Event Marketing & Experience

6 Undefeated eCommerce Website Practices That Boost Conversions

Victoria Rudi
September 7, 2020

Table of Contents

If you’re looking to boost the conversion rate on your ecommerce website, you need to take a customer-centric approach in this day-and-age. Therefore, joining forces with a professional WordPress agency is a must.

Not only do customers expect personalized products, 84% of consumers now say that the experience is as important as the quality of the goods.

With this in mind, your ecommerce site should focus on customizing customer journeys to meet the needs of your target audience. By tailoring the ecommerce experience, you’ll garner much more attention from customers.

Unsure of the top ecommerce best practices to drive conversions? Try these winning strategies.

What effect does your website have on conversions?

Your website is often one of the first places that a customer gets to know your brand. As with all first impressions, it’s vital that you showcase what you do and why you’re the best at it.

Smart website practices help you to nurture a relationship of loyalty and trust with potential customers.

You need to do this with strong user experience (UX) design that personalizes the customer journey.

91% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that recognize their interests and personalize recommendations based on these. Implementing website practices that tailor your service will convert higher.

Offer an immersive experience that engages and entertains your audience, while educating them about your content. A third of marketers are using educational content to engage customers as it converts so well.

Since 42% of marketers agree that customers are more likely to buy products when they see educational content on social media, you need to share your web content on your social platforms.

Equally, consistency in branding serves to boost your conversion rates. With sleek, consistent branding, you can enhance your ecommerce conversions by 23%.

Consider how over-50’s insurance firm, Insure4Retirement, boosted conversions by 300% by focusing on UX web design.

The insurance firm did this by employing ecommerce site practices that:

  • Eradicated complicated jargon in the web content
  • Shortened the customer journey
  • Clarified the buying process with clearer signposts

6 Bulletproof eCommerce website practices that drive conversions through the roof

Driving conversions in your ecommerce business is a complex learning curve.

To ensure that you’re keeping up-to-date with the web design techniques that convert effectively, you need to research your clients and understand their motivations for buying.

By personalizing the experience, you can offer a tailored ecommerce experience, boosting conversions. Try these undefeated ecommerce best practices to kick your conversion rate into gear.

#1: Open with a freebie

While it may seem counter-intuitive, you should open your customer relationship with a freebie.

By offering your customer something for free at the beginning, you can hook them in early.

On a practical level, this may mean offering a free trial or demo on a landing page pop-up. Often customers have to trade contact information for the free demo. A free trial gives you a killer opportunity to collect data for future marketing.

Beyond this, a free gift at the start of your customer relationship shows that you are willing to build trust. Offering an olive branch, your free gift should showcase the high level of your work and the potential benefits your paid-for products could bring the customer.

The other reason to offer a freebie at the start, is to convince people to convert with a little nudge. People are suckers for offers, with 79% of consumers saying that free shipping is more likely to make them purchase.

Take Trainual, for example:

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Notice how Trainual guides visitors toward a free trial. There are three call-to-action buttons on the ecommerce homepage.

By encouraging visitors to try the product, Trainual shows off what the product can do.

This ecommerce website practice of offering free samples is highly effective at increasing brand awareness, generating leads, and capturing data.

This works to boost conversions now and for future marketing.

#2: Personalize the online experience

Shoppers now expect personalization in their ecommerce experiences.

On one hand, customers want to be recommended products that match their interests.

On the other, buyers want to customize the purchasing experience.

In general, 76% of customers simply want brands to understand their expectations and requirements.

You can personalize the online buying experience by adding customizable features, such as ways for customers to tailor the product or save their preferences.

Showing related content and a product recommendation also boosts engagement thanks to personalization.

Check out how Nordstrom Trunk Club does this with personalized styling:

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Taking it one step further than regular subscription boxes, Nordstrom Trunk Club offers a fully-personalized online styling service.

Buyers take a comprehensive style survey to determine their tastes.

Following the delivery of the subscription box, buyers can offer feedback on products to improve the next box.

This is one of the most popular ecommerce clothing services due to its intensely tailored service.

Moreover, chat widgets can also add a touch of personalized experience. If your product is more complex, you customers might need the extra help.

Take a look at how Spruce uses an accessible chat widget throughout their site to contact their support team:

Chat widgets can range from chatbots, to easy-access FAQs, to live chat, and more.

Letting them know you’re available when they need help increases your chances of converting them into satisfied customers.

#3: Optimize your SEO

SEO is the secret weapon of every ecommerce business.

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s the practice of creating a map for Google in your website content.

By optimizing your SEO, you appear higher in each relevant Google search result, improving your conversions.

Since nearly half of all traffic goes to the top Google search result, SEO is unbelievably important for increasing visibility.

You boost SEO in two main ways.

Firstly, you need to make sure your content SEO is on point.

Your content SEO refers to the actual content of your website elements. The words used within your articles, blogs, summaries, product page content, and so on.

These words should reflect popular relevant searches.

You can find popular keywords using tools like Ubersuggest and Answer the Public.

For example, let’s look at Eventtia’s keywords:

(Image Source)

As you can see, it would be wise to generate content that maps to ‘event management software’ and ‘brand events’.

Secondly, your technical SEO needs to be sharp.

This refers to all the tagging in the back end of your website that points Google to relevant non-text based website elements.

Keywords should be integrated into your image and video alt text, headlines, URLs, meta descriptions, meta tags, and so on.

By doing this, search engines connect your web pages to relevant searches and boost your search result rankings. This translates to more visibility and higher conversion rates.

#4: Feature pop-ups

Pop-ups are a nifty way to enhance activity with a conversion rate of nearly 10% for top-performing pop-ups.

Interrupting visitor actions on your website, pop-ups are a top tactic to introduce a relevant deal or offer a free product to urge conversion.

However, your pop-up strategy needs to be dynamic. Don’t feature pop-ups as soon as a visitor hits your website.

Instead, try delaying your pop-up by a few seconds. Research shows that the quicker a pop-up appears, the least effective they are. In fact, a 15 second delay can increase conversion by more than 38%.

Alternatively, try programming your pop-up to trigger when users scroll. The scroll action indicates product interest so push a relevant deal.

A popular and effective conversion tactic for pop-ups right now is the exit pop-up. Exit pop-ups trigger as visitors make moves to leave the site.

In this instance, deliver a pop-up that redirects visitors to stay on your ecommerce site with an unmissable offer.

Look at how marketing guru, Tim Ferriss, uses an exit pop-up to grab attention.

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Offering a free ebook, Tim Ferriss uses a full-page pop-up to give a last killer shot at converting the user before leaving.

The big picture is humanizing, creating an emotional connection to leverage trust. The content is just intriguing enough to make readers want to stay.

#5: Direct visitors with bold call-to-action buttons

To streamline your website user experience, it’s smart to direct customers with clear signposts. A CTA (call-to-action) button is perfect for this.

When optimized correctly, a CTA button can boost conversions on your ecommerce store by 232%.

Build a series of landing pages for different dedicated conversions. These landing pages could push customers toward a certain deal or product.

Alternatively, use landing pages to segment your target audience by persona-specific landing pages.

Whether your landing page conversion metric is data capture or sales, drive conversions with a bold CTA button.

Check out how energy beverage brand, Elemental Labs, use a CTA button:

(Image Source)

With two words, Elemental Labs personalizes the call-to-action by making the drink ‘yours’.

The directive is clear and the next course of action is obvious. Bold and bright, the button urges visitors to buy immediately.

#6: Maintain consistent, authentic branding

Consumers want authenticity. 86% of buyers are more likely to shop with companies whose brand personality feels genuine.

In this sense, you need to establish a clear brand identity and shape your visual and vocal brand messaging around this.

Keep your branding consistent. This refers to visual elements, color palettes, ecommerce website design style, messaging voice, and so on.

With clear, consistent branding, you can push conversions by 23%.

Think about Dr Martens, the famous boot brand:

(Image Source)

The black leather with the yellow stitching is so globally famous that all branding with this color palette makes consumers think of the Dr Martens brand.

You’ll see this particular shade of yellow and black all over the shoewear brand’s social media, website, and in-store merchandising.

Conclusion

Now you have six unstoppable ecommerce website practices under your belt, you’ll have no trouble with conversion optimization.

Just remember that website visitors expect a personalized online experience from ecommerce brands. Add customizable elements and tailor your content to your ecommerce store to foster an emotional connection that teaches your audience solutions.

Got questions about ecommerce website practices to boost your conversions? Reach out to our team at Eventtia.

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Victoria Rudi
Senior Content Specialist
With a Master’s degree in Event Management and a keen follower of SaaS technologies, Victoria is an event content master, producing insightful and valuable for Eventtia’s blog and beyond

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