Increase Conversion Rate: This is how it works!

More customers, increasing orders and higher sales: Conversion rate optimisation has a huge influence on the success of your online shop. It is not simply optimised so that it increases, but rather because the increase in the conversion rate (also: conversion rate) positively influences concrete key business figures.

The larger the proportion of buyers out of the total number of shop visitors, the higher the profitability of marketing measures that draw these shop visitors to an online shop. Accordingly, a rising conversion rate leads not only to higher sales but also to a higher return on marketing investments. In this blog post, we have summarised everything about increasing the conversion rate.

What is a Conversion in E-Commerce?

In e-commerce, a conversion ultimately means a successful conclusion of a purchase. However, this main goal is preceded by several intermediate goals that lead the customer step by step to the desired action. These are referred to as macro- or micro-conversions.

To give an example of such a micro-conversion: Before a shop visitor makes a purchase, he must first reach the product page and place something in the shopping basket.

Measuring not only the Marco Conversion Rate, but also the different Micro Conversion Rates has the advantage of revealing optimisation potential.

There is a very simple reason for this: as a rule, micro conversions are much higher than the actual macro conversion. For example, shop visitors often place products in the shopping cart without completing the purchase process. If the micro conversions increase without the macro conversion rate following suit, shop operators can quickly intervene and identify where exactly the visitors abandon their purchase. In this way, online retailers can increase the conversion rate in a targeted manner.

Increase Conversion Rate: 10 Tips for Online Shops

If you want to increase the conversion rate, you are faced with a multitude of possibilities. Depending on where the weaknesses in your online shop lie, these 10 optimisation measures are guaranteed to increase the conversion rate.

Reduce Abandonment Rate

Visitors arrive on a page, find the right product, place it in the shopping basket – and abruptly cancel the purchase process. Abandoned shopping baskets are particularly annoying for shop operators, as the purchase is usually only one click away.

This is exactly where the potential for reducing the abandonment rate lies: the further back the visitor is in the conversion funnel, the higher the purchase probability. Take advantage of this fact and increase the conversions in your online shop. uptain as an all-in-one tool for reducing the abandonment rate has the right solution for every scenario:

• Newsletter Popups generate qualitative subscribers and thus convert interested but not ready-to-buy shop visitors into returning paying regular customers.
• Exit Intent Popups prevent shopping cart abandonments at the moment they occur. Shortly before the potential shopping cart abandoner leaves the shop, a window tailored to the abandoner appears.
• Abandoned Cart Emails bring shopping cart abandoners back into the purchase process after they have already abandoned and ensure that the abandoner completes their purchase without any problems.

User-Friendly Navigation and Search Function

The navigation provides the visitor with orientation in the online shop – whether he is specifically looking for a certain product or just browsing. If, on the other hand, the navigation is not geared to the user’s needs and expectations, the user will leave the shop annoyed.

To avoid this scenario and increase the conversion rate, a user-friendly navigation and an error-tolerant search function are needed. This includes not only a navigation bar, but also breadcrumb and contextual navigation. These improve the shopping experience and user-friendliness in terms of user experience. This makes it easier for the website visitor to search for a desired product or simply to browse.

Gaining the Trust of Visitors

Trust and credibility are important buying factors in e-commerce. Be sure to build trust by signalling credibility, because the barrier to leaving the site and visiting another shop is very low in e-commerce. Once you have gained the trust of the site visitors in your online shop, there is not much standing in the way of conversion. Shop operators have several trust-building measures at their disposal:

• Common seals of approval
• Product reviews
• Social media presence
• Service orientation
• SSL encryption

Improve Product Descriptions

Product descriptions are part of the discipline of content marketing and have a considerable influence on the conversion rate of an online shop. Since we do not have the product physically in front of us when shopping online, we ideally need a detailed description. With the help of an optimised text, you convince the visitor of the product. For this, the added values and advantages in particular should come to the fore. The buying decision can be strongly influenced by good, detailed content. Questions that product descriptions can answer

• How does the fabric of the jumper feel?
• How big is the coffee machine in detail?
• How loud is the hairdryer?

Optimise Product Images

Product images visually support the product description. No matter how detailed a description is – we need images and videos to assess visual characteristics such as colour, shape and texture. Professionally implemented, images increase the buying mood, so that the conversion rate also increases. However, there are a few things you should keep in mind when it comes to product images:

• High information content: The product image should answer all possible questions that a prospective buyer might ask. The questions vary from product to product. For example, with clothes, the colour and fit are often relevant. Ideally, the prospective buyer should be assured that they know everything they need to know about the product.
• High resolution: The potential buyer wants to have the feeling of holding the product in his hands. To enhance the shopping experience, you need high resolution images that bring out the details (e.g. fabric for clothing and workmanship for electronic items).
• Changing perspectives: Make sure you show the product from multiple perspectives. The inside of backpacks and suitcases are key to purchase. For clothes, zooming in on the fabric can convince you of the quality.

Personalise Customer Communication

Every customer is unique in his or her specific wishes and needs. Good salespeople in stationary retail therefore recognise quite quickly how to deal with a customer and whether the customer should be called by his or her first name. Static communication, on the other hand, quickly comes across as inappropriate.

In e-commerce, there are specialised algorithms that use intelligent data processing to recognise which type of communication the customer prefers. The uptain® ALGORITHMUS enables communication that is individually tailored to the individual purchase abandonment. The exit intent popups, abandoned cart emails and newsletter slide-ins thus guarantee the best possible success in reducing your abandonment rate!

Generate Newsletter Subscribers

A sustainable method for online retailers to increase their conversion rate is to generate quality newsletter subscribers. Every online shop receives visitors who are interested but not yet ready to buy. This is completely normal. These are potential paying customers who only want to be convinced of the shop and its products. If you convince unknown visitors to subscribe to a newsletter, you can convert them into regular customers with the help of a newsletter.

But how do you convince visitors to subscribe to a newsletter? Give each visitor the individual incentive they need! The following incentives are suitable for generating newsletter leads:

• Vouchers for those visitors who are price-sensitive
• Exclusivity for those visitors who are looking for benefits
• FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) for those visitors who are curious and don’t want to miss anything

Providing Social Proof

Whether in our private lives or when shopping: we always like to rely on the experiences of others. Social proof means social proof and describes the phenomenon that we trust the evaluations and experiences of our fellow human beings. The rule is: the closer we are to a person and the more expertise a person has, the more we trust their reviews. The following options are available to shop operators to benefit from social proof:

• Influencer Marketing: look for influencers who appeal to your target group. An influencer who has 10,000 followers that match your target group can provide social proof and lift sales at the same time.
• Customer Reviews: Independent reviews from people we don’t know also build social proof. In addition to product reviews, there are rating portals for online shops (e.g. shopauskunft.de).
• Customer Testimonials: Place quotes from your customers on the website. Especially in B2B, this can increase the conversion rate. Here, well-known companies are often given as a reference.
• Expert Opinions: Well-placed expert opinions can also increase the conversion rate as a reference. Depending on the industry and product, medical specialists, lawyers or teachers can be used as experts.

Adapt Call-To-Action

Often underestimated and easily overlooked, call-to-actions (CTAs) hold enormous potential for optimisation. Small changes in colour, choice of words and positioning can make or break a purchase. CTAs are calls to action in the form of buttons that give the customer a further impulse to buy and lead him to the next step of the buying process. Therefore, these calls to action should be convincing – both in terms of content and design. This is the only way to successfully lead visitors from the product page to the beginning of the checkout process, on to entering the data and finally to payment and ordering. What makes a good CTA?

• Colour and Design: The CTA only catches the eye if it stands out from the rest of the website. Therefore, it is advisable to choose the colours in such a way that they create a contrasting colour combination. On the other hand, colours appeal to human emotions. Red, for example, means danger, but also dominance. Blue, on the other hand, can signal relaxation, but also coldness. So the choice of colour should be carefully considered.
• Active Verbs: Since CTAs are calls to action, use action-oriented texts for a higher conversion rate. Verbs in particular signal to us that there is something to do. Avoid vague formulations such as “Click here” or simply “More”. Much more promising are active verbs with phrases like “Discover now” (early phase of the customer journey) or “Buy now” (late phase of the customer journey).
• Urgency: One of the strongest incentives in marketing is urgency. Every online retailer is familiar with artificial scarcity, for example. Use the incentive of urgency also in your CTAs by choosing time-related phrases such as “Buy now” or “Only for a short time”. In this way, you create strong impulses in the visitor that convince them to order.

Optimise Checkout

As with shopping cart abandonment, the same applies to the checkout: the potential customer is at the end of the conversion funnel and is therefore more easily convinced to make a purchase. A wide variety of elements can be optimised in the checkout:

• Offer different payment methods (Standard Payment and Quick Payment)
• Optimise shipping (shipping prices, terms and times)
• Enable guest orders to reduce the hurdle to ordering
• Keep the ordering process short to take advantage of attention spans
• Mobile-first design in the checkout to attract mobile users
• Optimise loading times and prevent session time-outs

How Online Merchants start to Increase the Conversion Rate

If you as a shop operator want to increase the conversion rate in a targeted manner, you should understand conversion rate optimisation as a process. The market and customer expectations are subject to constant change, to which you can react appropriately by optimising the conversion rate. These 5 steps will help you to increase the conversion rate in a targeted manner:

• Analyse: Before the actual optimisation, the weak points of the customer journey must be identified. Why and at what point does the visitor abort the order process? Classic conversion killers are, for example, a lack of mobile responsiveness and a lack of visitor trust in the online shop. A user-friendly website on mobile devices not only impresses visitors. It also ensures a better ranking by Google and can positively influence the ranking in the search results. With the help of various quantitative (e.g. A/B testing) and qualitative (e.g. surveys) methods, you can uncover the weak points in your online shop.
• Solution ideas: After enough data has been collected from the analysis and it has been determined where the optimisation potentials lie, you need solution ideas, which you can find with a competitor analysis, for example. It is important that the collected solutions are measurable.
• Variant creation: You have now found the weak points and collected solutions based on them. Now these solutions must be embedded in the online shop. The embedded solutions are initially only variants that you test in the next step.
• Testing variants: Now the hot phase begins. In the test, the new version is compared with the old one. Shop operators usually use A/B tests. Here, visitors are randomly given one of the two variants: A or B.
• Test evaluation: At the end of the A/B test, you know which of the two variants leads to more conversions. You can now permanently establish the variant with the higher conversion rate in the online shop.

Conversion Tools: Automated Conversion Optimisation

The interplay between manual measures (e.g. building trust) and conversion tools integrated into the shop (e.g. winning back shopping basket abandoners with uptain) promises the best possible success.

Conversion tools…

… increase the conversion rate through real-time analyses where there are technical limits to manual measures. The uptain® ALGORITHM permanently processes several million data points, such as the browser and the end device, but also weather data and the movement of the mouse pointer.

… automate the conversion rate increase after a one-time integration. After configuration, which takes about 30 minutes, the process of winning back your shopping cart abandoners is fully automated.

… recognise individual needs and offer personalised solutions that are particularly promising. The uptain® ALGORITHM takes into account a multitude of influencing factors in order to understand each individual visitor in the best possible way and to offer the appropriate solution in each case (e.g. Whatsapp service).

… are resource-saving (time, costs, personnel) and allow you to concentrate on the essentials. Our solutions adapt effortlessly to your corporate design – without IT or design knowledge. So you not only have recourse to more efficient methods, but also to resource-saving ones.

Calculate Conversion Rate

Now you know what you need the conversion rate for, how and why shop owners increase the conversion rate and how to start with conversion rate optimisation. However, if you want to measure the conversion rate, you need a formula to calculate it. First of all, there is a simple formula for calculating the conversion rate, but it is not tailored to the needs of shop operators.

The problem with this formula is that the page visits or sessions are in relation to the sales. However, the relationship between the unique visitor and the sales is much more meaningful, as the focus here is on user behaviour. A visitor does not always buy at the first visit to an online shop, but passes through several touchpoints within the customer journey before actually completing the purchase. This applies to regular customers and even more so to new customers. Therefore, the following formula for calculating the conversion rate is always preferable:

What is a good conversion rate depends strongly on the industry. The graph below shows: Online booksellers would be happy with a conversion rate of online pharmacies. But factors such as target groups, brand awareness, product range, pricing and website design also play a decisive role.

Increasing the conversion rate remains a major challenge for online retailers. Because technology and customer expectations are constantly evolving, optimisations must also be constantly carried out. uptain covers a specific area of conversion optimisation with the reduction of the abandonment rate and ensures an automated increase in the conversion rate.