DO YOU REALLY UNDERSTAND CONVERSION... PART 3 OF THE ARTICLE SERIES

 This is part 3 of the thin red line e-commerce series that I have been publishing here on LinkedIn.

After writing a couple of articles about e-commerce I hear from my readers that many don’t really know or understand what conversion is, and almost all of them are too embarrassed about it to say it out loud.

I can understand that people that are not the CRO expert at an e-commerce site never heard about conversion before and I know that in many organizations even people working at e-commerce organizations don't know and understand what conversion is. So as a result of this feedback from you, my amazing readers I will spend a few lines on this subject.

Conversion

Conversion is the number of people visiting your site that during the ongoing visit decide to become a paying customer by adding a product to the cart and finalize the purchase (depending on the goal of your website it could be different, for example, a blogs goal might be to get the visitor to subscribe to the newsletter or similar and as soon as you as a visitor have completed the task that the website owner defined as the goal of your visit it's considered a conversion). Basically, this is the number that states how many orders you get compared to how many visitors you have. In short conversion rate is the amount of visitors that convert to customers.

Let’s play with the idea that you have 100 visitors and out of those 100 you receive 2 orders. I know that you probably find it ridiculous that I use 2 as the example as it’s so low. But that’s actually the current situation for most e-commerce stores as the global average conversion rate is 2-3% depending on what type of products you sell online.

Note that we are not talking about how much money the customers spend on their orders nor are we talking about how many items are purchased in each order.

Your conversion rate is probably the most important number you should track at all time. It is the number that tells you how good you are at getting your visitors to buy.

That leads us to several more steps but let’s take them one by one.

Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO is all about optimizing the interaction with your visitors from every angle you can think of and a few more if possible.

Let’s go through a few of the most important parts you need to think of when you optimize your store for conversion.

Speed

With a slow site, you will have low conversion as people are not interested in waiting for your site to load. They expect a rapid response time and any store that have a longer response time than 2 seconds have a serious problem that affects their conversion.

Too much-required information or over complicated

Steps, we have all been there, step by step trying to go through that guided process of placing that order online, the more steps you have in your store the lower are your conversion. Statistics show us that for every step you have in your checkout process you lose about 10% of your customers.

This means that if you have more than 10 steps you have serious problems and will only attract the visitors that just won't give up.

I can actually personally reflect on this as I earlier this week made a purchase in one of the big e-commerce sites in Sweden. I had decided that I was to order this product and that there was no other store offering this for me. Putting me in the place where I spent over 5 minutes trying to figure out how to get through the checkout process.

I see this all the time as I go through stores in my daily work, the design looks nice, there is a marketing team that generates traffic to the store, all different departments take care of their business basically but there is no one that actually tests the store from a user consumer. Don’t get me wrong now, I am sure that most stores have a test team that makes sure that all bugs are taken care of but that’s something totally different, they look for issues in the technical setup and the code but they are not educated to look at the customer logical expectations. This result in stores that are technically advanced but lack the logical flow from a customer’s point of view.

If you don’t care about your customers eventually you will have none, it’s as simple as that and all news about e-commerce basically say the same, whenever a store doesn’t care about their customer's sales are negatively affected and that’s rather logical don’t you agree.

Retail stores are able to tackle this problem in the first-hand approach with eyes and ears. The store staff hear and see customers interactions and can help them whenever needed. This is something that I am writing a lot about in my next article so be sure to keep your eyes open.

I hope this article gave you the insight to help you get started on improving your conversion, and that you found the answers you were looking for. I am here to help you so don’t be shy just reach out to me and we can have a chat about your current situation.

If you found interest in this article I believe that you also will be interested in reading the other article series that I'm writing about the future of e-commerce, you can find it here -->  future-e-commerce-part-1-consumer-relationship-karl-lillrud

I'm flattered that you have read this far and as I'm sure you can see I have put a lot of effort into making this as valuable and as educational as possible for you.

Since I started writing these articles I have been overwhelmed with positive comments when I meet with readers in person, but perhaps I won't meet you for a long time, so I like to ask you for two things:

• I love feedback, just hit the like button or write your feedback either in a personal message or in the comment field. It could simply be that you agree with me, or you can point out things that you like me to elaborate on or perhaps what you hope to read about in the next article.

These articles are meant to help and educate you but if you think I'm shooting too high or too low I need to know so that I can finetune the aim for the next article a little so that it fits you perfectly.

• I want your help to spread the word, I have been working in this business for many years already but I rarely see these type of articles, and to me, that's an alarm bell going off. The things I talk about are to a large extent things that almost everyone in the e-commerce business should know about but most people don't. So help me help your friends, help me spread this article so that we start solving these major problems and if you're interested in talking about it more I am here, just give me a call.

If you like me to come and speak at an event, a seminar, a school, or in your office just reach out to me.

About the author:

Karl Lillrud is a serial entrepreneur with 21 years of experience from this segment. Founder of one of the first interior design e-commerce sites in the Nordic countries where he back in early 2000 learned about the many challenges that e-commerce struggle with even today.

That's why Karl decided to help companies overcome these hurdles and focus on what matters most, keeping customers happy and helping the companies improve their market position. Being a public speaker and entrepreneurial mentor Karl love to share his experience and knowledge with the one goal to help others reach their success easier and faster.