Five more ways to increase your customer conversion rate

Here are five more tricks to increase your customer conversion rate and increase sales on your ecommerce website.

Following on from our previous article, “Five ways to increase your customer conversion rate”, here are five more ways:

Make purchases social

You can persuade a customer to buy more products from you by encouraging them to follow you on social networks. Do this by setting up a Facebook “like” or Twitter “follow” button on your thank you page. Every time you appear in their Twitter or Facebook feed, you have a new selling opportunity.

Sharing information on social networks helps to spread the word about your ecommerce brand and helps to win more customers. Give customers the opportunity to update their Twitter or Facebook status with a pre-written message after they place their order (something along the lines of “I’ve just bought this great new product at XYZ. Check it out: www.XYZ.com”).

Offer free shipping

A study by KISSmetrics shows that 44% of visitors that leave their shopping cart do so because of shipping and handling fees. So why not give customers a reason to stay and spend on your ecommerce website by waiving their shipping fees. Of course, this could be a significant cost to your business, but test it out to see whether the additional sales may balance out the extra costs (you could also only offer free shipping on orders over a certain amount).

If you do decide to offer free shipping, make this obvious on your website with “free shipping!” banners that are always visible.

Related products

This is an easy way to increase sales and conversions. By offering related and similar products, you can help customers choose the right product for them, rather than them having to leave your site to find alternatives elsewhere. It’s also an easy way to increase a customer’s order size (ie if a customer buys a flashlight, why not sell him batteries too?).

Multiple payment options

Don’t freeze out certain customers by only accepting VISA or Mastercard. Some customers may not want to share their credit card details with plenty of websites, so why not offer them alternative payment options, such as PayPal? While PayPal isn’t always supplier-friendly, customers do love it. The customer’s credit card information, along with their shipping and billing address are already stored on PayPal, which means they don’t have to type it all in again on your website.

Tell customers what to expect next

What happens after a customer places an order? How long do they have to wait before the order is processed? What is the estimated time before delivery? Make sure you tell your customers what they want to know. If you are going to send them an email to tell them when their order is shipped, say so on the check-out page. And be sure to thank them for their order too!