There is a problem that troubles every eCommerce store owner: a lot of traffic but no sales. This reflects a low conversion rate, and you must find out the reason you can’t convert traffic into sales.
The reasons led to this circumstance may vary. A lot of traffic prove that visitors are interested in your products, but they are not converted into customers. Thus, there must be a problem with your storefront that makes visitors drop off their purchase intentions.
If you’re looking for a way to fix this problem and convert traffic into sales more effectively, you can quickly integrate these 14 game changers on your storefront and get immediate impacts you haven’t expected!
1. Acquire the right traffic
First of all, you can’t convert traffic that is already wrong. The mismatched intention traffic proves to be low-quality and it’s not ideal to convert into sales.
For example, we are looking for some glasses, so we go up to Google and search:
Now, the first result at the featured snippet (ranking #0) has met the purpose. However, the other result suggests “Glass for Window” which is irrelevant to our “Drinking Glass”. Although it doesn’t match the initial purpose, somehow we click it. This is not likely to happen occasionally, but you know sh*ts happen.
Of course, this traffic is not the right one to sell drinking glass to and undoubtedly generates no sale. On the contrary, qualified traffic is the traffic that has the potential to produce ROI from your inbound marketing efforts. They come from those who truly have an interest in your product and the intention to purchase.
In this case, we offer a few workarounds to avoid wrong-purposed traffic and attract more qualified traffic:
a. Optimize your keywords with SEO:
To let people find your products correctly, you must leave clues and traces on the search engine. Unique keywords can make your items stand out from look-alikes and surely help people find your site easier.
For instance, with the above example, you can edit your product description or page title with “drinking glasses”, “glass cup”, “glass mug”, etc. This clarifies your product information further and reduces the wrong-purposed traffic. Also, try to avoid generic keywords such as standalone “glass”.
Also, list your products under relevant categories, which improves the ranking in the search results and avoids irrelevant keyword searches.
b. Run ads targeting your potential customers:
This method actively brings in the right traffic you targeted, so you can control the input of your traffic as well as the volume.
Firstly, you need to define who are your potential customers, indicate their specific demographics and behaviors. Based on that, you can deploy advertising campaigns targeting them and invite them over your site.
Also, ads need optimization. Remember to watch and optimize your ads while they’re running.
Especially, the ad copy is one of the most important elements to optimize. You have to make it filled with your core keywords, improve its quality score and avoid generic keywords, which may rocket your cost per sale.
c. Share your products on forums and groups
This is a free way to acquire traffic while you can actively control the target. As you know, social media and community groups are the greatest places to share things. Leveraging this, you can start sharing your product there and invite people to visit your store.
Nevertheless, this method is free, but it doesn’t have an immediate impact. Thus, to increase the efficiency of this tactic, we suggest you pick the relevant community or groups that have the same niche as your products.
E.g, you are selling gaming keyboards and you should choose a gaming hardware community to work with.
2. Build trust for your store
The hardest barrier that prevents customers from entering their carts to purchase is trust-lacking. As if we’re the customers, the common questions we usually ask are: “Is this store trustworthy for me to buy?” “What if they won’t ship the items?” “Can I return the damaged goods? Does it have any guarantee?”
One of the reasons for trust-lacking is low brand awareness. Your customers know nothing about you and they will not willing to fill in their credit cards on your site due to the security issue. Thus, to convert traffic into sales, you should try to break the ice with your customers. The best way to do this is by using social proof.
Social proof is a general term that refers to any piece of evidence from the peers of your intended audience that verifies some element of yours. For example, it could be a word of praise from a past consumer that reinforces a claim you made about your products or a proof that reflects what past customers have done.
With social proof, you can prove that there are actual people are engaging on your storefront. Hence, social proof boosts up the visitor’s trust for your store and drive them to copy the reflected actions from the predecessor.
Normally, the engagements in eCommerce stores mostly are sales, checkouts, sign-up, and reviews. Here are what you can do with social proof:
a. Display live sales notifications, checkout, and sign-up notifications
For those who first enter your website, seeing others engaging will surely boost up their confidence, encouraging them to make purchases. Therefore, this can help you convert traffic into sales significantly.
Take a look at Luxipod; they’ve been using the live sale notifications for a while.
If you want to implement this on your store, it’s very easy. Boost Convert is the perfect tool to display sales, checkout, and sign-up notifications. The app takes just 1 minute to install and automatically syncs your real-time sales to convert them into notifications.
b. Enable product reviews to convert traffic
Besides, reviews also play a crucial part in social proof. Although roughly only 2-5% of buyers leave reviews post-purchase, these reviews are precious. It does not only bolster the trustworthiness of your store but also reflects the high quality of your products.
We take Ola.pet as an example:
With this high-rated reviews, this is a big plus to encourage customers to buy.
If you want to enable product review on your store, you can use a 3rd party app like Loox or Judge.me. Both of them are easy to set up and have a wonderful layout for the review feature.
c. Trust badge, guarantee, refund, and return policies
Apart from real-time notification and review, the trust badge is another useful method to make customers feel rest assured when shopping with you.
For instance, ProjectYourself attached the trust badges with clear, risk-free refund and return policies right at the beginning of its product page:
They included “Verified with McAfee” and “Norton” badges with free shipping and significant return/refund policies. That sounds tempting, even to us.
Nonetheless, some other factors influence trust and legitimate – for example, your business information. You may need to disclose some of your basic business information such as social media, email, support portal, contact method, or company location and forum.
Also, try to be active on the net to let customers know you’re active and ready to respond to them at any time. You can regularly post on your social media, respond to email and message, and send out newsletters.
Furthermore, it’s required to build essential pages such as: About Us, FAQs, Returns and Refund, Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policies, etc. With this sufficient information, your store generates a safe feeling for shoppers and increase the chance to convert traffic into sales.
As trust rises, they will have less hesitation to shop at your store.
3. Create a sense of urgency to convert traffic
This tactic makes use of psychology by creating a sense of urgency to encourage users to buy. The most usual method is adding countdowns into your store. In specific, we have 2 types of countdowns: timer countdown and stock countdown.
Generally, timer countdown pairs with a discount offer to show how much time your customers have left to grab the offer. As the time’s ticking, they feel more urged to take action and eventually make a purchase. In the end, people are partially afraid of losing such a sweet deal.
Meanwhile, stock countdown also generates a time-sensitive circumstance but stands alone. It displays the remaining numbers of items left in your inventory. Therefore, when the stock runs low, your customers may fear to lose their favorite items, so they will act to buy.
Some apps can help you displaying these countdowns, especially Boost Convert. Not only providing the countdowns, but it also offers the social proof feature as mentioned above. Hence, Boost Convert is probably the go-to choice to ramping up your conversion rate.
For example, Twenty Plus 2 is using this app with both the features enabled. The product page makes us feel no aggressive, yet still rocking it to convert traffic into sales
4. Highlight your call-to-action (CTA) button
Our final goal is to take our customers to the conversion flow and convert traffic into sales. Therefore, the flow must be as smooth as possible, making it easier for customers to purchase. Within the flow, one of the decisive elements is your CTA button.
CTA button is made to hook customers to take specific actions. Especially, it needs to be attractive, standing out yet simple and friendly towards visitors. Most of the cases, CTA buttons are made with easy-looking color, high contrast with the background, simple actionable design, and inspiring button text.
In the eCommerce industries, CTA buttons are usually placed in the product page, the text mostly is “Buy now”, “Purchase” or “Add to cart”. Thus, we’re limited with button text about urging people to buy, but feel free to be creative.
We take a visit to Pura Vida, and the first thing we notice is the “Add to cart” button. It’s designed with the shining mint color, the main color theme of the store.
Additionally, they reduce other elements’ size and use the white background to make the mint button stand out from the crowd.
5. Leave hooks on your product pages
Besides your hooking CTA buttons, other elements can support to convert traffic into sales by driving customers to act.
We go back to Pura Vida and see there’s a small “New” tag on the product image. Yes, that’s a hook there.
Also, we noticed the “Our cause” section in the product description, stating their core value to create jobs, charity, and environment protecting.
Scroll down a bit, they implement an Instagram widget that shows off real-life photos of their bracelet wearers, along with a few hooking icons which surely cheer up shoppers.
Pura Vida has done a good job in leveraging psychology from various aspect:
- Noble causes, make customers feel they are also noble.
- Environmental issue.
- Happiness conveying.
- Crowd effect (display others beautiful bracelet wearers to attract customer to follow)
From these lessons, you may want to start looking into your product page, analyze every element of it, and find what you’re missing. Afterward, optimize them to hook customers to act, implement new elements and try to make use of factors such as feelings, missions, and causes.
6. Enhance your checkout flow
When you’re successful to drive customers to make a purchase, then you should make sure the checkout flow is flawless. Particularly, any small error could turn customers away, so be careful.
In general, eCommerce stores have 4 checkout steps: cart review, customer information, shipping method, and payment. It is the most optimal checkout flow which is used by most store owners.
Nevertheless, if you’re having a low-loading speed site, 4 checkout steps with 4 page loads are not okay. This will 4X the loading time and force customers to wait in prolonged loadings. That will cause them to drop off their checkout.
Hence, the easiest way to improve your checkout flow is by increasing your site’s speed. The faster your site runs, the faster customers checkout.
Besides, the regular checkout flow with 4 steps will require 4 page loads. Thus, this slows down the checkout process and prevent customers from buying. To reduce page loads, you can transform your cart review page into a cart drawer or popup that appears on the right side every time customers press “Add to cart”. Let’s see how BlueCrate tweak their cart here:
However, be advised that it requires coding experience to set up this cart type. So if you aren’t familiar with the code, you can hire an expert developer to help you or use a free Shopify theme that supports this cart type:
Also, the payment page of some eCommerce store platforms lets you add in custom elements, Thus, we suggest you could use some customer reviews, trust badges with return/refund policies. Again, here is another example from ProjectYourself:
When improving a part of your store, it does not only help to convert traffic into sales but also refine your store to perfection. Keep enhancing it and testing which improvement suits best for your site.
7. Enable guest checkout to convert traffic into sales
We’re aware that signing up for an account should make things easier to track and manage orders for both store and customer’s end. However, it slows down the checkout flow so you may lose customers there.
Theoretically, there identically are 2 types of buyers: those want to sign-up to feel rest assured about their orders, and those don’t want to sign up due to the long sign-up process. Luckily, guest checkout can solve both sides’ issue. Check out the guest checkout from Que Bottle here:
Guest checkout lets customers checkout as fast as possible while you still can gather all necessary information from them. After the purchase, you can make them create their accounts later to track their orders.
With guest checkout, you can speed up the checkout process and take one step further to convert traffic into sales more effectively.
8. Convert mobile traffic with mobile responsive storefront
79% of smartphone users have made a purchase online using their mobile device in the last 6 months. Ecommerce is shifting to mobile transactions, making mobile eCommerce become a rich market to exploit.
Therefore, to maximize your conversion rate, you should adapt to mobile eCommerce as soon as possible, starting with making your store fully mobile responsive.
Likewise, browsing on mobile is way more limited than on a desktop. If your site looks messy on mobile display, no one ever wants to proceed on it.
For example, Appolowear morphs the site beautifully on the iPhone X display. Imagine if they are not responsive…
Such a pain to browse on such display without responsive. You hardly can buy anything on that.
To convert traffic into sales better, you also need to make your store compatible with all display sizes, including mobiles, tablets, desktop, and ultrawide display.
By default, Shopify’s theme is responsive itself. However, your content must also fit their design and make sure both desktop users and mobile users can browse your store effortlessly.
In specific, you should pay attention to:
- Your image displayed size
- Product name: length, text size, keyword
- Product description
- Variants selection
- Sticky CTA button on the mobile interface.
9. Clean distraction from your store
Conversion optimization drives customers into the checkout flow. To maximize the potency, you should make sure there’s nothing else to distract customers from the goal you aim them to go.
First of all, define what you want to aim your customers to do. Is it clicking “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” button, entering the collection, the product page, subscribing to the newsletter, sharing the product, grabbing a discount coupon, or joining in a contest? It’s up to you to decide.
Then, you must make sure those actions stand out from others by reducing text around it, simplifying the other photos, and avoid highlighting other elements. Making your photos look fancy is good, but don’t mess them up, that could overwhelm your customers with too many things.
Besides, putting element too close to each other makes your storefront seems “suffocated”. Hence, you can add in some white spaces between elements to let your storefront “breathe” and look more comfortable.
The first impression when we visit ALAZKA merch store is an elegant experience, simple yet straightforward. They choose the white background with moderate text size and focus on the album’s photo and the buttons.
10. Focus on the product descriptions that convert traffic
Nowadays, some of the eCommerce stores don’t pay attention to product description. Normally, the store’s owner imports the products from AliExpress or other sources, leaving the product description the same without editing.
As seen in most cases, the base product description merely speaks for its technical specs. Indeed, it did its job: presenting the product.
Nonetheless, that’s just a generic, shallow, no emotion-driving paragraph with numbers and measures which is not optimal to convert traffic into sales. Does this description make us want to purchase? Meh.
If you customize the product description, you will see it converts traffic into sales drastically. First of all, you can craft the description to tell what your product can do, what benefits the item can bring to the customers and why they should buy it.
Moreover, putting in excitement, curiosity, and even a little sense of humor would be even greater. For instance, check out the product description of Chewy:
They spoke clearly about the product’s key benefits: pet’s healthy skin, antioxidant, immune system, etc. Also, the description included the detailed specs about the products, giving customers all information possible.
Furthermore, we suggest you divide your product description into parts as Chewy did. You may consider to break it into Specs, Features, Description, Details, Preview.
To demonstrate the product even better, a tutorial video about your product and guide how to use it can be very helpful to convert visitors.
Above all, the product description is one of highly-converting elements or your storefront. Therefore, if you have the resource, don’t forget to re-decorate it to convert traffic into sales better.
11. Use high-quality product photos
While the product description describes the product’s usage, specs, and features, the product image describes the appearance, packaging, or samples to convert traffic into sales.
It’s best that you let your customers try your product first. Sadly, you’re limited to offer customers free-trial for your products; only the images can describe it.
To overcome this, you can craft extraordinary photos to convince customers to buy. Notably, high-quality product images in high resolution are compulsory.
As can be seen in most eCommerce stores, the images can be zoomed when hovering the mouse over it. Therefore, your images are required to be large enough to cover the zoomed scale.
Furthermore, make sure that your images cover all perspectives of your product. Here is an example from Adidas:
Adidas display various pictures of their shoes, along with the hover zoom feature. Each photo covers an angle of the item. Hence, customers can inspect the product better and have a higher chance to make a purchase!
Moreover, the photos must be clear, eye-comforting, and easy-looking to emphasize the product in it. Nonetheless, do not overuse too many photos as it will make your website look suffocated and distract customers from making the purchase.
12. Establish live chat on your storefront
While visitors are wandering around your store, it’s ideal to jump in right there to help and convert them. Because when you accompany your customers, they will find it more confident to browse and purchase without worrying about anything.
The best way to engage with visitors is by establishing a live chat. Particularly, you can make use of the Facebook messenger, or integrate a standalone live chat system.
To use Facebook chat, install the app Quick Facebook Chat and connect with your Facebook Page with the app. You can customize the position and appearance of the widget to match your store’s theme.
This method is easy to set up, quick responsive via Facebook, and friendly to customers. For example, Myth of Eastern is using this app to support and engage with their customers very effectively.
Whereas, if you don’t want to use Facebook messenger, Olark is a good alternate choice for a standalone live chat system. Plus, it can easily integrate with Shopify.
However, beware of the downside of this tactic. Supporting your customers takes a lot of time. Therefore, your work will be stuck to customer support effort only, preventing you from other crucial tasks.
Besides, low responding time will hurt your reputation. We suggest you should prepare enough resource for customer support before establishing the live chat.
13. Remarketing to invite customers back and convert traffic into sales
If you can’t convert traffic at their first visit, then invite them to return and convert them. Remarketing is one of the best ways to make use of churned traffic. Let’s start with how to collect leads from your traffic.
a. Collect leads from your traffic
Before people leaving your store, you can at least capture some information from them. Email is the most common type of lead that you can collect. You can start with a professional lead capturing tool, or use the ordinary Opt-in form for newsletter subscription. For lead capturing tool, there are lots of options to choose from. We recommend SiteKit, a free, lightweight app that lets you create header bars, popups, and win-wheels. It’s built exclusively for lead capturing and fully customizable for all widgets.
Alternatively, if you prefer the traditional opt-in form for newsletter subscription, you can place it in the header bar, the last block above your footer, or right in the footer of your site.
As we are building an eCommerce store, the top priority is not capturing leads but to convert traffic into sales, so we suggest you can place the opt-in form at the end of your site, such as the last block or the footer.
For instance, Avenged Sevenfold set up a small sign up form at the end of their merch store.
As well as Daniel Wellington, they put a small opt-in form at the end of their site, before the footer.
Furthermore, you can also collect leads by installing Google Tag Manager and Facebook Pixel. They record who has visited your site into a custom audience and let you run ads targeting that audience.
b. Convert traffic via your collected leads
Once you gather customer’s leads, it’s time to convert them.
If your customers have an unfinished checkout, send them a friendly email to remind about the order.
This is a great way BlueCrate used to bring customers back to their site and complete the order. Additionally, this also prevents cart abandonment.
Besides cart reminding emails, you can send newsletter introducing your new content, latest offers, and deals. Look at how Pura Vida introduces their new items here:
Moreover, you can run advertisements to target who has visited or engaged on your site. From the leads you collected via Google Tag Manager and Facebook Pixel, you will have the option to deploy campaigns specifically targeting them using your custom audience.
This is an effective way to strengthen your brand’s awareness and invite people to come back. If you do remarket effort right, you can make use of all traffic sources including churned one to convert traffic into sales more effectively.
14. Remember to say “Thank You”
It’s polite to say “Thank You” to your customers. When you say “Thanks” to them, they appear to be happy and satisfied, improving their user experience with your products. Eventually, they will recommend your shop to their relatives.
Thus, be nice to your customers regardless of any circumstances. You can boost up your service’s quality and have a higher chance to be mentioned with good words via word-to-mouth.
There are 2 common ways to say “Thanks” to your customers. Firstly, you can thank them after they make purchases via emails. Here is an example of thank you email from Origin.
Meanwhile, Luxipod has a different approach. They include a thank you note with beautiful words to their customers inside their product package.
Indeed, this is just a small detail but has a high impact on your user experience and your professionalism. Hence, you’ll be mentioned via word-of-mouth with nice words, spreading your brand awareness and increasing the chance to convert traffic into sales.
For thank you emails, you can use Happy Email app to send an automated, pre-customized email to thank all customers post-purchase. While your user experience is improved, also your conversion rate will rise.
Final words
Glad that you’ve made it till the end, these 14 game changers are gonna help you fight no-sale situation. Easy to set up yet effective, you can start implementing them immediately on your storefront
Many store owners have come to us expressing their concerns about this issue and we have guided them through their darkest time. We believe you will be the next to escape it and start to convert traffic into sales.
Yes, yes you will!
It’s time for a storefront upgrade and see how many you can convert your traffic! Good luck boosting your conversion rate ♥
Recommended for you
