How To Increase Your Conversion Rate & AOV

Increasing your traffic and improving your ads can generate more revenue, it’s just as vital to convert your current traffic into paying customers. A business which focuses entirely on bringing traffic to their landing page, without any effort to improve the conversion rate on said landing page, is simply unsustainable. Typical conversions that businesses focus on include sales, leads, and email sign-ups. For the sake of this article, since we are an e-commerce-first agency, we’ll be focusing on sales. 

‍

Through a process of regular data analysis and consistent landing page experimentation, you can tweak your website to widen your sales funnel and convert more visitors. 

‍

‍

First Impressions are Key

‍

On average, users will spend about 15 seconds on your home page when they land on it for the first time. In that very short space of time, the user goes through a series of psychological processes to decide whether or not they’ll proceed on your website. It’s crucial to use this time to make a strong first impression to entice the user to purchase. 

‍

Mobile First

‍

79% of all traffic to Shopify stores is from mobile, and 69% of all Shopify orders are made on mobile (Drip.com). This tells us that all Shopify store owners should prioritise the look and functionality of their mobile site first, with desktop coming after. Mobile traffic as a percentage of all traffic to e-commerce websites has only been increasing over the last decade, so this recommendation won’t be changing any time soon. 

‍

‍

To optimise a site for mobile, ensure that all of the most important pages on your website and clear and easily-accessible. This will help to increase your average session duration. Make sure that your website loads fast, and without too many pop ups. These can be particularly annoying on a mobile website, where the user needs to click X on several pop ups before being able to access the main part of the site. The Google Page Speed Insights Tool is the easiest way to assess your loading speed on desktop and mobile. 

‍

Images and videos that are not optimised for mobile can be detrimental to your conversion rate. Wrong sizing, file sizes too large, these are easily preventable elements which can slow down your website and ruin the user experience. 

‍

Above all, it’s important for the business owner to put themselves in the shoes of a website user and ask themselves a series of questions: 

‍

• Does my website create an experience that users will appreciate?
• Is the sales process of the website easy to follow? 
• Is my site quick to load, without errors and excessive pop ups? 

‍

If you follow these steps when it comes to optimising your e-commerce site mobile, you’ll be on a one-way train to a high conversion rate. 

‍

Average Order Value - a silent hero

‍

AOV often gets overlooked as an important metric to focus on. To break it down however, any increase in your AOV will bring you more revenue, for the same number of customers. 

‍

The most popular methods of AOV optimisation include upselling, cross selling, free shipping with a minimum order value threshold, bundling, and more. Let’s look at which of these methods give store owners the best returns. 

‍

A simple tip to increase AOV is to use your website to highlight your higher ticket items. When a user goes into a particular category of your store, let’s say Shoes in this instance, you want the first rows of shoes to be your best selling, highest value items. The user should always have the option to sort by least expensive, by item name A-Z etc, but that initial view of the collection should prioritise the items that will generate the most revenue for the business. 

‍

Another easy W in the AOV game is to create a minimum spend threshold for free shopping. We’ve all found ourselves at one point in time trying to find an item to add to our cart to hit the free shipping threshold on a website. It’s a guaranteed way to increase your store’s AOV with not much work required. The trick is to ensure customers know how much more they need to spend to hit the threshold. There are several Shopify plugins like Free Shipping Bar that not only maintain the free shipping threshold above the website menu, but also provide pop ups with dynamic messages informing the user how much more they need in their basket to qualify. 

‍

It’s equally important to cross-sell related products during the checkout process. Not only will this increase your AOV, but also will increase engagement and satisfaction from the customer. It creates value for both parties, and helps to build longer term relationships between the two, when done in the right way. 

‍

Conclusion

‍

There are several relatively easy ways to boost the Conversion Rate and Average Order Value on your store, that don’t involve anything too complex to implement. 

‍

Focusing on mobile, optimising your homepage, cross selling and upselling are all just a few examples of small optimisations that will increase your revenue from the same number of website users. 

‍

Businesses can obsess over click through rates, number of clicks, ad copy etc. Of couse, these are all crucials elements of your funnel. However, if the existing processes on your website aren’t optimised to generate conversions, it’s a huge waste of budget.