3 Strategies for Increasing Online Conversion Rates

Looking to get more checkouts on your eCommerce site? With a boom in consumers moving online, businesses are constantly looking for better ways to capture the attention of the customers flocking to digital retailers.

In order to reach customers in a crowded field, it’ll take a few steps to get them in the door and a few more to get them to purchase.

We've researched three strategies you can use to increase online conversions:

1. Leverage social and SEO to attract new customers

2. Prioritize good customer experiences

3. Retain customers with repeat transactions

The first step to increasing online sales is a fairly obvious one—you need to attract prospective customers who are interested in the types of goods and services you sell. There’s two ways to go about this.

First, you can use social media marketing to attract leads to your website through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms.

According to a recent GetApp survey, 48% of small to midsize businesses (SMBs) currently use Facebook or Instagram to sell their products or services—beating out eCom giants such as Amazon and eBay, and even their own business sites. (See the survey methodology at the end of this piece.)

From a single dashboard, you can create, schedule, and post content on your various social media channels. You can monitor and track the social media channels for customer interest, and then engage to answer questions around various products, services, queries, and support.

Second, optimize your eCommerce site for SEO to attract untapped customers that are searching for your type of product on Google or Bing. While SEO can seem complicated, the right software can help you keep it simple and get your eCommerce site ranking high in the search engine results.

Morningscore’s onsite health check showing a site’s SEO performance (Source)

These SEO tools can provide a holistic view on your site’s overall SEO performance and can provide easy, actionable tips on how to improve your site’s rank on search engines in order to bring in potential customers.

Now that you’ve attracted new clients, it’s vital that you provide an experience that makes it easy for customers to find your products and purchase them.  Even if you have great products, a difficult customer experience will ensure customers will go elsewhere.

One of the easiest ways to answer prospective customers’ questions is a customer support tool that provides chatbots and/or live chat capabilities to answer any question in real-time. You can also find customer support solutions with features designed to help optimize static FAQ pages, ensuring all of your information is up to date and correct.

In addition, look for the right eCommerce solution that can accommodate consumer preferences like multiple payments or options for shipping methods, and can make the checkout process as easy as possible to avoid missed conversions.

Setting up multiple payment methods in X-Cart (Source)

Customers are the lifeblood of any business. In order to build a business, you aren’t just looking for one-off customers, but repeat customers that can be converted to brand loyalists. Also, keep in mind, repeat customers cost less to serve than new ones.

In order to get customers to spend more during checkout, there are two different methods you can follow. Upselling can convince customers to spend more by adding products or services that are related but not necessarily required, whereas cross-selling promotes the sale of complementary goods and services when there is an opportunity.

Look into personalization software that can help businesses create and implement cross-sell and upsell offers.

More resources to help you sell online

These three strategies are a great place to get started—but if you want to dive deeper, check out these recent articles:

• Growth Hacking eCommerce Profits for Your Small Business

• How SMBs Can Make Money With eCommerce Growth Hacking: Thibaut De Lataillade in Conversation With John Lawson

• 3 eCommerce Business Ideas for Your Store