If you have any experience with e-commerce sites, you definitely know that building the site is only the beginning of the process. Nobody will ever visit your site if you don’t promote it. And even if they visit your site, they will not buy anything unless you have a solid strategy to turn visitors into buyers. In order to maximize conversions, you need to focus on three things –
- Ideal layout,
- Text on the page and
- SEO.
I will discuss briefly about these three things. Let’s start with the layout.
The positioning and the size of the major elements play a crucial role in the ultimate conversation of your visitors. According to recent studies, placing big images on the product pages can significantly increase your conversion.
However, you shouldn’t add too many images on the page. Especially if you want to cross-sell products, you shouldn’t distract your visitors. Large, centered images do the trick most of the times.
The text on the page also plays a critical role in the conversion rate. Instead of using highly promotional sales pitch, you should opt for actual information with some helpful insights. Don’t overwhelm your visitors by providing too pushy text or CTA’s.
And then, you can’t ignore SEO too. If the customers can’t even find your website, how can they visit your site and buy your products? You should target the appropriate keywords and put the keyword in the title, first paragraph of the post, meta description etc. Using a dedicated plugin like WordPress SEO by Yoast will make the process easier.
Best Conversion Optimization Plugins
While these things should be maintained by you, there are some things which you can automate. There are actually some WordPress plugins and extensions which could be helpful in increasing your conversion rate.
Let’s take a look at the best WordPress plugins for increasing conversion in a WooCommerce website.
1. SIP Reviews Shortcode for WooCommerce
While visitors will read what you have to say about your products, they will most definitely be more interested in reading what other people who bought them have to say about them, aka, the so-important product reviews.
Figleaves ran an experiment and found that adding reviews to a product can increase conversion by 35.27% for that product. They also found that products with reviews had 12.5% higher conversion rate that products without. As you can see, you can’t afford not to have product reviews prominently displayed in your store.
With SIP Reviews Shortcode for WooCommerce you can insert reviews anywhere in your store with useful shortcodes. in addition, it can help you set product schema so that people will see the product rating directly from Google search results, hence more people clicking on your product pages.
2. Review for Discount Extension
Developed by WooCommerce itself, this is a very handy solution for increasing your conversion rate. With the help of this extension, you can make your customers come back for the second, third, fourth times and so forth.
Once installed and activated, the plugin will offer discounts to your customers in exchange of reviews. Along with encouraging the customers to actually check out, this will also increase the number of reviews in your website.
And the more reviews you have, the more credible your website will become for the potential customers. And discounts will encourage them to finish the shopping. These are proven conversion increasing techniques for any e-commerce website.
3. Olark Chat
Being always available for your customers is an awesome way to make your visitors like the website more. And you can do that by integrating a live chat system. Among all the available options, Olark Chat is the simplest and easiest solution.
As customers are browsing your website, they will be asked if they are facing any problem in the shopping process. If they response with any problem, you can provide instant solutions and guide them through the process.
Before finally finishing the checkout process, most customers want to do some research for more information. If you can provide instant answers to their quests, chances are high that they will actually buy the product from you.
4. Optimizely
If you want to increase the conversion in your WooCommerce website, there is no alternative to A/B testing. You should test everything from the text, image, CTA, button placement etc. Find out the variations that work best and do some more A/B testing with them. This is a guaranteed way to increase conversion.
And for the testing, Optimizely is one of the easiest choices. By using this simple but powerful tool, you can optimize the user experience and create the ultimate sales funnel for the visitors. You can set up different types of experiments to find out which designs and approaches work best and focus on them.
5. Social Coupon WooCommerce
This unique WooCommerce plugin offers instant discounts to visitors for sharing your website in social media networks. With the help of this plugin, you can easily strengthen your social presence and boost the conversion. With more social popularity, you will also receive a strong support in your SEO efforts.
The latest version of the plugin allows you to setup multi-step discounts. With this feature, the customer will get multiple discounts for performing separate social actions. You can choose to display the social discount offers in the products, cart or checkout pages. The plugin comes with readymade designs for Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and VK.com.
6. WooCommerce Hot Deals Pro
There is not any customer who doesn’t like discount or deals. And WooCommerce Hot Deals Pro enables you to set up attractive deals in your website. The plugin is an excellent choice to create and promote daily, weekly deals or special one-time offers.
By using this plugin, you can easily create these offers for any of your products. It is possible to create unlimited number of deals with one or more products. The deals could be pre-scheduled to start and stop at specific times.
If you don’t have the time to choose the product or product category, you can let the plugin choose them randomly. And the discount amount could be set as the percentage of the price, a fixed amount or a specific product price.
7. WooCommerce Free Gift
‘Free’ is a very powerful word. You can easily attract more customers by offering something free. And the WooCommerce Free Gift takes this one step further by offering gifts when customers spend a specific amount. This is a really interesting way to increase your conversion rate.
Due to human psychology, your customers will definitely be motivated to actually cross the specified limit and get the free gift. It is possible to choose the gift yourself or allow the customer to choose the gift from a list of options.
You can choose to offer the gift only to registered members or for all visitors. By setting up multi-level gift, you can encourage the customer to spend even more.
8. Recover Abandoned Cart
Cart abandonment is a major reason of lower conversion rate. The Recover Abandoned Cart plugin intends to prevent cart abandonment in your WooCommerce website. Once customers make it to the shopping cart, they are definitely interested in the product. You can easily use this interest to get the customer back.
The plugin will monitor which customers are abandoning the cart. And then, you can send follow-up emails to these customers. Besides the manual process, it is possible to send preset emails to the customers. It is also possible to set up a series of emails with better offers each time.
Conclusion
If you want to be successful in e-commerce business, you need to master the conversion skills. I hope the tips and plugins mentioned above will help you in that regard. If you have any additional question or confusion about conversion optimization, feel free to leave a comment below. I will be glad to help you.
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