Top 6 Best Practices to Boost Conversion on Your Store

Ecommerce retailers work hard to increase their conversion rates and acquire users. Most of the time this happens at a premium cost. Therefore, it’s important to turn more browsers into buyers and employ conversion rate optimization tactics. 

Increasing your conversion rate lowers your cost per acquisition and increases your online sales.

Below SaleCycle outlines 6 key conversion rate optimization techniques:

[Speak To An Expert: Increase Your Conversion Rate]

1. Multi-Cycle Cart Abandonment Emails 

Cart abandonment emails allow brands to reconnect with visitors who have abandoned their carts.

On average, 84% of online shoppers will leave without purchasing items placed in their digital shopping cart. It’s vital to implement a solution that persuades visitors to complete their purchase and convert. 

Cart abandonment is when a potential customer starts a checkout process for an online order but drops out before completing the order. 

There are many different reasons for cart abandonment:

• Lack of trust 
• High shopping costs 
• Checkout complexity 
• Not the right time 
• Lack of payment options 
• Price too high
• And so on…

Cart Abandonment emails offer an easy route to purchase for those shoppers who have abandoned before completing checkout.

Using great timing, multicycle strategy, email design, and relevant content, shoppers can be persuaded to complete their purchase.

Basket Abandonment Emails have some of the best performance stats of any marketing email. They have an average open rate of 43% and conversion rates of 8.5%

Add Cart Abandonment Emails to increase the conversion rate by up to 8.5%

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2. Install a Climate action plugin

75% of consumers are actively looking to buy from Regenerative Brands, and they moderately appreciate being asked to donate to climate action when the brand is contributing nothing.

Taking climate action will give you a competitive advantage and resonate with your customers, especially if you communicate your values at the right moment in their journey on your e-store.

By popping a regenerative plugin in the cart section, you can increase your conversion rate by up to 20% and let your customers know about your positive impact.

The plugin is customizable so you don’t have to worry about branding consistency.

Key benefits of installing a Climate action plugin:

• Increase your cart conversion by up to 20%
• Affordable micro-contribution
• Improve your brand image, therefore your customers’ loyalty
• Create actual positive impact that you can track from a digital platform and use for your communication and marketing content
• A large variety of causes you can support

You can generate better emotional bonds with your customers and increase their loyalty to your brand. In doing so they can be aligned to the causes that you support with their preferences: reforestation, plastic pollution, education, women empowerment, coral restoration, etc.

Thus, a Climate action plugin is an authentic way to differentiate yourself from your competitors. You can boost your sales while building a lasting impact on the planet.

[Install this climate action plugin to increase your conversion rate by 20% ]

3. Save Cart Items 

When a shopper looks likely to abandon a purchase, it’s important to offer to save their cart items for later. This is perfect for when people aren’t quite ready to buy. 

When a shopper is about to leave, try showing a tailored message asking for an email address, to send them a reminder of their shopping cart contents.

Some key benefits:

• Grow your marketing & sales pipeline
• Increase on-site conversions
• Increase brand awareness after a customer’s journey

The average add-to-cart rate within e-commerce is around 11% therefore, utilizing mouse tracking, you can monitor visitors who add items to their cart, who then show signs of exit intent, identifying the moment they are about to abandon their purchase.

Then trigger a handy message inviting the customer to enter their email address and send their cart, re-engaging them with your site and allowing them to return to complete the checkout journey whenever they want.

By giving visitors the chance to subscribe, you can add additional data to marketing distribution lists to reach potential customers that you could have otherwise missed, all the while providing an improved customer experience.

Add this to increase the conversion rate by up to 8%

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4. Progress Bars 

Progress Bars inform, reassure and encourage users when completing a longer online form spread over multiple steps.

They are an incredibly useful conversion rate optimization tool to let your consumers know how far away they are from completing certain actions, such as completing a purchase or qualifying for free delivery.

It’s human nature to know where we stand, to know how long something will take or how close we are to the finishing line. The e-commerce purchase journey is no different. 

Let your consumers know close they are to completing certain actions, such as completing

a purchase, or qualifying for free delivery.

Using Progress Bars provides a visual cue for customers. If they’re close to abandoning, it can show them the purchase is almost completed, offering encouragement to continue.

Key benefits of Progress Bars: 

• Motivates the customer to complete the task 
• Produces reassurance and reduces uncertainty 
• Improves customer and brand communication 
• Identity online sales journey friction points  

In other situations, it can help to improve average order values by providing reasons to add more shopping baskets. A Progress Bar which tells them they can have free shipping if they spend £10 more it encourages people to add more shopping baskets.

The key is to provide a clear indication of the goal so the message is easily understood by shoppers. Context is key, so they need to be triggered at the right time – in response to customers about to leave the site, or when pages are loaded.

There are a group of high online traffic and sales periods such as Black Friday Sales or specific times of the year and month when your sector experiences peak patterns. 

The busiest retail months online can be a great opportunity to implement on-site progress bars that push customers further down the sales funnel.

Add a Progress Bar to increase the conversion rate by up to 18%

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5. E-commerce Countdown Timers 

Adding Countdown Timers to your campaigns is a great way to provide urgency, and help persuade your customers that they really need to purchase before it’s too late.

Countdown Timers are an excellent way to create urgency and provide customers with useful information which affects their decision to buy.

Creating a sense of urgency is a powerful technique that encourages shoppers to make a faster decision on the purchases they’re considering.

It’s a clear visual cue that time is running out and this can become a key factor in their purchase decision.

Ways to use Ecommerce Countdown Timers:

• Add countdown timers to your website: product pages and homepage 
• Add countdown timers to your checkout funnel 
• Add countdown timers to your cart abandonment emails

Countdown Timers work well when they offer useful information to customers – that a sale will end soon, or perhaps that they have an hour left to order if they want their purchase to be delivered the next day.

Countdown Timers can be effective at any time, and add an extra edge when used in key sales periods when offers are often time-limited. For example, we found that using timers during the Black Friday, sales period led to a 30% increase in click rates and a massive 200% increase in conversions.

Add Ecommerce Countdown Timers to increase conversion rate by up to 26%

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Data Source: SaleCycle tracks and analyses millions of online conversions each day from 500 of the world’s biggest e-commerce brands. The data highlighted is SaleCycle real-world e-commerce client data.

6. Live Product Trends 

Live Product Trends increases visitor awareness of product popularity and encourages a purchase.

With Live Product Trends, shoppers can see just how many other people are looking at the same product, adding urgency, and encouraging the customer to purchase now.

Using Live Product Trends across pockets of the website such as checkout funnel, product pages and emails is an effective way to keep your customers engaged. Some features include highlighting products low in stock or that are ‘hot’. 

Let your customers know the number of people looking at the same product by triggering an on-site alert when they show exit intent. For example, if there’s only one pair of shoes left in a customer’s size, then they need to buy quickly to avoid the risk of missing out.

There are many different ways to trigger Live Product Trends:

• Time-Based: when a user lands on a page or becomes inactive 
• Exit Intent: when a user drags the cursor outside of the webpage window 
• Number Trends: key numbers highlighted around the website 

It’s a great way to use social proof. Showing how many people have viewed a product recently tells customers other people are interested in that product, and makes it more credible.

Websites have plenty of useful data on customer behavior, product views, and purchase trends, Thus, it pays to use this to help and inform other shoppers. When displayed in the right context, such as an e-commerce product page.

Live Product Trends can give that extra firepower to any promotional campaign or increase conversion in targeted areas.

Add Live Product Trends to increase conversion rate by up to 13% 

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Handprint is the world’s leading Regeneration as a Service platform that enables companies to become more responsible and grow with the planet in a transparent & automated way. With 75% of consumers actively looking to buy from sustainable companies, Handprint’s Regeneration as a Service platform allows businesses to create impact with every sale and increase cart conversions by up to 20%.