As Magento Certified Solution specialists, we help merchants using Magento increase their conversions. In this article I am going to share some of the proven strategies that anyone can implement.
Quick CRO Strategies
Taking advantage of the features included in Magento is affordable and fast. For example, Magento includes features like abandoned cart, emails, and reports, which are often overlooked by customers. Magento 2.1 includes two proven features to increase conversion:
- Elasticsearch (Enterprise Edition only): Customers can quickly find what they are looking for with Elasticsearch technology that enables this powerful search on your site. You can optimize the experience by setting weighted attribute values, stop words, and search synonyms.
- PayPal online payment and saved credit cards - reduces payment time and complexity.
Magento 2 also has dynamic checkout, support for product videos, and Varnish cache (to improve page load time). All of these features can improve conversions. There are two other features that Magento includes that are sometimes overlooked for conversion rate optimization:
- Visual Merchandizer: Drog-and-Drop style to create pages that convert optimally.
- Customer segmentation: Segment your customers to ensure they show the right buyer the right content. For example, if you sell to consumers and businesses on the same site, you should segment them.
CRO Toolbox
Google Analytics is perhaps the most important CRO tool. Magento includes support for Google Universal Analytics. If you're new to Google Analytics, don't feel overwhelmed. These are the key metrics to review:
- Conversion rate: See where you are and set a goal to improve.
- Exit rate: Don't confuse this with bounce rate. Bounce rate typically indicates low-quality traffic, and in my experience, does not correlate with conversion rate. Exit rate, however, could be an indicator of poor content, site speed, etc. and it is more relevant (in general, although there are some exceptions).
- Average session duration and average page depth: Improving both metrics will directly correlate to higher conversions, overall. It's not surprising that people who spend more time on your site buy more.
I typically don't recommend focusing on traffic, because the correlation of traffic to revenue is not always directly positive. However, you could monitor traffic sources, as a change in the mix of traffic sources usually affects Conversion Rate (positively or negatively).
If you're on a budget, there are great conversion rate optimization tools that are free or very cheap:
- Inspectlet: It allows you to view your buyers, to see exactly where they are having trouble purchasing (i.e. search, checkout, navigation) (the basic plan is free).
- MageMail: Allows shoppers to recover abandoned carts with a single click. This goes beyond the abandoned cart tools included in Magento, it also has re-engagement emails, with intelligent recommendations. (You only pay per conversion).
- Google Insights PageSpeed: It allows you to quickly test the 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 getting the most conversions, I recommend a specialized social analytics platform called AddShoppers, which is much more robust. (The Social Sharing Extension with analytics is free.)
- You can do A/B style testing for free with Google Content Experiments. This requires a little more time and technical knowledge.
It can be extremely useful to analyze your conversion funnel as “website – cart” and “cart – sale”. The latter should be significantly higher, perhaps 30% or more (varies depending on industry and cart value). Viewing them separately will help you focus your efforts on the part of the funnel that needs the most attention.
Another way to segment that I recommend is by device type – you may find that improving mobile conversions alone can increase sales significantly. Don't be discouraged by a lower mobile conversion rate, as this is normal.
Finally, you must segment the traffic source (organic search, paid, referral, etc.). This will help you refine 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 to the source(s) that are improving, as well as improve conversions per source.
CRO for B2B
Yes, CRO for B2B merchants is important. Your B2B buyers are often short on time, but have more formal (sometimes long) purchasing processes to adhere to.
You have to improve your site to meet their expectations. If not, the competition will.
All of the strategies in this article apply equally to B2B. Since your customers may shop differently than you expect, reviewing your data and using a tool like Inspectlet will help you better understand your buyers.
Conversion Killers:
- If shipping isn't free, be upfront about it. Show costs as early as possible in the purchasing process. I highly recommend split testing free shipping to see if it improves your conversion rate and average cart value.
- Show your phone number in the header. Be easy to contact, via live chat, phone, email, and FAQ pages.
- Return policies should be clear.
- Delivery times must be clear. Buyers prefer to see the estimated delivery date (“Expected delivery 12/6/2017”) rather than deadlines (“3-5 days”). Plumrocket has an estimated delivery date extension that puts this information on the product page.
- Lack of trust can kill a sale quickly. Google Trusted Stores are free to apply, and Wyomind has a Magento extension for this.
Set realistic goals
A good conversion rate varies by industry. Review the Top 500 and 2nd Top 500 Internet Marketers guides for sites in your niche and compare them to your conversion rate.
Anything better than what you have now is a good goal, but make sure you have a realistic expectation for a specific time frame. I have found that an increase of 10%-15% per quarter is achievable (i.e. increasing 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.
