Sales Enablement

Increase Your Conversion Before Increasing Your Traffic

June 10, 2021
June 10, 2021

If there were 100 people in your store, but only one was making their way to the checkout, would you rush outside with a sign and start trying to usher as many people in as possible, or would your efforts be better used on first approaching the customers who are already in-store and engaged, and seeing if they have any reservations you can assist with. I’d wager the second, so why are businesses spending most of their time and money getting more traffic to the site, when what they should be doing is converting existing traffic first?

In our second episode of Everything eCommerce, we discussed platform and personalisation with James White of Nosto, the world’s leading eCommerce personalisation platform. One of the points raised was that many businesses invest so much effort into increasing traffic to their website, and not actually working on converting the existing traffic.

The average conversion rates of eCommerce websites in Q2 of 2018¹ are as follows:

  • Globally – 2.86%
  • In the US – 2.63%.
  • In the UK – 4.31%
  • Invesp internal metrics found that an average of 13% of visitors converted into customers, with the highest converting site sustaining a rate at 28%.

So how can we take those browsing visitors and turn them into customers or leads?

  1. Focus on top-converting traffic channels

If you’re wanting to improve your conversion rate, it makes sense to look at which channels are already doing well. The answer to this lies in your own analytics, so do some digging! It’s generally well known that email campaigns work and have the highest conversion rates, but for you, it could be from social or ad campaigns. If you’re investing time and money into a channel which is drawing in a lot of traffic but has a very low conversion rate, take a step back and look at putting that funding into the channels that are serving you well.

  1. Optimise your website

You want your website to have a coherent flow to it, and as many sticky pages as possible to keep visitors engaged. Using your analytics, you can see how long people stayed on your page, and then which page was the most common for people to leave your website after visiting. If there seems to be a pattern here, look into how you can change this. This could be anything from coming up with entirely fresh content to updating old data, redesigning and simply making content clearer. You may want to look at your page design, experimenting with different styles such as busy pages and a more minimalist look or adding offers and limited-time sales. Make sure your site is accessible, with clear information, and easy to navigate, otherwise, you risk customers getting lost or leaving the site due to not finding what they need.

  1. Call to actions and forms

If the form you are asking your customer to fill out is full of unnecessary or questions that are potentially too personal for an initial call/quote, you could be deterring people from submitting their details. If someone has to sit for a full ten minutes filling out a form just to get a super simple callback, chances are, they just won’t. Call to action buttons are also a big part of this, instead of just ‘submit’, try something like ‘Grow my traffic!’ or ‘Yes, I want my free item!’. Colour them, make them stand out visually and appealing to click on.

  1. Live chat as a personalised solution

Live chat has exploded in popularity over the last few years, and the answer to why that has happened ultimately lies in what it can do for conversion rates. Live chat is now not just a customer service solution, but a lead generating and sales enablement tool. Using a data-driven proactive chat strategy, a chatbox will appear to customers when they need it most and be able to assist them with any last-minute queries or qualm any concerns they have ahead of purchase.

90%² of customers said that the ‘live chat’ button gives them confidence that they can get help if they need it. The statistic speaks for itself, no matter how thoroughly you think you have optimised your website, there will always be customers who struggle to find what they need. Ultimately, having a chat agent there to speak to could be the deciding factor on whether that person becomes a customer or not.

It happens all too often, a business buys the license for a live chat software, only to then realise they don’t have the manpower, time or skill to manage it effectively. Investing in a managed chat solution is a handsfree way of ensuring your chat is running behind the scenes when you need it most.

Mobile traffic to eCommerce sites has steadily grown year on year, but mobile traffic conversion rates are still significantly lower than both desktops and tablets. By improving the mobile shopping experience, you can change things considerably. According to a Superoffice study, 62% of consumers now expect to see a mobile chat feature, and mobile chats accounted for 53% of all chats in 2018 (up 7.9% from 2017)³, so adding a live chat feature to your mobile site is a great solution.

At The Chat Shop we deliver 50% more leads from your existing traffic and our chat gives an uplift in sales conversion of between 5 and 15 times when compared to non-chat engaged customer journeys. Click here to find out more.

Watch the full podcast here.

¹https://www.invespcro.com/blog/the-average-website-conversion-rate-by-industry/

²http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/commerce/atg/cross-channel-commerce-survey-333315.pdf

³https://99firms.com/blog/live-chat-statistics/#gref

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