How Can SMBs Increase their Customer Conversion Rates?

02/12/2021

A lot of effort goes into starting any kind of business, including e-commerce. First, you have to research the market and then decide what kind of product you want to sell. Next, you need to determine how to source and market those products. After which, you also have to register your business. Once the business is registered, it is time to sell your products.

In today’s highly competitive online market, it is important to encourage interested consumers to purchase your product. This act is called customer conversion. But what is the meaning of conversion for an online business? It is simple. It is the process of converting visitors to your website into customers who make a purchase.

Now, let’s understand the meaning of conversion rate. It is the percentage of visitors who actually become paying customers. For example, if 100 people visit your website or the landing page and only 10 of them end up making a purchase, then your conversion rate is 10%.

Remember, a higher conversion rate means greater sales. But customer conversion may not happen easily. You need to continuously put in work for it. In this blog, you can learn how to improve your conversion rate by following simple tips.

Tips to Increase Customer Conversion Rates

Attracting consumers to your website or landing page is great. But if they don’t make any purchase, then your business and revenue will get affected. Therefore, it is important to collect and analyze data to improve your customer conversion rates. This process is called conversion rate optimization. You can use the following tips to improve the conversion rate of your website visitors.

Optimize Product Pages:

Data shows that only 2.58% of e-commerce website visits converted into actual purchases in the 2nd quarter of 2019, worldwide. One of the reasons can be poorly designed product pages. It is important to understand that the product pages are digital sales assistants. They should be able to convince the website or landing page visitors to add those products to their carts.

The best thing you can do is optimize your product pages with SEO keywords. This can help to make your product pages appear on the top results of search engine results. Besides this, you can use high quality images and videos to make your product pages more visually appealing.

Offer Discounts/Coupons:

Offering discounts or coupons can be one of the most common strategies to increase customer conversion rates. In fact, a survey highlighted that 92% of Indian consumers say that discounts are their main drivers for online shopping.

But excessive discounting can also hurt your profits as customers can get used to getting discounts from your business. To avoid this, you can try using limited-time discounts or coupons, which will create a sense of urgency among your customers. To avoid coupon expiry or end of discounting period, they might go forward with the purchase.

Highlight Product Reviews

Most consumers check product reviews before buying any product. For them, product reviews give them a neutral judgment for the product. In fact, a survey found that positive and negative reviews play an important role in influencing and helping customers make their purchase decisions.

Product reviews are very important to sellers. According to data, having more than 50 reviews per product can mean a 4.6% increase in conversion rates. Therefore, it is recommended to prioritize customer reviews and testimonials on your product pages. For website conversion optimization, you can encourage your customers to write product reviews. They can be considered as important as your product descriptions and photos.

Offer Free Shipping

According to available data, many online shoppers abandon their shopping cart due to high shipping costs. For them, free shipping is one of the main factors that influence their buying decisions. You can potentially increase your average website conversion rates by choosing to offer free shipping. But as a small business, providing free shipping can hurt your profit margins.

Therefore, you can find ways to make free shipping profitable for your business. You can do this by adding a free shipping threshold.

Offer Returns and Refunds

Your return and refund policy can affect your customer conversion rates. Shoppers cannot feel or touch the products offered online. Therefore, an unclear return and refund policy can lead them into second-guessing their buying decisions. You can work towards solving this by having a clearly stated return and refund policy.

A study found that 90% of surveyed consumers highly value free returns while shopping online. It also revealed that 62% would buy again from a business that has free returns and easy refund policies. By doing this, you can build confidence and trust among your customers and encourage them to purchase your products.

Simplify Checkout Process

Many consumers abandon their online shopping carts due to long or confusing checkout processes. Let us think about this from a shopper’s perspective. They want to complete their shopping as soon as possible. But a long or complicated checkout process can slow them down. This can annoy them and negatively affect their shopping experience.

You can avoid this by simplifying your checkout process. You can make your checkout process user friendly by reducing steps and minimizing the required customer information to be entered. Keep it simple.

Offer Multiple Payment Options

In this digital world, consumers have access to multiple payment options. These include digital wallets, direct bank transfers and credit/ debit cards. However, if you offer only one or very few payment options, you unintentionally end up affecting their shopping experience and your conversion rates.

To avoid this, consider offering more payment options. Research can help you find the options that are most preferred by your target audience. Data reveals that businesses can improve their sales by up to 71% by having top 3 payment options accessible. This can help to simplify your customer’s checkout process and prevent cart abandonment.

Encourage Cart Abandoners to make purchase

If someone adds items to their carts and then abandons it, they become cart abandoners. But these people are also your potential customers. You can encourage them to make purchases they abandoned. You can choose to do this by sending cart reminders, push notifications and emails. By not doing so you may miss potential customer conversion.

Conclusion:

Always remember, conversion rates may have a major impact on your revenue. If your website or product page has many visitors and still a low conversion rate, then it is time for you to make some changes. Luckily, there are multiple ways you can make use of to improve your customer conversion rates but not every website conversion optimization technique can serve as a magical recipe. You can however use the tips mentioned here to possibly increase your conversion rates and enjoy improved sales.

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