5 Tips On CRO for eCommerce Sites

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of ensuring that your eCommerce site gets more sales. The recommendations below won’t drive more traffic to your eCommerce site, but they will help you leverage the current traffic by improving the engagement of your visitors, so that they actually become viable leads and make a purchase.

Make ‘About Us’ page about the visitor

When creating content for the ‘About Us’ page of your eCommerce site, make sure you are providing the information that your visitor is really looking for. This is an important page, and many visitors will want to see that you have this section on your site. However, contrary to popular belief, the majority of visitors are only interested in what your products can do for them. Keep the content about yours or your company’s history to a minimum. Instead, re-focus the content on this page to support the messaging about how you will solve their problems and help them overcome their most pressing challenges. And be sure to encourage visitors to take a specific action. Want an easy way to remember this? Make the ‘About Us’ page 80% ‘you’, 20% ‘me’.

• Keep the amount of “We” and “Our” oriented text to a minimum, and instead focus on providing insight about how your company understands your customers’ needs.
• Break up longer content with headings to make the copy easier to read, and present the information in a logical flow from most important to least important.
• Provide as many clear differentiators as you can that will impress your customers.
• Highlight partnerships, certifications, industry recognitions and awards prominently, especially with graphics.
• An origin story about your company can be relevant, but be sure to clearly communicate how that relates to how your products/services help your customers.

Use professional product photography

Professionally photographed, high-quality images of your products are going to have a direct impact on the conversion rate, as well as on the return rate, shopping cart abandonment, customer loyalty and overall brand awareness. The better your product’s look, the more likely you will elicit an emotional response that will drive customers’ buying impulses and inspire them to make a purchase without actually having physically experienced your products. One of the best ways to create the visual appeal required for an emotional response is to arrange products using a combination of display aids to dynamically present your products at different heights and from different angles.

• Display aids like acrylic display block risers can help to separate products to fit neatly within a nice composition. Acrylic display block risers are ideal for product photography because they come in various sizes, shapes and colors along with customization options too.
• True scale, or actual size of products is also important to keep in mind, and it is very important to establish scale within your product photography, and this is not easy. Photograph your products alongside other items that your customers are likely familiar with, and their true scale will be automatically revealed.
• Products that are extra-large or extremely heavy are best mounted on display pedestals, and these come in all types and styles and can be very effective in conveying the actual size within a product image

Create effective landing pages

Landing pages are intense distillations of marketing elements, where great copy, solid design, clever marketing, and strong data practices come together to drive visitors to a single goal. Your lead generation strategy will very likely utilize product landing pages to display sales messaging that comes as an extension of an advertisement, search result or link that the visitor clicked on. These pages should use short, compellingly written, bite-size copy that intersperses visual illustrations or graphics to communicate results achieved with your products or solutions. The following are some best practices you should follow on writing great product copy for landing pages.

• Use a heading at the top to orient the visitor so they know they are in the right place, and then another heading or subhead that calls out the product benefits. For example, ‘Nitrogen Supplements (Heading)>Produce more crops in less time (Subhead)’.
• In bulleted lists, consider starting each with a verb and not an adjective.
• Don’t use superlatives unless you prove them with facts. Statements like, “We have the best customer service” are overused and mean little. Add some quantitative data to back up what you are saying.

Sell the solution, not the product

If you want to be persuasive, don’t simply list product features out, but instead talk about the benefits in a high level way. Focus on the capabilities that products enable for customers and the value they get. This is called solution selling, and the customer will instantly know that you understand their pain points and you can service their needs. Do this at the very top of your products pages, and it will capture your prospects’ eyes and encourage them to read more about what you have to offer them. You will also need to hit on core items that show real business value. A solid value proposition needs to be underpinned on one or more of these four fundamental business drivers: driving revenues, reducing expenses, creating efficiencies and mitigating risk. Insert quantitative metrics to support the story you are telling, and that will resonate with the customer hitting on one or more of the business drivers mentioned above. Finally, your products are not the only ones on the market, so be sure to provide clear differentiators that dissuade your visitors from looking further for the products they need.

Get the visitor to take a small action

You want to be sure to build up to a call to action (CTA) on each page of your eCommerce site. One goal per page is good. Invitations like, ‘Learn more’, ‘Put a product in the shopping cart’, ‘Go To Products Page’, etc. By the time your visitor reaches the CTA, they will already be familiar with the value proposition outlined in your sales proposition, and the CTA should be highly relevant and easy to do. Create a sense of urgency, and make sure that what you are offering them in return for taking an action, is more valuable to them than what they have to give. For example, if you want them to download content about your products for a deeper dive into the capabilities they will gain, it should not require more than filling out a few contact details on a form. However, if you are offering a discount or a free trial, then you could ask them to invest more of their time, for example, by scheduling a sales call.

Conclusion

Remember that distraction inhibits conversion, so keep your visitors focused on the goal of taking a small action. Keep it simple and professional, both textually and visually, because the more that your visitor has to read and visually process, the less likely they will be to make a conversion decision. Minimize distractions such as too many product options, poor images that don’t visualize scale, and links to extraneous information while implementing the above best practices and you are sure to convert more on your eCommerce site.

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Guest Post By Ray Ko

Ray Ko has been creating effective visual merchandising and interior design strategies for retailers for more than 20 years. Today, he is the senior ecommerce manager for shopPOPdisplays, a leading designer and manufacturer of stock and custom acrylic product.