On improving conversions

"You cannot improve what you do not measure"

This is an old maxim, but extremely valuable when managing your online business. Customer acquisition is one of the most important aspects in sales, and sellers try different techniques including ads and social media posts to get traffic coming to their website. And the smarter sellers try to measure how much each ad or campaign or post is contributing to the increasing visits to their pages.

Now, a visit obviously does not mean a sale - Increased visits can lead to increased sales. But customers who visit your pages drop off at different stages. If one analyses and visualises the patterns of number of customers visiting their site and where they are dropping off, the pattern begins to look like an inverted triangle, commonly represented by a 'Funnel Chart'.

For example, of the 100 people who visit your site, only about 43 may view a product detail page. 14 of them may add a product to cart while only 3 of them finally make a payment. Once we see that customers are dropping off at different stages, it becomes important to arrive at the reason. 

Why do customers leave your website without making any purchases?

This can be due to the following reasons:

a] Badly designed or spammy looking sites

First impressions matter. You should ensure that your sites are well organised and present all the relevant information. Your websites don't need to be stunningly beautiful all the time. What is more important is that your customers are able to find all the information easily. This, of course, includes information about the products but also other information such as your return and refund policies, shipment and delivery policies, terms and conditions, privacy policy and others. Also, add at least 2 ways in which your customers can reach out to you, such as a contact form or email address, phone number or a way for them to chat, such as tawk.to or Facebook Messenger widget. Omnibus has the embed snippet feature to make embedding chat widgets super-easy!

b] Not using https

This simple graphic should explain more on this. Not using https can result in increased bounce rates. Bounce rate is a metric that defines the percentage of visitors to your website that left without performing any action after landing on your page - typically single page sessions. (Read more).

 

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c] Insufficient information about products

When purchasing a product online, customers are often concerned about a post-purchase regret - "This is not what I wanted". And this happens due to an expectation-reality gap. Our goal as sellers should be to minimise this gap and be transparent about what the customer is going to get. When a customer visits a brick and mortar store, they are often able to obtain information about the product and ask clarifying questions to the sales person. This is difficult in the virtual world. Therefore, to earn customer trust, we should provide sufficient information about the product, discussing its use-cases and ensuring all the attributes are well written. This enables customers to not just understand the product better, but also compare it with similar products and make the right decision.

d] Poor quality images

Similar to the point above, a customer is able to touch and feel and look at the product closely in a brick and mortar store. However, when purchasing online, they have to rely on your product images. Try to make your product images as clear as possible, shooting it in angles that a customer would like to see. This helps the customer clearly see and understand the product, and helps build trust with the customer. (Keep in mind to not make your site slow due to heavy images - Read more here.)

e] Pricing

This is one of the most important pieces of information to be represented on the website, and one where sellers should be completely transparent. Customers may choose to drop out of your site because your prices are too high. This could be because of absolute prices being high, in which case, you may want to do some more homework on how you could potentially reduce costs. Your customers don't seem to see the value despite clearly articulating it. Alternatively, It could be because of relatively high pricing where you are pricing your products above what your competition is charging. This becomes apparent when people are viewing product information and not adding it to cart.

In other cases where customers are adding products to cart but not completing the transaction, pricing could be playing a role if your pricing structure or messaging is not clear. Customers don't like feeling hoodwinked with bait and switch techniques where they see a price, get excited, and see a higher price during checkout where hidden charges start manifesting. Always make it clear if other charges or taxes are going to be added subsequently so that they are not surprised.

f] Payment failures

Another reason is payment failures. Perhaps the bank servers were temporarily unavailable, or your payment gateway had some issues. It is important to capture the order. We can then try to salvage the situation by reaching out to customers via email and a payment button to prompt them to complete their payments. As per reports, over 45% of such emails are opened, and almost a half of them convert. Omnibus provides the payment email feature out of the box to make this easy.

There may be other reasons beyond the ones listed above, and reaching out to your customers or running on-site surveys may help understand problems better. We hope this page helped you understand how to measure and take a few corrective actions. Do let us know your thoughts and share your feedback in the comments. If you enjoyed this post, we would appreciate a quick share.

Visit https://acik.in for more information about Omnibus - our integrated, multi-channel sales platform that has addressed a few of these issues as part of its system.