Guide to Optimizing your Conversion Rate Strategy on Magento

That’s why more and more questions like “What kind of tools to measure the conversion rate on Magento stores?”, ”Steps of conversion optimization”, “How to convert visitors into potential customers” are now flocking the Internet. But guess what, they are asking it wrong.

When you plan to optimize a business’s conversion rate, the first thing you need is a strategic mindset, not any tactics, tips, or tricks. In this article, SmartOSC will offer you a conversion rate optimization strategy on Magento to give you an overview of the bigger picture

What is conversion rate optimization (CRO)?

Conversion rate is an important aspect of business 

Conversion rate is the ratio of visitors coming to your eCommerce site/store versus how many of them actually make a purchase. From that mere figure, business owners can draw a clear understanding of their business performance to leverage for better business decisions.

The best way to calculate your conversion rate is by taking the number of conversions (in other words, sales) and dividing that by the number of total visitors on your site in the same period.

For example, if your store had 50 conversions from 1,000 interactions in July, your equation will be 50/1,000 = 5%. Your conversion rate in July is 5%.

Key conversion rate optimization tools 

According to Wordstream, CRO tools have an average ROI of 223%. That means for each dollar spent on CRO tools, you will essentially get $2.23 back – Not a bad deal, right?

In terms of the best CRO tools, nothing beats Google Analytics – it’s free, and it gives you a perfect picture of your buyer personas, their journeys, and preferences, as long as you take whole advantage of its system. Google Analytics gives you access to valuable data on every single conversion on your sites, such as the sources they are from, their time on site, the pages they’ve read, you name it. 

Besides Google Analytics, there are other conversion rate optimization tools of different cost plans, such as 

• Google PageSpeed Insight (free)
• Google Content Experiments (free)
• Inspectlet (free)
• MageMail (pay for conversions)
• AddShoopers (quite expensive)
• And many more.

Strategies to optimize your conversion rate on Magento

After knowing the basics, let’s move on to the strategies for business owners to optimize for a better rate of conversions.

Search optimization

Without customers knowing about you or your business, all conversion rate strategies are useless

Before developing any conversion plans, we need people to find out about who we are and what we sell first. Without customers knowing about you or your business, all conversion rate strategies are useless. Thus, your utmost priority must be:

•  Smooth and effective search features 
•  Optimized pages, images, and text descriptions for search engines, such as Google and Bing. 

By optimizing the search, you are creating a predictive decision and taking control over the customer base. A predictive and personalized site search is essential for any business owner to draw more insights and predict market trends based on customer behavior and demand. From that, they can display the trendiest products on the homepages, show the availability of stocks, and decide to halt/ resume a product line based on its demand.

Practically, the built-in feature of Magento is not adequate for shops to adapt to the ever-changing search behavior of customers. That’s the gap for the third parties to jump in, bringing desired and effective search functions such as weighted attribute values, typos, auto-completion, and search synonyms. 

Check out our Top Features for B2B E-Commerce Websites Now & Beyond

User-friendly product page

After getting customers in, you must keep their attention and interest long enough – and that’s where your product pages come in.

Generally, the majority of eCommerce store owners and developers are focusing on their home pages as well as some selected landing pages. While it is true that companies can see a 55% rise in leads when they boost the number of landing pages from 10 to 15, according to Hubspot, it hardly contributes to the store’s conversion rate improvement. Why so? Shoppers come to your Magento site to search for desired products and related information, and they may compare different products, prices and payment policies, and even stocks availability. It is the refined product page development that boosts user experiences and keeps them stay, not some persuasive landing pages.

Companies can see a 55% rise in leads when they boost the number of landing pages from 10 to 15, according to Hubspot

You can leverage this strategy by enhancing the UX of the product pages and the entire Magento site demands. Some additional features that should be included are zooming capability for product browsing improvement, social media integration for better sharing, delivery check, and other extensions available to optimize your product and category pages in innovative ways.

Polishing Magento magics

Speaking of extensions, it would be a pity if shop owners don’t have the needed knowledge of Magento tools and plugins to fully take advantage of these. You just can’t win a battle you don’t know about. That’s why many companies seek for personnel/agencies to do all the Magento management for them, from analyzing the code, site speed optimization to URL structure and meta descriptions customization and so on.  

Email personalization

Studies at Aberdeen show that personalized emails increase conversions by around 10%, on average

According to Campaign Monitor, Email marketing drives $44 for every $1 invested. And with personalized email, studies at Aberdeen show that personalized emails increase conversions by around 10%, on average. 

Personalization in general gives people value and credit. An effective email marketing campaign can easily improve the conversion rates with the help of marketing professionals and aim to the customers returning to the carts and making a complete checkout process.

Check out optimization

When a customer decides to make a purchase, you are just halfway to reach a conversion because customers change their minds easily and swiftly. According to Dynamic Yield, the typical shopping cart abandonment rate for online retailers varies between 60% and 80%, with an average of 71.4%. 

Customers can postpone, cancel or change the product in just the blink of an eye in this phase. But there is a way out for shop owners: It is claimed that the best-optimized checkout process has an abandonment rate of 20%.

So, what can you do? A proven strategy to be applied in this situation is to hold the customers with an intense desire to purchase that particular product. You can achieve that by analyzing the existing entire check-out process including the steps, login accounts, and payment systems.

Just a thought: Should You Add Buy Now, Pay Later to Your E-commerce Store? See how experts answer.

Secure payment methods 

Secured money transactions with a payment gateway are the prime factors to enhance conversion rates for any Magento store. The latest versions of Magento such as M2x have a built-in PayPal payment gateway integrated with the latest features. But, business owners also need to define payment method strategies regarding regionally popular payment gateways to suit their targeted audience. 

What’s in it for this game? You will need at least support for multilingual and multi-currency features of Magento.

Advanced strategies for order and delivery management

One thing that makes Shopee the dominant player in Southeast Asia eCommerce markets is their real-time order updates and successful on-time product delivery. This feature hypes eCommerce customers up for their upcoming parcels as well as encourages them to speak some cloying words regarding your business on social networking sites. In other words, it can satisfy your customers and make your Magento eCommerce business viral.

Today business owners can leverage real-time tracking tools and technologies available and several postal services to offer APIs integration to show data of an order tracking to customers. Similarly, Magento also enables shipping calculators to compute the final cost when the products are reaching customers doorsteps. Many Magento plugins also allow store owners to offer free shipping for some defined quantity of product purchases or the costs of aggregated products to increase AOV and conversion.

Test everything

While you are smoothing out any details in the customer journey to boost your conversion rate, you need to know for a fact that very few of them are practically applicable and provenly efficient for your eCommerce stores. Therefore, all strategy implementations require measurement and thorough testing. 

Check out SmartOSC’s Key to Successful Digital Customer Experience

Top Magento conversion rate optimization tricks that actually work

Only after understanding the whole picture should you look at this section. Here, we will provide you with industry tactics to help you throughout the journey.

Know your audience 

Not knowing who is paying for your products/services, where they are from, and what are their primary drivers will leave you clueless about what decision to make in the future and slows your current sales. 

So, the first thing you need to do is define exactly where most of your traffic comes from on your Magento sites. Remember, the thing bringing people to your website is probably the same thing that might convince them to become a customer most. So learn about your current customer and your ideal customers – do they match, if not, why? Only when you know your target customers, their online habits can you plan your website accordingly and cater to them the way they prefer.

Set realistic goals

The conversion rate varies by industry, platforms, and even devices, so what you considered poor CR may be a good goal for others. For example, Statista shows that mobile conversion rate stats for desktop and mobile show percentages of 4.14% and 1.82% respectively. And while the average eCommerce CR is around 2%, the top 10% of websites convert at 11.45% or higher, according to Techjury. 

 The conversion rate varies by industry, platform, and even devices

So, anything better than what you have now is a good goal, but make sure it’s a realistic expectation for a specific timeframe. Also, remember that CRO is a constant practice. You must set aside time/resources to review your results, and constantly improve. Over time, you can reduce your cost-per-acquisition.

Make strong CTAs

The CTA is among the most important pieces of content a business has to offer as it guides the readers through what to do next, whether it is to fill the form, make a purchase, leave a comment, or social share. CTA is an essential conversion tool (basically the definition of conversion), but we need to pick our calls wisely.

Did you know that in 2020, changing your CTA to “Click here” can increase CR by 30%? Why so? Because experts at SmartOSC have concluded that for eCommerce sites, the perfect call to action needs to be strong and clear. All customers want things to be done quickly and you won’t want your CTA to distract people from their purchase intent. But at the same time, your calls for action should work to your benefit.

Other strong CTAs can be something beneficial, for instance, free samples, free trial periods, 30 minutes of free consultancy, and so on to those who give their email address. 

Don’t ask for too much info

only eCommerce customers but customers at large do not like being forced to fill out long forms and providing too much personal information. A strong lead for your conversion only consists of 3 things: full name, email address, and phone number. That’s it, really.

Today customers are more aware of sharing their private information than ever – that means they can get suspicious or protective over their privacy enough to leave your site and come to those asking for less information. 

Reduce product pagination

Last but not least, product pagination can tremendously impact your conversion rate. This issue may seem like a small thing to most people, but in fact, experts have proven it to be tiresome for users to continuously click on the “next” button or switch between pages multiple times. Not only it is tiring but users also get irked by the page loading process. 

So if you have a lot of products, you can either increase the number of items per page or choose an infinite scrolling feature to ease out the job of clicking on the next page. This kind of dilemma has confused quite a lot of business owners because Magento supports both options with quite a lot of extensions, and both choices have their own pros and cons. 

Read more cases where SmartOSC leverages technology advances to optimize our client’s conversion rate.

Conclusion

If you search online, there are hundreds of tips and tricks to help you optimize your conversion rate strategy on Magento, and the fact is, very few of them will prove to be efficient to your business. To maximize your chance of success, the first thing to bear in mind is to fully understand the concept and element of conversion, your Magento sites, and your current business situations. 

SmartOSC is an international development agency that offers scalable, cost-efficient, and world-class enterprise Magento services. With prominent advantages in eCommerce of 15+ years as partner and winner of Magento’s Imagine Excellence Awards Finalist for 2 consecutive years, we now have 200+ Magento 2 certified developers and successfully provide 1000+ projects in all domains globally. 

Contact us now