Subscribers, leads, and sales don’t just happen on their own if you have a website — you need to work hard to optimize every aspect to get these results.
Your website’s UX is a crucial factor in optimizing your sales funnel, improving your conversion rate, increasing your revenue, and ultimately, growing your business. It is one of the most reliable ways to improve your results.
This article will share a list of helpful UX optimization tips to improve your ecommerce conversion rate. These will enhance your customer’s experience with the site, making their time on the website as smooth and enjoyable as possible, motivating them to “take the plunge.”
Improving Your Digital Sales Funnel and Conversion Rate — 6 Actionable Tips
If you want to have a high-performing ecommerce store that helps you reach more customers, generate more leads, and drive sales, you need to offer your visitors a seamless user experience.
It must be both easy and enjoyable for your visitors to sign up and purchase items from your website, so the process of ecommerce UX optimization is crucial.
We sat down with DigitalSilk and came up with a list of ways to optimize your ecommerce store’s UX today.
1. Optimize the Checkout Process
Research has shown that nearly a fifth of users have abandoned their carts due to UX issues during checkout. They called the experience either too complicated or too long.
To avoid any snags and delays in the checkout process, you need to make it easy, quick, and seamless. This is one of the most efficient ways to boost conversions from prospects in the latter stages of the funnel.
2. Add Security Certificates and Other Trust Signals
Site seals, SSL certificates and other trust signals help customers feel more secure about doing business with an ecommerce store.
There are two crucial user behaviors related to trust signals that we’ve seen throughout our testing of the various checkout processes:
- The average user determines a site’s security level based on a “gut feeling.” To a large extent, this is based on how familiar they are with the brand, but also how visually secure the site itself looks.
- Sometimes, users perceive some parts of the same page to be more secure than others, depending on the design.
The best way to approach perceived website security is to hire experienced designers and developers with a track record in producing trustworthy websites.
3. Optimize for Mobile
Although most ecommerce websites do have mobile variants, many still don’t provide the best mobile user experience.
Paying attention to mobile optimization has never been more crucial, with an increasing number of users browsing the internet on their smartphones and tablets.
One of the best ways to improve your digital sales funnel and increase your conversion rate is to make your website easier to use on mobile devices.
Your prospects should not have any trouble working their way through your ecommerce store on mobile, regardless of the type of device they’re using.
4. Keep Product Descriptions Clear and Informative
Product descriptions on ecommerce websites are challenging to get right — they need to provide all the info a prospect might be looking for without being cumbersome and overwhelming.
People aren’t too keen on taking chances on online products, and they’d much rather click away and look elsewhere than purchase an item based on incomplete information. If your product descriptions fail to meet your users’ expectations, you can bet that they’ll go to the competition.
Depending on the type of products you’re selling, you could consider adding all kinds of info, such as compatibility information, product dimensions, or product composition (such as ingredients or materials used in its creation).
5. Proudly Display Your Return Policy and Shipping Info
Shoppers care a lot about shipping fees and return policies. Make no mistake, many of your potential customers will abandon their orders if they’re unhappy with these two crucial aspects. The quality and price of the product may not even matter in some cases.
Once a prospect has found a product they’re interested in and can’t decide whether they should pull the plug or not, the return policy will play a critical role.
However, some users want to know about the return policy before they’ve even started browsing the site. These, usually more experienced online shoppers, use this technique to determine whether your store is even worth their time.
So, you might have a dedicated page detailing all the ins and outs of your return policy, or you may have it displayed on the checkout page, but sometimes neither is enough. Since different buyers look for this information in various places on your site, it is a good idea to put it in the footer of every page.
People are used to seeing this info on the bottom, so they’ll even scroll right past a section of the page that is clearly relevant to what they’re looking for.
6. Allow Users to Check out as Guests (But Encourage Account Creation)
The first thing you need to do is make sure that your visitors have the option to check out as guests. When it comes to cart abandonment reasons, being forced to create an account is right up there.
That said, you can gain a lot from having as many visitors as possible create accounts, and streamlining your digital sales funnel is one of them. However, users won’t simply sign up to your site because it benefits you — they need to understand that there’s something in it for them as well.
The tricky thing is to help your prospects understand that having an account in your ecommerce store could be beneficial for them, especially when it is their first purchase. You need to spell out how it would make the purchase better in no uncertain terms.
If, for example, you’re willing to give your visitors a 5% discount on the first purchase for signing up, make sure to display this information aggressively throughout the checkout process.
Wrapping Up
We cannot overstate the importance of user experience when it comes to the ecommerce digital sales funnel and conversion rates.
Providing your visitors with a top-notch experience means you’ll grow a happy customer base more quickly than your competitors.
Many websites are still missing out on these essential ecommerce UX optimization practices, so make sure to utilize every single one of them and stay ahead of the game.
The opinions expressed here by Guest Contributors are their own, not those of Rise Marketing.