What Is Conversion Rate? How Can You Increase It?

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action. On an e-commerce site, this typically means the percentage of visitors who go on to make a purchase.

A high conversion rate usually points to a well designed, high performing site, while a low conversion rate signals that there's room for improvement.

Before you begin optimizing your site's conversion rate, you first need to understand your customers' behavior, preferences, and pain points.

If most of your visitors aren't scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page, you should either condense your content or move your call to action (CTA) further up the page.

What Can You Do to Increase Your Conversion Rate?

1. Optimize Your Site: Improve your design, headlines, buttons, filters, and copy, and run A/B tests. A/B testing involves comparing two versions of a web page to see which one performs better in terms of conversions. Tools like Optimizely can help you run these tests.

2. Improve Product Information: Make sure your product descriptions and size charts are complete and detailed, and that your product images are detailed and show the item from multiple angles.

3. Make Sure You're Priced Competitively: Keep your pricing competitive. You've likely already noticed that conversion rates tend to rise during promotional periods.

4. Review Your Analytics Data: Use tools like Google Analytics to identify trends and understand customer behavior. Look at insights around landing pages, exit rates, and traffic sources. Set clear conversion goals, track performance over time, and measure the impact of your CRO efforts.

5. Optimize Your Checkout Page and Payment Flow: Offer guest checkout, multiple payment methods, and clearly displayed payment security icons. Make checkout buttons highly visible, and keep the number of steps required to complete checkout to a minimum.

6. Offer Personalization: Use visitor data to tailor the user experience. Take advantage of tools that support dynamic content, like personalized product recommendations or user specific targeted messaging. Segment your audience by behavior or demographics and personalize accordingly.

7. Use Responsive Mobile Design: Make sure your site is mobile responsive. Optimize loading times and ensure easy navigation on mobile devices. Regularly test your site across different mobile devices and browsers.

8. Get Your Product Ordering Right: Feature your best selling, most compelling products prominently at the top of the page. Make sure the products placed there are well stocked and have a full range of sizes available.

9. Use Compelling Visuals, Banners, and Copy: Use images and videos that capture customers' attention, and A/B test your visuals, videos, and banners to see what performs best.

10. Clearly Display Return Policy and Trust Information: Make sure your return policy and any trust indicating icons are clearly visible on your site.

11. Support Customers With Live Chat: Give customers the ability to ask questions in real time, and keep live chat buttons active and accessible.