Understanding the impact of the metrics that affect your business KPIs and applying CRO strategies can positively optimize the Average eCommerce Conversion Rate for any online business. – Tweet This!
Just when you have launched your new eCommerce store online and looked at people visiting your page, you realize that most of the people are just surfing your store online. Some of those shoppers may be adding products to their wish lists without making any purchases. This makes you wonder – “what could have gone wrong!”
The conversion from a prospect to a successful sale is one of the toughest purchasing funnels that today’s online retailers are trying to analyze. Digital marketing experts are racking their brains for the newest strategies to make conversion from every customer visiting your online store. However, it would be a little surprising to know that, statistically, the conversion rates are one of the lowest statistical figures today. Even when the reach and convenience is available at the click of a button, it is hard to convince the customers to order from your webshop.
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Let’s pull this apart piece by piece and look at it as bare essentials so that you can formulate your own eCommerce conversion rates.
What do you mean by eCommerce conversion rate?
Simply put, conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who make a purchase (or initiate an intended action) online. Mathematically, eCommerce conversion rate is the percentage derived from the number of conversions divided by the total number of visitors. There are many metrics like traffic sources, new visitor and return visitor category, value per visit and so on to find the exact conversion rate.
This means if you are not converting visitors into buyers, then you do not have much of a game on your online store. You need to constantly keep track of the advertising dollars you spend and how much of that spending is converted into actual sales. By this, you’ll be able to understand how much a real order is costing you. This will help you shape up your marketing strategies.
Tracking the conversion rates also helps you to measure your online store’s performance. This will inadvertently lead to RFM (recency, frequency, monetary value) and customer lifetime value analysis. If you get the habit of constantly tracking these metrics, you’ll soon be able to realize which strategies are good for your business. Should you focus on acquiring new users or should you choose to ensure repeat sales by keeping your loyal customers on hand?
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When conversion rate analysis is used along with RFM and CLTV measures, it can prove to be a useful tool to gauge the success of your online strategies and other activities used to increase business. It also points out the areas of improvement that are necessary to make your online retail store even more proactive and imitate programs that can increase revenue and growth.
Even an increment in the conversion rate can mean an increase in your sales, so you need to put an effort into reaching the best conversion rate possible!
What is a good eCommerce conversion rate?
There is no one true answer for this question. It varies from industry to industry and a matter of perception. In other words, if there is a scope of improvement to increase revenue then there is always a ‘higher’ limit to a good eCommerce conversion rate (compared to the current or previous rate(s)). A company may have 20% conversion rates but they would still aim for more; that is how businesses work and this goal happens to be one of the driving factors for a thriving and profitable venture.
How to calculate eCommerce conversion rate for your business?
The formula:
Conversion rate = (conversions / total visitors) * 100%
However, you can be specific about conversion rates to focus on a single aspect or get an overall view of your business success. Apart from overall conversion rate, aspects like marketing channel conversion rate, keyword conversion rate, campaign conversion rate, page-level conversion rate and a lot more can be analyzed. This in-turn provides a great way to predict the success of a strategy or the overall progress of a campaign making it a handy way to calculate the success.
Factors affecting good ecommerce conversion rate
At the same time, one has to understand that conversation rate is highly contextual. For instance, an online store selling stores will have a higher conversion rate as compared to a furniture store or a luxury brand. However, that does not mean the latter had less chance of making a profit on their investment. The following variable factors have an impact on the conversion rate too:
- Product cost
- Product type
- Average order value
- Traffic source
- Device
- Location… and a lot more
Conversion rates can be misleading too as, to put it bluntly, it is just the visitors who bought products from your online retail store; repeated customers purchasing the same product does not mean you have a higher conversion rate but a good click conversion rate which is a whole other topic.
Click conversion rate = (converting visitors / total visitors) * 100%
This means click conversion of visitors regardless of how many times they converted divided by the total visitors and multiplied by 100 to arrive at a percentage. Hence understanding the variable factors should give you an insight about your business progress without comparing it with others as well as providing peace of mind.
Improving your current eCommerce conversion rate
Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO is one of the most prominent ways to improve any existing conversion rates. The process in which you can optimize your landing page to produce more conversions from traffic is called Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
This strategy not only helps with new traffic but also monetizes old traffic that you already have on your retail platform. This means evening without an increment in traffic, you can still achieve a higher conversion rate with CRO.
Here are some tips to improve the conversion rate with CRO:
- Dedicated Landing Pages
Dedicated landing pages are necessary, especially when you are doing paid advertising online. Imagine a Bing ad taking you to a random page where your item of choice is listed along with a list of other items; you would not probably look much further. But if clicking on the ad took you to a complete new page dedicated only for that product, the presentation makes it look important as well as informative without losing the interest of the customer. See where we are going with this – creating customer engagement for higher conversion rates with dedicated landing pages.
- A/B Testing
A/B testing is splitting your incoming traffic into two or more variants of a page. This will prevent from losing traffic as well as freezing of your dedicated landing pages. This split of traffic into two makes it easy for people to focus between variant A and B; in other words, you do not lose valuable traffic for any reason. Using a CRO software will allow online retail stores to implement this test and improve the Average eCommerce Ratings.
For beginners, using Unbounce, Optimizely, Google Content Experiments, Visual Website Optimizer, etc. are some of the ways to go instead of investing in expensive CRO software.
Changing the Font Size, button colors, images, spacing, etc. can increase your Conversion Rate by 5%. – Tweet This!
Use Hi-Def pics, update font size, provide time-limit discounts and lot more
Simple tricks like changing the font and pics can bring in new traffic. This means more conversion rate possibilities. Limited time coupons can bring in more customers; competitive pricing, easy checkout, live chat, trusted payment gateways, etc. can bring your conversion rates to a new high.
- Creating hypothesis
Once you identify the elements that have an impact on your conversion rate, then creating a hypothesis can give you an edge in positive conversions. Creating a headline for a product, clear description, tweaking button sizes and colors, changing layouts, timely offers, etc. are some of the ways to improve / increase conversion rates. May sound a little unconventional but a changed layout with a little tweak here and there often brings in more customers and improves engagement time.
- Remove distractions
Maintaining interest of a customer depends on creating a landing page with low distractions. Avoid putting similar products on one page; this often leads the customer to move around, create confusions and ultimately abandon a search.
The Global Conversion Scene – How much is it?
After talking a lot about improving the conversion rates, CRO and digital optimizations, it would sound puny if we hear the global conversion rate. Average eCommerce conversion rate by industry, globally, is at 2.86%. The 2018 cross-industry Google Ads clickthrough and conversion benchmark shows that the Average eCommerce conversion rate is 3.48% on mobile devices and 0.72% on the display network. It is important to take benchmark conversion rates of individual countries while formulating your own KPIs to understand the conversion rate you can expect from different countries.
The figures may seem small but it still covers a major chunk of people from countries like the US, Asia, Europe and Middle East. However, there is a huge scope of improvement by implementing strategies for a higher conversion rate.
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Industry-wise Average eCommerce Conversion Rate
Real estate, B2B, auto industry, consumer services, health, finance, eCommerce, legal education, insurance, technology, travel & hospitality are some of the industries that have benefitted in the last few years thanks to the optimization of conversion rates.
However tracking every industry is not possible here, but we can shortlist a few and look at them as an eCommerce conversion rate benchmark.
- Luxury eCommerce conversion rate
This area of business has seen an increase in conversion rates thanks to the optimization of eCommerce online stores that represent luxury products. In the past few years, luxury brands are not shying away from displaying themselves online instead of resorting to Amazon or other online retail service providers. Their highly optimized online platform has been able to ensure a direct connection with their customers and had seen a rise in average eCommerce conversion rate each year. Be it fashion or auto industry, each of these sectors has managed to create enormous traffic with good conversion rates which is likely to continue.
- Furniture eCommerce conversion rate (1.19% average eCommerce conversion rate)
Statistically, the data available is miniscule for a good comparison. The furniture industry has taken a step towards digitalization and has greatly reduced the need for physical storage and inventory maintenance. However, such a move did not deter the public from purchasing from startups like PepperFry; instead the trend was positively embraced and the industry displayed a fascinating and valuable conversion rate in the market.
- Conversion rate fashion ecommerce (1.41% average eCommerce conversion rate)
Fashion industry is a place where new trends emerge daily and even with the swift changes in the industry, the conversion rate has seemed to soar higher than before. Thanks to the eCommerce conversion rate optimization of online stores, eCommerce retailers are finding new and innovative ways to achieve a good ecommerce conversion rate.
eCommerce conversion by devices – Impact of mobile devices
As mentioned earlier, the conversion rate for eCommerce platforms are mostly made on mobile devices. The impact of mobile devices are huge and therefore optimizing online retail stores for mobile use including apps will prove highly beneficial for the Average eCommerce Conversion Rate. However mobile eCommerce conversion rate may be half that of desktop according to Monetate’s ecommerce quarterly which gives a figure of 3.85% for desktop and 2.03% for mobile.
Bottom-line:
Average eCommerce Conversion Rate is a clear factor in determining a profitable business. However, too many elements can confuse online retailers and end up losing customers, sales and eventually profit. Therefore understanding the impact of the metrics that affect your business KPIs and applying CRO strategies can positively optimize the Average eCommerce Conversion Rate for any online business.
To sum it up, there no one true way to compare two conversion rates, even for similar products. Creating a hypothesis and identifying KPIs in your business can be the starting point for higher conversion rates. From there on, timely tweaks and proper implementation of optimizing strategy can help to keep the Average eCommerce Conversion flowing.
Curious to learn more? Take a look at related posts!
- The Comprehensive Guide to eCommerce Conversion Optimization in 2020
- Shopify Product Detail Page Design: Top Conversion Errors, Revealed
- Conversion Rate Optimization Tips for the Busy Marketers
- 4 Golden Tips You Could Use To Increase Conversion Rate In eCommerce
- 3 Ways Big Data Can Help To Increase Conversion Rates