Last updated - September 15, 2021
Conversions are a matter of powerful impressions. From landing on your website, to checking out, every step is a new impression. You have all the power to anchor your visitors so they stay for the whole process and bump up your conversion rates by becoming buyers.
Once you’ve successfully brought visitors to your website through great advertising, you need to entice them to your product pages, and to the part of the page that seals the deal for them. All the while providing them with a fluent and engaging user experience.
Follow these tips to improve the conversion rate on your Shopify store.
1. Strategically place your Add to Cart buttons
There are two main types of shoppers – the impulse buyer and the savvy shopper. The former is likely to buy your product on the first whim and the latter is sure to read through every tiny piece of the product page. You will find that the most successful Shopify stores cater to the both of them. By tweaking their theme to have the Add to Cart buttons above the fold, they make the impulse buyer click on it immediately, and at the bottom of the product page, they make the savvy shopper more likely to add your product to their cart while under a strong impression left by just having viewed the pictures and read the product description, reviews and testimonials.
2. Pique your shoppers’ interest with reviews
Mediocre reviews are a dime a dozen nowadays. More often than not, you see product pages with dozens – or even hundreds – of reviews, a lot of which are in the vein of “Works great!” or “I love it!”. While that may impress someone who is only skimming through your store, the discerning buyer will want to know what the earlier adopters have to say about that specific product they’re after. Buyers who are less than happy about their purchase are usually the most verbose, so it is a good idea to counteract them with lengthy reviews from satisfied shoppers. The likelihood of purchase peaks at 4.7 out of 5 with everything above indicating insincere reviews. If you believe in your product, you will surely be around that number, so incentivize all your customers to leave honest and thorough reviews and watch your engagement and conversion rise. Prospective customers who interact with reviews are four times as likely to convert than those who don’t. Use that to your advantage.
3. Improve your site search function
Shoppers who use the search function are much more likely to convert because they have an explicit intent to select a product and buy it. Their queries should be met with a responsive search function which will immediately show them relevant results, together with catchy thumbnails of the products. For other visitors, you can use the visual cue of a search bar to signal to them that they can verbalize their desires in your store. Your search functionality should be pretty lenient; it should parse misspellings, auto-complete the drop-down on every letter entered, and process natural language into correct queries, especially if you’re catering to an international audience. Your search bar can also moonlight as a call-to-action, signaling that they can search for similar products.
4. Have telling product pictures
Your Shopify store is much more than a display window. It is an opportunity to present your product in ways that traditional storefronts cannot. Imagine if you had a product demonstrator for each product in your brick and mortar store. It would drive expenses through the roof. But in your Shopify store, you have the ability to do exactly that. Add photos of your product from multiple angles so potential buyers can see better what it would look like once it’s in their hands. If they can imagine owning it from the pictures alone, you are one step closer to win them over. That’s why you need to make sure at least a few photos show the product in action, even if it is the most mundane thing.
5. Email Capture
You can convert visitors who don’t buy from you the first time in other ways. On average, only 3% of visitors are first-visit shoppers. You can start to build relationships with them and reel them in if you get their emails.
One thing you can do is to remove distractions from your sign-up pages. Each ad you run on another platform can redirect to a different landing page. Don’t redirect them to your eCommerce home page, which probably has a lot more information than visitors are willing to take in. For the best impression, make sure that all elements are in line with the ad that brought them there. Streamline the experience to solidify the idea of your brand in their heads. Then it will be much easier to persuade them to leave their email address.
One of the tools that you can use are pop-ups. They should be attention-grabbing and have engaging and highly converting text – mind you, it is usually not more than one sentence, so make it count – playful, funny, or urgently calling to action, and you can even add a discount or some other kind of incentive for signing up.
eCommerce merchants dread driving people away with pestering and overly aggressive calls to action, like popups, so you should carefully choose the right time to display them. A good time is as they’re leaving the page, so that their experience is annoyance-free while they’re spending time making the decision whether or not to buy your product.
You can engage your visitors with a gamified approach to signing up. You are almost surely not their first website or sign up, so it’s a good idea to make a lasting impression by presenting them an interesting and playful way to sign up.
6. Make your store accessible to mobile users
You want to use the convenience and ubiquity of mobile phones to your advantage. Many people use their phones as their primary device for communication, entertainment and shopping. You can witness for yourself the negative impact of not adopting the mobile paradigm well or soon enough in high-profile websites who were too short-sighted or lazy to update their platforms. For the most part, your Shopify theme will be optimized for mobile browsers. However, it is always highly recommended that you double-check every page by narrowing your browser and converting to mobile views in the console browser. Mobile users are much more likely to stay and make that purchase if your store looks as inviting as possible.
7. Make your website layman-friendly
Your customers come from all walks of life. Not all of them have been born with an iPad or mouse in their hands. When you are designing your store, you need to take into account that even somebody like your proverbial grandma is a visitor and a potential buyer. Make her shopping experience as easy as possible. From the landing page to the checkout, streamline the process so you don’t lose customers along the way. The entirety of your store should be easy to navigate and understand. Go through every step and make anything that doesn’t flow well easier.
User behavior, tastes and preferences evolve on an almost daily basis. Your store should reflect the cutting-edge trends in user experience design with tried-and-true marketing tactics to drive your engagement, conversion, and ultimately revenue up.
