Talking about conversion rates, the primary goal of all business is to convert a lead (obtained from various online or other promotional campaigns) into a buyer (who finally purchases the product). Now, this conversion statistic is in turn based on many other dependent conversions. A few of these are mentioned below:
- Conversion of views to form submissions – This is one of the most common sources of online leads
- Conversion of form submissions to subscribers (be it to newsletter or any other offers etc.)
- Conversion of subscribers to repeat website visitors
- Conversion of repeat visitors to first time buyers
- Conversion of first time buyers to repeat buyers
Therefore, optimizing each of the steps in the customer life cycle would in turn cause an increase in percentage or probability of converted deals from online leads which are captured in the system.
Now, the question arises – how to optimize the content so as to ensure that the maximum customer progresses in the customer life cycle stages of ecommerce websites?
Majority of sales (especially B2C) do not involve a rational decision
This may sound erratic but it is not! There have been instances in the recent past wherein online stores with inferior products have recorded higher sales than online stores with better content and better pricing. This is because of the persuasion skills of these ecommerce sites. Most customers have been found to make purchases out of an emotional connect rather than judging on the rational utility of the product. Therefore, ecommerce’s who are able to present and position their products in a better way often get away with higher sales than otherwise.
All the glitters, at times, is gold
“All the glitters is not gold” may not be always true for online sales. This is because statistics (i.e., overall ecommerce statistics for 2016) show that 93% of the online consumers base their sale patterns and decisions on the visual appearance of the web portal or the ecommerce portal. And, approximately 52% of them decline to visit a particular web portal more than once in case they are not amused by the aesthetics of the website. The overall content involves the inclusion of videos, illustrating the utility of the product, chat widgets in the website, the ease of use and transition from one page to another and more importantly, the mobile responsiveness and the performance of the page – i.e. the time taken to load the web portal or the app.
Statistics and customer reviews have stated that more than 96% of visitors find videos to be more useful than static content, and the overall conversion may increase by more than 12% with the replacement of images with videos on the landing pages.
Apart from that, the loading speed is of extreme importance especially in economies wherein the internet bandwidth is less as compared to the number of users using it. Statistics say that about 73% of users accessing the landing pages from their mobile are not satisfied with the speed with which the website loads, and more than 65% of the online users are not willing to wait for more than 3 seconds for a website to get loaded. Therefore, it is important that the weight of the website is also light.
Live chat widgets do play a crucial part in customer engagement on the website. This, however, is more critical for B2B sales, which show a great improvement in conversion rates on having the live chat option on the website.
(Statistics are based on Brainfox’s infographic: 65 Proven Statistics About E-Commerce Consumer Psychology.)
A/B testing could be one of the options to ensure website optimization
Now, given the customer behavior and the trends, the question arises as to how designers should offer a landing page catering to the terrain which is being targeted by the business because the customer value perception may differ from one geographical region to another. A/B testing could be one of the solutions to this dilemma. It captures the customer behavior to each of the webpage variants that has been launched by the designer. Now, each of the variants can have different positioning of components – one with video vs. one with the image, one with the chat option vs. one without the chat option and so on. Therefore, analyzing customer behavior on these variants may help designers to get a better and a more customized insight on the customer preferences in that particular geography.
Payment Security – a major reason behind shopping cart abandonment
Trust seal is a non-negotiable factor which needs to be considered by online players before launching it to customers. Most online shoppers have declined transactions due to risks in the payment process. In addition to that, the pricing of the product should be realistic and competitive. The cart abandonment rate has been the maximum in the payment gateway stage of the transaction, where the customer has declined payment due to such reasons.
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