Five CRO Strategies That Will Help Retailers Online

Most ecommerce businesses are looking for long-term, sustainable growth. A key part of achieving this is optimising conversion rates. There’s growing competition within the online space making the customer experience more important than ever. By following conversion rate optimisation (CRO) best practices, and adopting the latest ecommerce solutions, you can start creating the seamless, personalised journey that customers have come to expect. 

Nowadays, driving new traffic to your website isn’t enough. You need actionable ways to persuade these window shoppers to convert into loyal customers.

In this article, personalisation and buying behaviour experts, Salesfire, share five CRO strategies that will help you get the most from your website traffic, drive revenue and encourage brand loyalty. With 576 million user journeys tracked, Salesfire are data experts at the leading edge of ecommerce.

1. Personalise the shopping experience

Online customers expect their shopping experience to be tailored to their tastes and preferences, and with so much choice out there, why shouldn’t they? It might sound difficult to create customer journeys that are unique for each visitor but with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, we can assure you that it isn’t.  

With consumer intent-based eCommerce solutions like Product Recommendations you can enhance the product discovery experience. Using data-driven insights to suggest items to customers based on their on-site behaviour,  you can curate a strategy that exposes consumers to more of your product offering. 

Utilising such tech also ensures the user has a personalised experience, which has been shown to reduce acquisition costs by as much as 50%, lift revenues by 5% to 15%, and increase the efficiency of marketing spend by 10% to 30%. 

Not only can they appear on your product, category and home pages but they can also be used as incentives when nearing the final stages of purchase, on the checkout page.

These intelligent suggestions inspire upsells, influence cross-sells and connect customers to their purchases faster, encouraging them to build bigger baskets and boost your average order value (AOV).

2. Stop shoppers from leaving

Many online retailers generate traffic through PPC and paid social strategies then not knowing how to stop shoppers from leaving without completing a purchase.

By leveraging exit intent technology you can track user behaviour to detect if a customer is about to leave your site. If you know when they’re about to leave, you have a better chance of stopping them through the use of Behavioural Overlays. 

These overlays trigger a targeted message to the shopper based on their on-site behaviour to reduce basket abandonment and inject them back into the sales funnel.  

They can be used in various ways to accelerate users through the shopping process, to re-engage them by offering a discount code or remind them of your best price guarantee. Even better, you can tailor the message for individual shoppers.

3. Social proofing

It’s no secret that people are influenced by people and when it comes to buying online, there’s no exception. 

When a customer can see that someone else is buying an item, or that they ‘approve’ of it, it encourages and influences them to purchase it too. This is social proofing and a solution you can use to increase conversion rates.

Eternal Collection utilises social proofing with exit intent on the checkout, guiding traffic through to catalogue sign up pages, increasing their average order value across the site. Amplifying conversion rate and maximising ROI to 51:1.

“So, how do I implement this?” I hear you say. Well, it’s simple really. If you can show that your products are deemed popular online through the use of ecommerce solutions, you can increase the desirability of your product. Solutions such as intelligent messaging on product pages, genuine reviews to instil confidence or exit intent Overlays. 

When using intelligent messaging, a customer can see that the shoes they have been keeping their eyes on are selling fast, or that the offer for free delivery is going to end at midnight, persuading them to convert. This sense of urgency can encourage customers to act, and keep them in the sales funnel. 

4. Optimise your site

Making your site accessible and responsive across all devices is incredibly important to ensure customer journeys run smoothly so not to deter or interrupt the purchase. Customers are making purchases from their laptops, desktops, mobiles and tablets – and with the growth of mobile commerce, ecommerce sites need to be up for the challenge.

Slow load times and non-responsive site designs infuriate shoppers and lead to retailers losing money, customers and conversions. 

Make sure your site is designed with the user in mind. Being fully responsive and easy to navigate on all devices should be the norm to ensure you don’t miss out on any mobile purchases.

5. Introduce visual search

If you haven’t already, you need to get a search function that is powered by visuals on your site. Visually Similar Search (VSS) can be applied on any ecommerce site to enhance the way your customers look for products.

The move to a more visually stimulating digital world has already begun, so why should search be left behind? Visual search now drives 6.4% of ecommerce revenue so it would be foolish to not jump on it. 

If you hadn’t already guessed, visual search uses an image as the search query. VSS is different to the likes of Google Images which uses the text associated with the image, giving your customers an advantage when it comes to online shopping.

Visually Similar Search is powered by AI, recognising images, shapes and colours to match the exact and similar queries to suggest similar products the consumer is interested in. This further enhances the user interface and experience as they can also upload their own images via visual search.

Stuarts London saw great success with Visually Similar Search influencing an overall conversion uplift of 8.19% and 11% of revenue influenced by the solution.

With technology moving forward, you can’t be left behind if you want to keep ahead in the competitive ecommerce market.

Summary

Achieving long-term, sustainable growth through optimising your conversion rates is made simpler when you adopt Salesfire’s best practices and introduce their latest ecommerce solutions.  

Based on years of extensive research into personalisation and buying behaviour, Salesfire has developed a full suite of industry-leading conversion rate optimisation solutions that help Shopify sites convert more visitors into customers. 

Make the next step to helping yourself get the most from your web traffic, driving revenue and encouraging brand supporters. Do you want to find out how Salesfire’s suite of on-site solutions can help increase your conversion rate? You can book a free demo with a Salesfire expert or fire an email over to enquiries@salesfire.co.uk