Here’s how to address those common ecommerce conversion killers

Conversion is easily the driving force behind almost every ecommerce website.

If your primary goal lies in turning browsing visitors into paying customers, you cannot afford to treat conversion as an after-thought.

Today’s marketplace is more saturated than ever before. Shoppers have more choice than ever, too. What this means for you and your business is that there are many reasons for a potential shopper to choose your competitor over your site.

From poorly targeted, generic messaging all the way to wasted opportunities, frustrating user experience and disconnected marketing that is far from strategic, there are a number of problem areas that directly affect your ability to convert ecommerce leads.

These conversion killers give shoppers even less reason to stay and close the deal on your site.

Disjointed marketing

If you have not invested in a comprehensive strategy that incorporates the channels that are most likely to convert, you increase your risk of disjointed marketing that is all over the place.

The impact of this is poor performance across every channel. A structured, cohesive multi channel strategy will ensure that you are putting your budget where it genuinely adds value.

Wasted opportunities

What happens when your potential customer arrives at check-out, only to abandon their cart and vanish into thin air? Do you have their email address? Are you using the opportunity to craft abandoned cart emails that entice people back to your shop? Or, are you letting those visitors disappear forever, never to be seen again?

If it’s the latter, you are effectively wasting a chance to make a sale.

If your ecommerce site is difficult to use, your visitors will browse somewhere else

If you are losing visitors on this stage you can create custom audiences on Google Analytics and Facebook targeting these visitors directly with remarketing ads. This is a great way to get these visitors to complete the checkout process.

Poor user experience

User experience is everything. Poor user experience almost always means poor conversion.

This does not only apply to how quickly your shop loads. It also applies to the overall layout, navigation, functionality, check-out and design, as well as the descriptions, images, reviews and categories you use.

How well does your online store work on mobile? If your ecommerce site is difficult to use, your visitors will browse somewhere else.

Untargeted messaging

Finally, another way that you may be killing your conversion is by failing to deliver targeted messages.

Personalisation, lead scoring and segmentation are all highly useful tools that allow you to target your audience with offers and deals in a way that increases clicks, sales and even sales value. One-size-fits-all messaging, on the other hand, is far too generic to do much else than end up in your audience’s spam folders.

One way to start optimising this is by creating a blueprint of the whole user journey using your online store and marking all the touch points where you communicate back to your visitors.

This can include any marketing messages, content on the website or even the content of automated emails. Look where you are losing visitors and where you can optimise the messaging and content on those touchpoints.

Luckily, fixing these conversion killers is not as difficult as it seems. Once you fill in those gaps, you will soon start to see a difference in your conversion.

Feature image: stevepb via Pixabay (CC0)