Website conversion rate is one of the most powerful levers a brand has for increasing its overall revenue.

Conversion rate is the rate at which website visitors purchase from the website. Improving your conversion rate will increase your overall revenue without increasing your website traffic.

Here are some of our favorite strategies for improving our clients’ conversion rates:

Offer free shipping

Free shipping is one of the easiest ways to increase your conversion rates. It has become a customer expectation, and websites without free shipping can lose potential customers.

According to a 2021 Consumer Trends Report, 80% of consumers expect free shipping when ordering a certain dollar amount of products, and 66% of consumers expect free shipping for all online orders.

Add live chat or a chatbot

Product pages aren’t perfect. Customers have questions when they’re browsing through your products. You might already have answers to these potential questions, but the customer might have to leave your product page to find them.

The questions could include shipping information, delivery timing, or specific product questions. When a customer is forced to look for an answer and leave the product page, it reduces how likely they are to convert.

This is why live chat and chatbots are so powerful. Customers can ask their specific questions directly without ever leaving the product page.

It’s important to ensure you can respond to chat requests quickly or have a comprehensive chatbot.  At this stage in the checkout flow, a bad experience could turn a customer away.

Enable guest checkout

Don’t force your customers to create an account when purchasing. You should only require accounts if you absolutely need the customer to have one. Instead, let them check out and then ask them to create an account and opt into emails and SMS messaging.

Prompting the customer to create an account after the checkout flow, simplifies the checkout process and helps get customers to purchase as quickly as possible.

Once the customer has completed their purchase, then offer a discount on their next purchase if they create an account.

Detailed product pages

Since online customers can’t touch and feel your products, it’s important to have a complete and detailed product page. The more you can help a customer understand what they’re going to get, the more likely they are to purchase the product.

Your product page should at least have the following:

It’s important to have the basic product description and information, but you should also make sure to reiterate the brand story and product differentiators.

Highlight customer reviews

The average person doesn’t want to be the first to try something; being first can be scary. It’s similar to when shopping online; most consumers don't want to be the first to try a new brand or buy a new product. They want to know that other people have first liked the brand or product.

Most potential customers will look for product reviews and ratings to help inform their purchase decision. They’ll use these reviews to ensure that what you're saying about the product is what people experience.

Increasing how many positive ratings and reviews you have can increase your conversion rate.

One easy way to increase how many reviews you have is by sending follow-up emails to customers asking them to review the product. You could also incentivize them to leave a review by offering a discount or gift card.

Not only does this strategy increase how many reviews you get, but the reviews tend to be positive since only customers that intend to purchase again will be interested in the incentive.

Generous return policy

One of the best ways to make customers feel comfortable purchasing from your website is by offering a great return policy or product guarantee. You should highlight your return policy and make it easy to use.

Not sure what to offer? A 30-day return policy with free shipping is a great place to start if your brand can manage it.

Implementing a “try before you buy” program can make the policy even more seamless. These programs allow customers to try your product before completing their transaction, making it a risk-free way for consumers to make sure they like your product before purchasing it.

Next steps.

Your conversion rate has an immense impact on your overall revenue. Improving your conversion rate and increasing your average order value is key to scaling your brand. The better your conversion rate and AOV, the more you can invest in marketing.

Want to see how improving your conversion rate could impact your growth? Click here to learn more.