The best conversion rate optimisation (CRO) services for ecommerce

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) Services

When it comes to being successful as an ecommerce business, you need to maximise your conversion rates. Even though conversion is the ultimate goal of any ecommerce site, for every $92 spent on acquiring customers, only $1 is spent converting them.

This is surprising given that only 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates. 

Don’t be a statistic – get serious about making the most out of your digital marketing budget and optimising your conversions. 

To start, you need to fully understand your customers’ and visitors’ wants and needs. Knowing your users allows you to provide them with the best possible experience with your company. 

What exactly is conversion rate optimisation (CRO) and how do you measure your performance?

Below, we’ll go over: 

What is conversion rate optimisation?

Conversion rate optimisation, at its simplest for ecommerce companies, is when you make changes to your website to improve the ratio of total website visitors to customers. You must analyse the way users interact with your website and pinpoint areas where you can increase engagement and conversion rates. 

Conversion rate is a metric that measures the percentage of visitors who perform a specific action on your site—like making a purchase—within a specific time frame.

Improving that figure requires you to understand how your visitors interact with your site and getting more of them to do what you want them to do. 

To do this, you need an effective CRO strategy and the right tools. Using a Digital Assistant like ours here allows you to gather the right data. It also gives you the tools to make the changes to improve your conversion rates. 

How to measure conversion rates

How do you measure conversion rates? After you target what a conversion is at your business, the math is straightforward. 

First, you need to track conversions and visitors over a set period or within a specific marketing campaign. Depending on your company’s goals, you can define “conversion” in different ways. Here are examples of common types of conversions: 

• Calling your business
• Upgrading their service
• Responding to a specific Call to Action (CTA)
• Using a new feature or application
• Engaging with your site or social media
• Registering on your website
• Talking to your company via online chat
• Submitting a “Contact Us” form
• Making a purchase (by far the most important conversion from an ecommerce PoV)

These conversion definitions will impact your conversion rate, and relate to different aspects of your user journey. Look at this ecommerce conversion funnel analysis. 

For you to optimise your conversion rates, you need to have a measurable action that your users complete. 

Go through your customer journey and consider what a successful conversion looks like at your company. Then make sure the action you pinpoint is measurable and develop a methodology for tracking it. 

For example if you are running digital ads you will want to measure the effectiveness of these campaigns. To do this, consider using Marketing Automation. Especially if your CRO team is using ad clicks to track conversions. Connected Media allows you to observe unique touch points during your ad campaign. 

After you have the data, all you need to do is divide the number of conversions by the total number of site or landing page visitors and multiply that number by 100%. 

Conversion rate = (Conversions / Total Visitors) x 100%

Let’s take a look at an example. 

You’re an online retailer that has already looked at your customer journey and decided that conversion happens when a prospect makes a purchase.

Your site had 12,000 visitors in the last month and you had 500 customers make a purchase. Your conversion rate would be: 

(12,000 / 500) x 100% = 4.2% Conversion Rate 

Why your business needs conversion rate optimisation (CRO) services

The maths is straightforward, and you know what your customers want, so why do you need a conversion rate optimisation service? 

Firstly, the process may not be as straightforward as you think. Tracking customer behaviours and finding ways to optimise your conversions based on data is a time-consuming process. Not to mention it’s often easier and cheaper to leave this task to the experts.

Services like Digital Assistant, Email Remarketing, help your business through the CRO process. Conversion rate optimisation agencies use best in industry technology and tracking tools and have teams that can use them effectively. 

They can look at all your marketing channels and increase the usability of your web pages to promote higher conversions. 

Whether you have a new website or you’re trying to make your existing site more effective, there’s a wide range of benefits of CRO. Some of these benefits include: 

• CRO taps into your existing website traffic to improve your bottom line
• You can start converting more traffic with an excellent return on investment (ROI) 
• Improve brand image 
• Gain customer trust and loyalty 
• Create a better user experience 
• More effective lead generation

Now, let’s look at the different CRO services available. These services can be utilised at various stages of the CRO process: Analysis, Ideation, Testing, and Evaluation. 

Analysis

• Review of the user journey
• Segmentation and audience classification
• Tracking audit

Ideation

• Test recommendations
• Test specifications
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) considerations

Testing

• User testing guidance or implementation
• Bespoke testing tools and implementation infrastructure
• CRO strategy management

Evaluation

• Track metrics and produce case studies and reports
• Release testing and ongoing performance tracking

Which pages of your website should be optimised?

Different areas of your website can be optimised to increase your conversion rate. 

Focus on the high-traffic and high-intent web pages first. This will allow you to make the highlights of your website the areas where customers will be driven to purchase your product or service.

Homepage

Creating an amazing first impression is so important. Your homepage is your virtual storefront. If your customers are strolling down the pavement, you want to capture their attention and get them to enter your shop. The same applies to your website’s homepage. 

This page should encourage your visitors to stay on your site and help guide them to the most important areas. Simplicity is often the key, so don’t crowd your site’s homepage with too many images or a sea of text. 

As you can see with Adobe’s homepage, they use clear and visible CTAs with “Start free trial” and “Learn more” buttons. They also have easy navigation across the top, guiding visitors towards their various products. 

High-Intent Pages

Where exactly do your customers head when they have the intention of buying your product or service? Areas such as Product Pages, Category Pages, Pricing Pages, Checkout Page, and Contact Page are there for a reason, and you have the opportunity to leverage them to your advantage. 

On these high-intent pages, you need to focus on how to make visitors take the next step. Make sure to keep categorisation as simple as possible while giving them all the information they need.

These high-intent pages are also vital to your digital marketing strategy. If you’re using social ads, Google Ads or pay per click (PPC) strategies, make sure you direct traffic to these high-intent pages that will encourage people to move through the sales funnel. 

Landing Pages

Landing pages are prime real estate for converting visitors. These pages are where your customers land after an encounter with your brand via your ads, search engines, and social media. 

This type of web page needs to be able to grab and hold the attention of visitors. Take a look at the Pull & Bear landing page. It’s bold and simple, with a clear CTA offering 60% off.

Blog Pages

Blog pages can often be overlooked as places to increase conversion rates, but they’re a vital part of modern ecommerce. Having a solid content marketing strategy provides you with an important avenue to develop a relationship with your customers. 

Blogs allow you to perform important SEO and give you more of an online presence. 

Must-Have conversion rate optimisation tools

Now that you have an idea of the basics of CRO, let’s turn towards tools. CRO agencies may have specific tools that they prefer or that they’ve developed in-house. However, each of them should help you: 

• Listen to your users
• Make you experts in the market
• Watch how people engage with your site
• Collaborate with your site builders and designers
• Draw connections between reports and user feedback

There are three broad tools that you can use to help you execute CRO. They comprise: 

Qualitative Tools

Qualitative tools allow you to collect non-numerical data. They help you learn why your customers interact with your site in a certain way. These tools include: 

 Usability testing tools 

• Customer survey and consultation tools
• Online reviews and website feedback tools
• Website session recording and replay tools

Quantitative Tools

Quantitative tools help you collect all the numerical data to track metrics on your website. You can use: 

• Website heat map tools
• Form analysis tools
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) tools
• Net Promoter Score system (How likely people are to promote your website or product) 
• General analytics tools (like Google Analytics)

Testing Tools

Once you have your feedback from your qualitative and quantitative data collection, you need to develop a clear sense of what’s happening on your site. From there, decide where you need to make changes.

Testing tools allow you to make these changes and generate reports to monitor your CRO efforts. These tools include:

 A/B testing tools

• Conversion-tracking analytics
• Website feedback tools
• Website heat map
• Session recording tools

Conversion rate optimisation best practices for ecommerce

Sometimes in digital marketing, we oversimplify and claim that one optimisation action will drastically increase your conversion rates. 

However, there really aren’t any standard tactics in CRO. There are only guidelines and best practices from which to pick and choose. 

There are the basics like: 

• Bold colour for CTA buttons that are placed above the fold
• Use urgency to drive sales
• Use fewer fields on forms
• Always display testimonials 

However, wider-ranging best practices will help find you the best strategy for your company. 

Use the Data

Don’t assume you know what your customers want. Utilise the data you collect to make data-driven decisions. And, if you don’t have the data, start collecting it as soon as possible. It’s never too late to start building zero-party data for your business.

Don’t Copy the Competition 

While it’s good to be informed of your competition’s ecommerce practices, don’t imitate them. It will end up being confusing for your customers and will not reflect your brand. Look at your data to uncover problems and develop ideas that will work best for your company. 

Define and Track your Goals

Make sure you know what you want out of your CRO. Define your goals clearly so everyone knows exactly what you’re measuring. Tracking it over time allows you to make decisions based on how your optimisation efforts are progressing. 

How Digital Assistant can optimise your conversion rate

We use our technology and ecommerce expertise to support your CRO. Essentially, your Digital Assistant helps you optimise your conversion rates through a combination of personalisation, guided selling, and digital revenue optimisation.

1. Personalisation

Personalisation remains a priority for digital marketing leaders. Relevant and timely messaging is key to educating customers, minimising friction, and building confidence in brand interactions. 

Today, marketing managers are always trying to find new ways to personalise the user experience and make it more targeted to individual users. 

Ve’s Digital Assistant helps you do this through: 

• Context-awareness: This gives you the ability to uncover the explicit context of site visits to determine customer intent and alignment with response generation.
• Segmentation: The system uses rule-based segmentation for targeting; determining the next best action or algorithmic recommendations.
• Targeting & triggering: These features allow you to identify and deliver the optimum experience for an individual, based on a blend of what is known about the customer and real-time session activity.

2. Guided selling

Today, the internet is a hive of activity. The pace of change in digital commerce and evolving customer preferences require agility and support for scale and complexity. 

Here are some ways we can help you keep up with the market: 

• Marketing enablement: This provides marketing teams with a vehicle to act on behalf of an organisation, to simulate an engagement between the brand and website visitors.  
• Experienced support: Our team can execute customer surveys, gather and incorporate user feedback, collect and/or ingest and analyse customer survey data.
• Response generation: Ve’s Digital Assistant can match specific content components to particular segments, behavioural interactions, and/or “shopper mode” persona types.

3. Optimisation

Today, we’re at the start of a new multi-experience era that will lower the friction of the buying experience as we interact with the emerging digital mesh of touchpoints. Here at Ve, our services allow you to make the most out of: 

• Data & analytics: Track user behaviour; collect, ingest, and match user-level data from multiple sources to support basic & advanced data analysis.  
• Performance testing: This includes the ability to design and conduct basic and advanced testing, such as A/B testing and multivariate testing.  
• Measurement & reporting: Track, measure, and report performance and performance improvement, as well as standard and custom reporting.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is a Good Ecommerce Conversion Rate?

A good ecommerce conversion rate is difficult to pinpoint. If you believe what you read, the average conversion rate rests between 1% and 4%. Look at the graph below for the average conversion rates of UK online shoppers in 2020. 

However, these rates differ widely depending on an array of factors, like: 

• Conversion goals: Everyone measures a conversion differently (like ad clicks, purchases, registrations) and the rate of conversions will vary based on what you choose. 
• Different companies: Every website, audience, and industry are different.

Even within your industry, there is no ultimate figure you can rely on with 100% confidence. You don’t want to obsess over meeting made up numbers. You just want to focus on developing an in-depth understanding of what matters to your users and developing great customer relationships.

Over time, you will use that number to see if the changes you’re implementing are having an impact on conversions. Soon, you’ll have an optimal conversion rate for your company.

How can I Improve my Conversion Rate?

There are many ways to improve your conversion rate, so consider using a CRO consultancy to see what will work for your company.

You can also use tools like behavioural email to deliver highly relevant content directly to your customers.

There is also Digital Assistant and Connected Media to provide you with the best in CRO services. 

You can also: 

• Use a CRO planner
• Promote your testimonials 
• Add a live chat option
• Test your offers

What Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) Service is the Best for me?

That depends on your specific needs.

Talk with your marketing and sales team before shopping around for CRO services. It will help you decide on an agency that can complement your company’s brand.

We may be biased, but Ve’s Digital Assistant and Connected Media services work with your company to provide all the support you need to boost conversion rates and provide an excellent user experience. 

If you won’t take our word for it, request a demo today!