As a Magento Certified Solution Specialist at Creatuity, I help Magento merchants increase conversions. In this article I’ll share some of my proven strategies that anyone can implement.
Quick CRO Strategies
Leveraging the features included in Magento is affordable and quick. For example, Magento includes Abandoned Cart Recovery features, such as emails and reports, that are often overlooked. Magento 2.1 includes two features proven to increase conversion:
- Elasticsearch (Enterprise Edition only): Customers can quickly find what they are looking with cutting edge Elasticsearch technology powering your site search. You can optimize the experience by setting weighted attribute values, stop words, and search synonyms.
- PayPal in-context checkout and saved credit cards: Shortens checkout time and complexity.
Magento 2 also has a streamlined checkout, support for product videos, and Varnish caching (to improve page load time). All of these features can improve conversions. Two other features Magento includes that are sometimes overlooked for conversion rate optimization:
- Visual Merchandizer: Drag-and-drop products to create pages that convert optimally.
- Customer Segmentation: Segment your customers to ensure you show the right shopper the right content. For example, if you sell to both consumers and businesses on the same site, you should segment them.
CRO Toolbox
Google Analytics is perhaps your most important CRO tool. Magento includes support for Google Universal Analytics. If you are new to Google Analytics, don’t get overwhelmed. These are the key metrics to review:
- Conversion Rate: See where you stand now, and make a goal to improve.
- Exit Rate: Don’t confuse this with Bounce Rate. Bounce rate indicates low quality traffic typically, and in my experience, doesn’t correlate with Conversion Rate. Exit rate, however, could be an indicator of poor content, site speed, etc. and is more relevant (in general – though there are some exceptions).
- Average Session Duration & Average Page Depth: Improving both of these metrics will directly correlate to higher Conversions, in general. Not surprisingly, people spending more time on your site, buy more.
I typically don’t recommend focusing on traffic, because the correlation of traffic to revenue isn’t always directly positive. You could, however, monitor traffic sources, since a change in traffic source mix typically affects Conversion Rate (either positively or negatively).
If you are on a budget, there are great Conversion Rate Optimization tools that are free or very inexpensive:
- Inspectlet allows you to watch your shoppers, to see exactly where they having problems shopping (i.e. search, checkout, layered navigation) (basic plan is free)
- MageMail allows shoppers to recover abandoned carts with one-click. This goes beyond the abandoned cart tools included in Magento, with other re-engagement emails, such as smart recommendations. (only pay for conversions)
- Google PageSpeed Insights allows you to quickly test speed of your site on all devices, as well as test some basic UX rules. (Free)
- If you want to dig deeper into which social channels are converting the best, I recommend a specialized social analytics platform calledAddShoppers, which is much more robust. (Social Sharing Extension with analytics is free)
- You can do A/B split testing for free with Google Content Experiments. This takes a little bit more time and technical knowledge than a turn-key solution such as VWO or Optimizely.
Break It Down
It can be extremely useful to break your conversion funnel down into “website-to-cart” and “cart-to-sale”. The latter should be significantly higher, perhaps 30% or more (varies by industry & cart value). Viewing these separately will help you focus your efforts on the part of the funnel that needs the most attention.
Another way I recommend to segment is by device type – you may find that improving mobile conversions alone can boost sales significantly. Don’t get discouraged by lower mobile conversion rate though, since this is normal.
Lastly, you should segment on traffic source (organic, paid search, referral, etc.). This will help you hone your landing pages for each source to maximize conversions, and see if a particular source is performing better/worse than you expected. This allows you to efficiently allocate your budget on the source(s) that is performing the best, as well as improve conversions on a per-source basis.
CRO for B2B
Yes, CRO for B2B merchants is important. Your B2B shoppers are typically short on time yet have more formal (sometimes lengthy) purchasing processes to adhere to. You have to improve your site to meet their expectations. If you don’t, the competition will.
All of the strategies in this article equally apply to B2B. Since your customers might shop differently than you expect, reviewing the analytics and a tool like Inspectlet will help you understand your shoppers better.
Conversion Killers to Avoid:
- If shipping isn’t free, be upfront about it. Show costs as early in the shopping process as possible. I adamantly recommended split testing Free Shipping to see if it improves your Conversion Rate and Average Order Value enough to justify the cost – you might be surprised.
- Display your phone number in the header. Be easy to contact, vialive chat, phone, email and FAQ pages.
- Return policies should be clear.
- Delivery timelines should be clear. Shoppers prefer to see the estimated delivery date (“Expected delivery is 12/1/2016”) rather than timeframes (“3-5 days”). Plumrocket has an Estimated Delivery Date Extension that puts this information right on the product page.
- Quick checkout with variety of payment options, including at least one “wallet” method like PayPal or AmazonPayments.
- Lack of trust can kill a sale quickly. Google Trusted Stores is free to apply for, and Wyomind has a Magento extension.
Set realistic goals
A good conversion rate varies by industry. Review the Internet Retailer Top 500 and 2nd 500 guides for top sites in your niche, and compare with their conversion rate. Anything better than what you have now is a good goal, but make sure it’s a realistic expectation for a specific timeframe. I’ve found a 10%-15% increase per quarter is achievable (i.e. increase from 2% to 2.2% in a single quarter).
Also, remember that CRO is a constant practice. You must set aside time/resources to review your results, and constantly improve. Over time, you can reduce your cost-per-acquisition.
Source: https://magento.com/blog/best-practices/magento-conversion-rate-optimization-strategies
