6 tips for increasing e-commerce conversions

Increasing e-commerce conversions is a high priority for online storefronts. A "conversion" means a visitor has taken a desired action that boosts your business, whether that means signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase.

Ultimately, you determine the action in question, as well as the ratio of actions to visitor sessions or the number of visitors. (I recommend looking at visitor sessions over unique visitors because then you can measure interaction and how often a user returns to your site.)

Episerver, a software company, released a benchmark report (registration required) in 2019 on conversion strategies. After tracking more than 1 billion unique shopping sessions across 159 unique retail and consumer brand websites, the study reported that 50 percent of visitor sessions happen on mobile devices, such as smartphones, while 9 percent happen on tablets, and 41 percent happen on desktop computers. As a result, e-commerce owners can conclude, logically, that their sites need to become mobile-friendly, and they can adjust their templates accordingly. 

Once you set your parameters, you can set a strategy. Decide what actions you want users to take, and quantify them using the appropriate software. Then, you can solidify the goals you want to achieve regarding website conversions.

As the CEO of a company that specializes in internet marketing, I recommend these strategies and common-sense activities to help you increase conversions:

1. Prioritize user convenience. Convenience improves the user experience and makes users more likely to stay on your website to complete a certain action. In my experience, providing convenience also encourages consumers to think of your business more fondly and recommend it based on word of mouth, which is one of the most reliable forms of business communication. This means that people will visit and increase the number of potential conversions.  

2. Make sure your website is legible and presentable. By this, I mean to test that the font you've chosen is readable in the given size against the background of your website. Some of this is basic graphic design, and sometimes it is determining what the average viewer can see. Ensure that navigation is clean so that users can visit the pages they desire to see and find the objects that they need. Remove any superfluous features, and keep the ones that you need. These can include pop-up ads (no one really likes pop-up adds when they a visiting a site). 

3. Ensure that all of your links, images and media are working. People do not look kindly upon broken links, so implement 301 redirects for pages that have been shut down or are no longer working, especially after a migration. Implement high-quality images with alternative text so as to meet site compliance regulations, and keep tabs on any images in question to have a replacement on hand if the originals break during migration.

4. Reduce your website page loading time as much as possible. As mentioned, a potential customer wants convenience. That means they would rather not wait for longer than a few seconds to see an online store. Test your page speed on a regular basis using different tools, and identify features that are creating bottlenecks. If necessary, upgrade your website platform to reduce loading times. But only do this if an upgrade will receive a fair return on the investment. 

5. Think about SEO. When you have finalized your website's formatting and downloading, you can focus on SEO, or search engine optimization. Google uses SEO to rank websites based on how well they match certain keywords; you want to be the first result when someone types in that page entry. If you are selling keycards for security, for example, make sure that you rank first on Google when someone types in “keycards” or other relevant terms. 

Also, make sure that your content is accurate and provides value to the user when they visit your website. There was a time when people would try to rank higher on Google by posting pages with the same term repeated over and over again, proving to be nothing more than spam. Google eventually caught on to this and created algorithms to flag for spam, thus ensuring that a website would not use the same term past a certain limit. 

While this development was good for Google to catch potential spammers, it made SEO writing harder for copywriters. I recommend using a keyword to a limited point and then expanding on it. That way, the user gets a benefit out of the material they are reading, and your ranking on search engines won't be at risk.

6. Add a call to action to every piece of writing on your website. Your call to action is a short passage that encourages your users to complete a certain deed immediately. These can include contacting the website’s customer service, signing up for a newsletter or participating in other conversion-related activities. The main point is that you want customers to interact with your business, even if they don’t make a purchase immediately. What’s more, you remind them that they can take action and benefit themselves, as well as you, the business owner. 

E-commerce conversion increases don’t need to be rocket science. You simply have to make your website as presentable and valuable as possible, while using the current algorithms. These instructions will help you.