As an e-commerce entrepreneur, you should know that getting traffic to your digital storefront is only the beginning.
To cash in on your efforts, you must also understand your target audience, get in touch with their needs, and present them an experience that will help them accomplish their goals. Once the outcome they desire is within reach, that’s your cue to pitch your products or services as the ultimate solution.
It’s all about plotting an optimized conversion journey sprinkled with interactions — pushing your audience closer and closer to a purchase decision.
In this post, we’ll share with you four simple user experience or UX optimization strategies that will help you convert more visitors into paying customers.
Table of Contents
1. Redefine Your Target Keywords
Here’s a cold hard fact: a lot of small brands don’t know how to target keywords that would land them more customers.
Sure, you may know how to find keywords that are capable of generating traffic. You probably already used some of them to successfully pull in visitors to your blog or homepage, be it through PPC or SEO.
What you may have overlooked is the audience’s intent behind the keywords they use.
Just imagine the user experience impact of being shoved product pages when a user only wants pure, unbiased information for research.
That’s why, as a marketer, it’s your job to understand the three different types of queries when users go online: informational, navigational, and transactional.
Informational search queries
People who use search engines solely for research purposes make informational search queries. They are usually more interested in definitions, strategies, and knowledge than products or services they can buy.
Navigational search queries
On the other hand, navigational search queries are made by users who already know what they want — they merely use search engines to find the associated brand’s official website. As such, they include the name of the brand, product, or person in their search, such as “buy Apple iPhone” or “sign up to Gmail.”
Transactional search queries
Lastly, transactional search queries involve potential customers who could be close to a purchase decision. They typically include commercial or action-based terms, like “buy,” “order,” “services,” or
“price.”
From an e-commerce company’s perspective, it’s pretty clear that you need more transactional keywords in your strategy if you want to close more sales.
To find them, start with a keyword research tool like Ubersuggest to expand base keywords into long-tail variations. All you need to do is head to “Keyword Ideas,” type in a seed keyword, and then use filters to instantly spot keywords with commercial terms.
2. Improve Loading Speed
It’s understandable for online store owners to load up their pages with high-quality product images, fancy animations, and other visual features that can keep customers on the page. But if they fail to optimize these assets and focus on the site’s performance, they might actually do the opposite.
Statistics show that around 40 percent of consumers won’t hesitate to abandon a website that takes over three seconds to finish loading. This pattern is exacerbated on mobile devices, with over half or 53 percent of users jumping ship by then.
To identify steps that will help you improve your e-commerce website’s loading speed, you can use a tool like GTmetrix for a full analysis of your website’s performance.
Apart from the in-depth performance scores of your site, GTmetrix also generates a list of actionable recommendations you can follow.
Another way e-commerce websites can attain faster speeds is to leverage a Content Delivery Network or CDN. In simple terms, a CDN is a collection of proxy servers globally distributed to provide fast transfer speeds and minimize latency — regardless of where the user resides. More often than not, CDN providers bundle their services with additional security benefits, such as a web application firewall and DDoS mitigation.
3. Double Down on Trust Elements
If there’s one thing online customers trust, it’s the genuine review of a previous customer.
A survey from BrightLocal reveals that 85 percent of consumers would trust online reviews as if they’re product recommendations from people they know.
The good news is, showing off positive product reviews on your e-commerce website isn’t necessarily a technical challenge. Most e-commerce platforms like Shopify and content management systems like WordPress support plugins or apps that make it easy to showcase reviews on any page.
Strong Testimonials, for example, is a WordPress plugin that allows you to display positive testimonials on your website using multiple views. You can also use the plugin to embed review submission forms right in your product pages.
When it comes to generating testimonials, however, you’ll need to be a bit more creative. A surefire strategy is to design an automated email workflow that requests new customers to write a review about the products they recently purchased. Think of it as a smart autoresponder that triggers whenever a sale is verified on your e-commerce platform. With an email marketing platform like MailChimp, you can easily configure a triggered email with conditions from your e-commerce website. Aside from customer reviews, there are several other “trust elements” you can incorporate into your e-commerce website to build buyer confidence. This includes trust badges that you can acquire from your payment gateway, security service provider, and SSL certificate vendor.
4. Eliminate Friction
To encourage more customers to convert, you need to ditch the unnecessary steps they need to complete upon checkout. It makes sense to encourage your customers to subscribe to your mailing list or provide more information about themselves, which can help you design more personalized user experiences for them in the future. Keep in mind that, among the top reasons why consumers abandon their online shopping carts, two of them are linked to too much friction in the experience — namely a confusing checkout process and having to create a user account. That said, make it a priority to offer a straightforward, frictionless checkout process that only requires customers to provide the essential payment information. If you rely on the lead generation aspect on your e-commerce website, at least consider having a “guest checkout” option for those who are only interested in a particular product.
Conclusion
Getting more sales on your e-commerce business may not be a walk in the park, but it’s not rocket science either. It’s all about putting yourself in your audience’s shoes and adopt their goals as your own. Once you do this, it shouldn’t be hard to come up with a UX formula that customers will be grateful for. The UX strategies above should be more than enough to give you substantial gains in conversions. Do you have any other suggestions, questions, or opinions you’d like to share with our readers? Feel free to leave a comment below and discuss. Cheers!
