How CRO can transform your Shopify or BigCommerce store
18/05/2021 - Digital Marketing
What is CRO and why is it so important?
Firstly, a little information about conversion rate optimisation and why it’s vital for your business. CRO focusses on converting visitors to your website into customers by delivering an improved user experience.
Whilst you might think that your website has no problems that need addressing, often there are a variety of simple improvements that can be identified by analysing the customer journey. For example, is it a chore to navigate through the website or is the checkout process too complicated?
CRO is so important for your business because it is one of the most effective methods of boosting your revenue. Not making some simple adjustments to your website to improve your customers’ user experience can be the difference between making a sale or seeing visitors leave your site after less than a minute.
Examples of beneficial CRO techniques
Reducing abandoned baskets: Some ways that you can reduce the risk of customers abandoning their baskets is to make the journey from the store to the checkout as frictionless as possible. You can also include a progress indicator and thumbnail images of products in the basket
Increasing add to cart conversions: Including features such as time-based offers and a counter of how many of the product is left in stock can give customers a sense of urgency that they need to checkout as soon as possible.
Motivating customers to purchase immediately: Adding notifications which state how many people are currently looking at an item or how many times it’s been purchased in the past day can also help motivate customers to put products in their basket and checkout.
CRO and Shopify
Shopify is an ecommerce platform that offers online retailers a range of services to implement on their online store, such as payment and customer engagement tools. CRO is just as important for Shopify stores as it is for any other website, and Un.titled is a Shopify CRO agency that practical tips and tricks on how to implement it.
Your top priority has to be designing vibrant and navigable landing pages that make your potential customers’ lives easier when they visit your website. If all your product information is laid out clearly and your customer’s journey to the checkout is smooth then increases the chances that a visitor to your website will buy a product.
Another CRO improvement you can make to your website is to take steps to improve the efficiency of your customers’ user experience. This can include looking into reducing your page load speeds for a more responsive website and making sure that your online store is optimised for access via mobile devices. Both of these measures can help make your customer’s journey from visiting your website and making a purchase flow a lot more smoothly.
Shopify merchants should consider the use of CRO as a potential growth tactic as you can reap a wide range of benefits for a comparatively small cost. By making some small and simple changes to your website, you can boost your ecommerce conversion rate and make significantly more sales.
CRO and BigCommerce
BigCommerce is another ecommerce platform that gives you a large degree of creative control over your website, such as designing product pages and discount coupons. Websites created using BigCommerce can also benefit from CRO to reach their full potential.
An excellent way of optimising your conversion rate is by offering excellent customer services to your website’s visitors. This includes making your contact details and return policies clearly displayed for your customer’s convenience and also using case studies and testimonials on your online store to help sway visitors into making a purchase.
Another CRO tip is to make sure your online store contains tools through which your customers can give you feedback on what they liked and didn’t like about your products and website. Placing surveys on important pages of your website, using software such as SurveyMonkey, can help you receive crucial advice on where you could improve your website and solve hidden issues in order to convert more visitors into customers.
BigCommerce merchants should consider the use of CRO as a potential growth tactic as it can lead to a substantial increase in sales and customers with only minimal changes needed to achieve this.
CRO Tools
An important part of CRO is testing the optimisations you make on a website to see if they’re worth it. This is called A/B testing and is important because it allows you to see if the changes you’ve made produce a higher number of conversions than the amount that webpage was producing previously. There are a number of tools you can use to carry out this process:
Google Optimise: Free to use tool offered by Google that can integrate with Google Analytics.
Optimizely: Comprehensive suite of CRO tools that provide A/B testing and other features for optimising websites.
VWO: Provides extensive tools for A/B testing and split URL experiments, a visual editor for building variations and advanced targeting options.
CRO Apps and Modules
There are a number of apps and modules that you can use alongside Shopify or BigCommerce that will also help optimise your website’s goal conversion rate. Some of our recommended ones are:
Hotjar: This is an excellent tool to use to help you understand the typical online behaviour of people who visit your website and receive feedback on how you can make improvements. It does via a number of methods, such as heatmaps to document which areas of your website get the most attention, session recordings, and surveys.
Crazy Egg: This is another great module that can give you extra insight that typical analytics tools cannot provide. Using heatmaps, scroll maps and visual reports, this software can tell you exactly how you can improve your website’s CRO.
Mouseflow: This module can help improve your website’s CRO as it records all of your website visitors’ sessions and automatically generates heatmaps for all your pages. Mouseflow also has the unique feature of a ‘Friction Score’, which indicates the level of user frustration each of your webpages so you can see where you are losing potential customers.
Using CRO to help understand user behaviour
CRO can be useful in helping to understand how visitors to your website behave, which in turn can help you understand how to target them more effectively. Setting up segments within Google Analytics can help break down user behaviour, such as where your traffic is coming from, what pages are being visited, and which pages are producing the most conversions.
This data can then be analysed to better understand what parts of your website need changing in order to optimise the conversion rate. For example, if a page on your website that has a video is producing a large number of conversions, then this indicates that video content should be utilised more.
Need a Helping Hand?
Optimising your website’s conversion rate may seem challenging for any business, no matter how experienced they are.
Luckily, we have expert Shopify and BigCommerce developers and digital experts on hand to give you personalised advice on improving your website’s conversion rates. Just say [email protected]!
