculate the speed of your website. If it’s something you think needs improving, simply choosing a higher level hosting plan could deliver the type of performance your users demand.