An eCommerce business lives off conversions. If they are not happening, the business dies. This site you are on now relies on digital downloads. A simple conversion rate improvement from 1.5% to 3.0% automatically doubles revenue. It is hard to do though and hard to test what actually is working. There are many external factors that are not easy to account for.
Here is a general eCommerce financial model that you can use to test out the effects of various conversions on ad spend. Also, here is a traffic conversion driven subscription forecasting model.
There are several ways to increase conversions for an ecommerce company based on studies:
- Optimize product pages: Make sure that product pages have clear, high-quality images and detailed product descriptions.
- Implement trust signals: Use customer reviews, ratings, and trust badges to build trust and credibility with potential customers. This is pretty hard to do credibly. Nowadays people see 5,000 reviews of all 5 stars and it doesn't feel genuine. However, if the reviews are real people, people see that and can tell to some degree if it is real or not.
- Make the checkout process easy: Reduce the number of steps and the amount of information required during checkout. I believe this is actually one of the biggest things you can possibly do. Look at Amazon and how simple they make spending money is on their site.
- Use social proof: Showcase customer testimonials, social media mentions, and trust badges on your website.
- Offer free shipping: Free shipping is one of the biggest conversion rate boosters, according to studies.
- Use urgency and scarcity: Use language and design elements to create a sense of urgency and scarcity to encourage customers to buy now. I don't like doing this personally, but apparently it does work.
- Personalize the experience: Use customer data to personalize the shopping experience and recommend products.
- A/B testing: Test different versions of your website and marketing campaigns to find out what works best for your audience.
- Optimize for mobile: With the increasing use of mobile devices, ensure that your website is mobile-friendly and easy to navigate on small screens. This is a little bit of an issue with my site. The mobile version doesn't show the 'view cart' feature so to see your cart you have to hit an 'add to cart' button.
- Create a sense of community: Building a sense of community around your brand can help to increase customer loyalty and repeat business, which can lead to increased conversions over time. Another huge one. When people talk to other people about your product / service and it is part of how they engage with each other, conversions will rise and purchases seem more like a fun thing to do rather than a chore or required task. It is also a great way to get word-of-mouth recommendations. Here are some strategies to start building a community around your startup business:
- Creating a community for a startup business can help to build brand loyalty and engagement, and can also provide valuable feedback and insights. Here are a few steps to help you create a community for your startup:
- Define your target audience: Understand who your ideal customers are and what their interests and needs are. This will help you to create content and activities that will be relevant and appealing to them.
- Choose the right platform: Decide where you want to build your community. This could be a social media platform like Facebook or Instagram, or a community-specific platform like Slack or Discourse. Twitter also works here.
- Create valuable content: Share valuable content that will educate, inspire, or entertain your target audience. This could include blog posts, videos, podcasts, or webinars.
- Encourage engagement: Encourage community members to participate in discussions, ask questions, and share their own experiences and insights. Use polls, quizzes, and other interactive content to keep things interesting.
- Foster relationships: Make an effort to get to know your community members and respond to their comments and questions. Show that you value their input and are interested in their feedback.
- Provide perks and rewards: Consider offering special discounts, early access to new products, or other perks to community members. This can help to incentivize engagement and create a sense of exclusivity.
- Continuously measure and improve: Continuously measure the engagement and satisfaction of your community members, use the feedback to improve your community and make it more valuable for your target audience.
- It's important to remember that building a community takes time and effort, so be patient and consistent in your efforts. With the right approach and strategy, you can create a loyal and engaged community that will help to support and grow your startup.
The above items will help you get the most out of your sales and marketing efforts.
More on A/B Testing
A/B testing for a website involves creating two or more versions of a web page (referred to as "variants") with slight variations, and then showing each version to a different group of users (referred to as "buckets"). The goal is to determine which version performs better in terms of a specific metric, such as click-through rate or conversion rate.
Here are the basic steps to set up an A/B test for a website:
- Identify the goal of the test and the metric you will use to measure success.
- Create at least two variants of the web page you want to test, each with a slightly different design or content.
- Use a tool such as Google Optimize or Optimizely to create the test and configure the variations.
- Set up the test so that visitors to your website are randomly assigned to one of the variants.
- Collect data on the performance of each variant, using the metric you chose in point 1.
- Analyze the data and determine which variant performed better.
- Implement the winning variant on your website.
- It's important to note that you should run the test for a significant amount of time to collect enough data, and it's also important to be sure that you are testing only one thing at a time, so that the results are not distorted by other factors.
Funny:
Why did the website designer spend all night at the computer? Because he wanted to increase his website's conversion rate!
