4 Tips for Optimizing Your E-Commerce Site
Many retailers try to intertwine the attributes of physical stores with online flexibility to create an e-commerce site that's memorable and encourages action. However, e-commerce sites have conversion rates hovering around 2 percent, whereas physical retail stores often convert somewhere between 20 percent to 40 percent of their visitors.
Therefore, while it's important to work on optimizing your calls to action and remove friction from your funnel to inch up conversion rates, the real question at hand is what can you do differently to reach the other 98 percent.
Smart companies realize that understanding visitor intent and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) for task completions is key. Here are four tips to get started:
1. If you don’t know what your visitors want, ask them. There are several great and inexpensive tools you can use to survey visitor intent, captured right at the moment they're interacting with your brand and in a way that's not obtrusive to the experience. It's absolutely fundamental that you ask strong questions from which you can drive action. The two most important questions to ask are, “What did you come here to do?” and “Were you successful in accomplishing what you came to do?”
This empirical data will shed light on how many visitors came to check prices, research products, find a job, get support, buy a specific product, etc., as well as if they completed that action. From there, it becomes much easier to establish priorities and build a business case for your web investments.
For example, if 15 percent of your site visitors come to find your closest physical store and you're failing to provide it for them in an easy way, there's a clear incentive to invest an hour or two to incorporate this information in a practical location.
2. Understand visitor intent. In addition to those who came with the intention of buying, you’ll need to develop specific and actionable KPIs for the rest of your visitors. You’ll want to make sure you're realistic and honest about which KPI will improve. If the answer is none, you shouldn't undertake the activity.
Also remember to use strategic calls to action that are aligned with the intent of your traffic. For example, for visitors who have clearly shown themselves to be in the research phase, skip multiple pushes for buy now and focus instead on the value of opting in to your newsletter or following your brand on Twitter.
3. Let the voice of your visitors guide your improvement efforts. If your data shows that 35 percent of the visitors who came to make a purchase weren't able to accomplish their task, you know you need to create a more friction-free buying process.
Thus, your objective for the category of visitors in the buying stage will be to fix the impediments so that everyone that's open to converting can do just that. If this audience bucket represents 20 percent of your total traffic, your true and relevant conversion rate is really the percentage of visitors you convert within those open to converting, not the percentage of total website traffic you convert.
4. Perfection is the enemy of action; find next targets. While we need to agree on where we need to go — or “define your awesome,” if you will — we must also carefully define the next target to keep building momentum towards that definition of “awesome.”
Customer centricity should be customer motivated and retailer driven. Recognizing buyer intent and customer needs (what they really want!) enables you to deliver the right offer and support at the right time to drive more customer-centered engagement.
Joakim Holmquist is the director of digital marketing at EPiServer, a web content management software company.
