The experience that your customers have on your site is extremely important. Most people know and understand that. You probably have no problem agreeing with that statement.
A problem is that many retailers believe that if their online sales aren’t great, then it must be that the site experience falls short, and if the site experience falls short, then they need to completely overhaul the site.
You may think one (or all) of the following:
- We need to find a designer to do a full redesign
- We need to switch to a new theme
- We need to get onto different software that will be a better fit
In other words, many people think, “we need something completely new in order to increase our sales”.
Fortunately, that is not always the case.
What is needed first is to go back and look at a site through the critical lens of thinking “what is our customer experiencing from homepage to checkout?”. With this in mind, you will see that there are a lot of problems that can be changed in our settings rather than a massive overhaul.
Here are the biggest four low-hanging fruits on your site you can change right now to help get immediate conversion growth.
1. Make accounts optional at checkout
If you require an account at checkout, you are losing sales. Period.
Allow your customers to checkout as a guest and then invite them to create an account after they have completed the purchase.
Each eCommerce platform has the ability to control the settings on accounts in the admin, so always be sure to disable requiring an account at checkout.
2. Give a clear call to action on your homepage hero
A call to action is simply a button or link that prompts a visitor to take a specific action that you want them to do. One of the most important places for a call to action is in the homepage hero, which is the top banner graphic (or slideshow of graphics) that customers see when they first land on your site.
Because of its position at the top of the page, the hero is an essential element for making a good first impression and for giving them a clear next step to a collection or product.
Sidenote: Your theme most likely has a button built into the content fields for the hero section, but you can also build in the call to action as a part of the graphic or image. As long as your theme allows you to make the entire image act as a link, it will act as a clickable button and gives a clear direction to your audience.
The 3 things you want to make sure your call to action has:
- It should visually stand out on the page. Use colors that contrast well with the image that it is on top of.
- It should be clear where it leads to when clicked. Rather than the button saying “click here”, use more directive language like “shop new arrivals” or “explore the collection”.
- There should only be one. Having multiple calls to action in one place will only cause friction because it’s not clear to your customer what the next step should be. Just stick to one.
3. Make sure your menu links are up-to-date
We see three common errors with links in the navigation menu:
- They lead to empty collections
- They lead to shallow collections (less than 4 products)
- They lead to a missing page or collection
Making sure your links are properly connected is something to be checked periodically, especially after busy sales seasons where a lot of items may be clearing off the shelves.
We want to always make sure to be linking to where your customer is expecting to go or this will create an expectation mismatch.
4. Look at the experience of your site on mobile devices
For many of you, your target audience is doing a majority of their online shopping on their phone. If your site has usability issues on smaller screens, you could be missing out on some major online sales.
We need to be meeting our customers where they are at and delivering them a great customer experience. You wouldn’t make it a challenge for your in-person customers to walk into your store. That should be the case when it comes to your customers’ online shopping experience as well.
Some common things to look for when evaluating the mobile experience
- Do your large banner images (like the hero) scale down well for small screens?
- How fast/slow do your pages load when you click around to different pages and collections?
- Is the text large enough to be legible?
- Is it easy to find the navigation and search function?
Need Some Assistance?
These four small, manageable changes could have a very real impact on the success of your store. But your situation may call for more than just addressing some low-hanging fruit.If that’s the case, we are available to be your partner in improving eCommerce as a revenue channel for your business. Schedule a free strategy call and let’s talk about ways we can take you to the next level.
