Are you an online merchant? Looking to sell your services and products using the web? Have any plans to create your own online store? If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then you surely need to be familiar with WooCommerce. Basically, WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin that can be coupled with WordPress to add e-commerce functionality. WooCommerce is a great choice for launching your online business and has been adopted by more than 380,000 online retailers.
Creating an online store does not necessarily mean that you will get targeted traffic to your site or achieve more sales. In fact online retailers face a great challenge to optimise their conversion rates, which can usually hang around 1.5%. Luckily, WooCommerce is a flexible and robust system with a variety of available extensions and plugins that enable you to customise your online store to perfectly fit your business needs.
Every online retailer should be looking for ways to increase their WooCommerce conversion rates. There are several things you can apply to your product pages to optimise conversion. Though these approaches can only make a small difference, collectively they can vastly improve the number of conversions on your WordPress website.
If you need to succeed in e-commerce business, then you definitely need to learn and master the skills of conversion. This article mentions some necessary tips and plugins that will assist you in that regard.
What is Conversion Rate? Is it important?
Conversion rate is simply the percentage of visitors taking the desired action. For instance, if an online toyshop gets 2000 unique visitors on a specific day and only 50 people successfully make a purchase the conversion rate for that day would be:
(50/2000)*100 = 2.5%
This is actually a good conversion rate for online stores. Usually, the average rate of conversion ranges between 2 to 4%. The conversion rate can be calculated daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly.
A conversion can be a contact, a purchase, a subscription, a review, a survey, downloading an app, creating an account, following a link, signing up for a newsletter, sharing the product on social networking sites, or anything that’s the desired action. Your site can have multiple conversions.
‘Converts’ are the users who are convinced to do what the individual Page needs them to.
Conversion rates are really important for two main reasons.
– It is easier to boost the number of ‘converts’ from your current visitors instead of trying to relatively boost the number of visitors.
– Greater conversion rates improve your site’s credibility with suppliers and customers alike, boosting your market share.
Higher conversion rates mean more people can easily get what they are searching for on the site and are satisfied with the quality of the products. Therefore, you need to implement a cohesive conversion funnel to help you maximise profits and have an edge over your competitors.
How Conversion Rate Optimisation Works
There are 3 main stages of optimising conversion rates, including: site analysis, user polls, testing and documentation. Note that conversion rate optimisation depends on different solutions that collectively work together to improve your site. Therefore, previously successful strategies or what worked for another website might not work on yours.
Site Analysis
This is the first stage of conversion rate optimisation and it’s where site analysis commences. Track all site pages to determine the mark patterns and audience response using analytics services like KISSMetrics and Google Analytics.
It’s a great idea to create fixed segments to make comparisons easier.
User Polls
Get opinions from your existing and new customers to get a genuine feedback about what they like and don’t like about your website. You can evaluate their responses to identify your conversion strengths.
You will also be able to determine the factors that need to be changed and optimise them.
Recommendations and ratings can help you measure user experience. Note what users often say about your website and the products that they are contented with. This will give you brilliant ideas for future product descriptions and promotional campaigns while highlighting the features of the products.
Testing and Documentation
After getting the qualitative data from user opinions and quantitative data from numbers you need to start testing. Sort optimisation areas by priority and design your test as the next task. Decide the expected goals of the optimisation in order to interpret the test results.
First, begin with small changes initially then move on to larger ones. Always test one change only at a time. Making multiple changes simultaneously makes it hard to figure out which change resulted to the positive or negative impact during optimisation.
How to Determine your Conversion Rate
How good is your WooCommerce conversion rate? You can easily determine and improve your conversion rate, which is crucial for your business. It’s easy: just investigate different numbers, and always remember that even a 1 percent lift in conversion rate can raise a lot more revenue.
Have you recently checked your conversion rate?
Let us check how well you are performing:
0-1% – Something is really broken. Check your site and traffic for problems. Get professional help from an expert.
1-2% – Score is below average. Check your site and incoming traffic to identify the weak points.
2-3% – Though your conversion rate is average, you need to check your numbers.
3-5% – Your site is performing very well. Continue improving your site and try to maintain the conversion rate.
Above 5% – Brilliant! Your site is superb – just work on keeping the conversion rate above 5% and you will never need to spend again.
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) techniques are essential in optimising conversion rates for your online business. WooCommerce works great too!
WooCommerce offers you an exceptional user experience by default: however, there are other places that need improvement.
Other than the overall conversion rate, you can also figure out some important numbers to check on your WooCommere store, including:
Bounce Rate
If it is over 75%, then look for a more reliable traffic source. Check your traffic and sales in case of a terrible bounce rate. You can check your bounce rate via Audience Overview on Google Analytics.
Product Conversion Rate
This should be above 5%. Identify the product that converts the best and give it a traffic boost. Also, check your top sellers and their product page traffic. Select the best and give its corresponding adverts a higher budget.
Cart Abandonment Rate
Should be less than 70%. Cart abandonment is an issue that should be dealt with. There are basically two ways to fight cart abandonment.
– Prevent cart abandonment
– Bring back abandoned carts
Unfortunately, WooCommerce doesn’t show cart abandonment stats; you can check your cart abandonment stats using online tools such as GhostMonitor.
Checkout Abandonment Rate
This should be less than 75%. Similar to cart abandonment, an action is needed. You can tackle it with GhostMonitor and Mousestats Form Analytics. GhostMonitor automatically brings back your buyers to complete their purchase. Mousestats simply tells you which fields could be improved to make it easier for buyers. This will help eliminate the weak points within your checkout page.
Time Spent on Every Product Page
Look for time spent on product pages. Work on the product pages that have the most time spent on because there is more interest in these products. However, it can also mean uncertainty. In this case, add more videos, pictures and try answering more questions and address any uncertainty using the product’s description.
Demographic Conversion Rate
You have to check this! Though you clearly know your niche, this data will surely surprise you – just give it a shot. This will help you customise your adverts because you know the most interested groups.
Mobile Conversion Rate
This should be greater than half of your overall conversion rate. This stat is very important. Not only does it show you what is broken on mobile, it also helps you fix several things, especially responsive problems, so you can earn more money from your mobile traffic.
Optimising WooCommerce Conversion Rates
1. Create More Appealing Product Images
Quality images are an essential feature for online store products. High resolution and large images can showcase the products really well persuading more customers to purchase, increasing the conversion rates.
Show as many pictures as possible shot from different angles and make them easy to zoom in on.
WooCommerce Image Zoom is a free plugin, which allows you to make product images bigger and set a zooming feature quickly and easily. The premium version, WooCommerce Image Zoom PRO has more eminent features such as different zoom options and zoom lenses. It also has an advanced setting panel that helps you configure the plugin to your own preference.
2. Display Product Features and Prices Clearly
Transparent product features, product prices and shipping charges build on your customers’ trust.
Providing clear information about products helps customers get an overall review and enables them to clearly decide whether or not to purchase that product or service. WooCommerce Views plugin allows you to make a fully customised e-store that gives you all the genuine features to add any essential information.
3. Highlight your Latest and Featured Products
Highlighting the latest or featured products will drive more traffic to your online store. Attract more clients by highlighting the discounted products or special offer products. WPB WooCommerce Product Sliders help you select some products from your online store and brand them as featured products. The premium version of this plugin, WPB WooCommerce Product Slider PRO has various aristocratic features such as unlimited sliders on every page, specific category slides and more.
4. Add Product Videos
One of the best plugins for this job is YITH WooCommerce Featured Video. Not only is it a free plugin, it also allows you to easily and quickly embed a video within your product or service gallery.
A video works as a great review of products and can boost the conversion rates of your e-store.
5. Encourage Customers to Return
To increase the conversion rate of your online site, you need to encourage the customers to frequently visit and purchase your products. This can be possible by offering loyalty programs, discounts, special offers, and promotions through email marketing.
The subscriber plugin, WooCommerce MailChimp provides a brilliant way to obtain customers’ email addresses for email marketing. Customers are allowed to subscribe to the newsletter once they tick a checkbox on the checkout page.
6. Testimonials and Reviews
Testimonials and reviews are essential purchasing factors. A customer first checks the feedback of other customers before proceeding to purchase a product. Therefore, positive reviews and testimonials increase the sales as well as conversion rates.
Yotpo Social Reviews is a free WordPress Plugin, which generates great customer reviews and testimonials for WooCommerce products by requesting customers to leave their feedback after placing an order.
7. Multiple Payment Options
A lack of multiple options for payment means loss of conversions, especially for online retailers. WooCommerce helps you increase conversion rates by adding different payment options.
8. Purchase Time
Customers get displeased when they wait longer to purchase a product. Purchase time is a decisive term, which can affect your conversion rates.
Try the WooCommerce Checkout Field Editor plugin to customise the default WooCommerce checkout page, which has many fields that can be a painful task for customers to fill in.
This plugin adds, edits and removes those fields for you to configure the page according to your preference. This means your customers will not need to roam for longer and your conversion rates will improve.
9. Go Multilingual
If you have customers from different places or countries then you may need to go multilingual, this will avoid losing clients due to the site’s language. If you have a multilingual site with WooCommerce, you should consider buying the Multilingual CMS package, which includes the WooCommerce Multilingual plugin, plus a lifetime of updates and support. You can even use a plugin like Weglot to help translate your site to different languages for not only conversions, but also customer feedback.
Alternatively, WooCommerce conversion rate optimisation can be implemented by using several other plugins that facilitate the various aspects of optimisation. Here are some of the plugins and tools, which help you improve your conversion.
Site Analysis
WooCommerce doesn’t have dedicated analytic plugins essential to analyse your site; however, it incorporates various analytic platforms directly or through third-party plugins, which allows you to implement those functionalities. Some of the popular analytics software and their extensions for WooCommerce include:
Google Analytics
This efficient analytics software offers a perfect solution for monitoring your website. The platform offers everything including basic rate calculations and advanced options like conversion tracking and cohort analysis. Google Analytics is absolutely free and can be integrated with WordPress through the Google Analytics by MonsterInsights plugin.
KISSMetrics
KISSMetrics tracks revenue, enables real-time interaction with users, and analyses your sales.
WooCommerce has an extension, which integrates with KISSMetrics to set up a custom KISSMetrics control panel on your WooCommerce Dashboard.
Clicky
This comprehensive web analysis tool works efficiently in real time. You can keep track of your individual visitors, assign them custom usernames, and also monitor their actions.
Clicky can be integrated with WordPress through the Clicky by Yoast plugin.
User Polls
Conducting user testing and user polls are essential for your WooCommerce site. Some of the necessary tools include:
SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey offers different survey templates that ensure easy and quick survey creation. Alternatively, it provides target markets to conduct surveys and also offers various attributes, which can be used to create a simple and in-depth poll. Zapier uses trigger-and-action links to integrate WooCommerce with SurveyMonkey.
Qualaroo
Qualaroo is an essential tool to create extensive and varied user surveys that enable you to interact with your visitors at various points of the conversion process. You can analyse their responses later to develop your website optimisation changes.
Qualaroo cannot be integrated with WooCommerce because it has no plugin. However, it has an instructional guide, which explains how to insert a widget into the header of your WordPress website.
Olark Chat
This live chat application customises your website by adding a pop-up chat window. This functionality can be added to your WooCommerce store with the Ilmenite Olark plugin.
Testing and Documentation
Testing and documentation form part of hypothesis verification. These plugins are useful to optimise your WooCommerce conversion rate.
Visual Web Optimizer
Visual Web Optimizer has various multivariate and A/B testing options that enable you to implement conversion rate optimisation strategies and analyse performance.
This software uses heat maps, usability tests, and behavioural filters that help you select the best option to optimise conversion rates. WooCommerce can be integrated with Visual Web Optimizer through an integration plugin.
Optimizely
Optimizely enables you to generate user-friendly A/B tests quickly and easily. It includes features like conditional activation and experiment scheduling of user tests to help in targeting particular audiences. It can be integrated with WordPress using its integration plugin.
CrazyEgg
CrazyEgg relies on heat maps to identify areas where users are often clicking on your website. This will help you determine the pages with fewer clicks, which can be optimised to improve conversion rates. CrazyEgg can be integrated with WooCommerce using the official WordPress Heatmap Tracking plugin.
Page Optimisation
Apart from user testing and site analysis option, there are WooCommerce plugins that enable you to optimise your site’s pages to increase conversions.
WooCommerce Review to Extend Discount
The WooCommerce Review for Discount extension allows you to provide customers with discounts once they leave a review. This encourages more customers to leave honest reviews and also ensures frequent visitors take advantage of those discounts.
WooCommerce Points & Rewards
The addition of points and rewards is a common strategy to improve user experience. The extension, WooCommerce Points & Rewards, integrates functionality for customers to become familiar with the site more and more, leading to increased conversion rates.
YITH WooCommerce Wishlist Plugin
Creating wish lists on your online store is essential in many ways. It always reminds users that there are products in their cart that they should buy. It saves users time wasted navigating the required products, reducing cart abandonment. This plugin adds the wishlist feature to your e-store.
WP GeoIP Country Redirect
Site localisation helps to easily and quickly find all the necessary information about the product pricing, availability and shipping options without any excessive navigation. The website’s logical flow is important for conversions; the WP GeoIP Country Redirect plugin is a great addition to your e-store, especially if your clients are from different countries.
Removing barriers to buying
Another important factor you should consider in order to improve WooCommerce conversion rates is removing barriers to buying. Barriers to buying are caused my many things. It can be hard to understand the products that are for sale. Though the products may be well understood, visitors might not find them easily due to the website’s confusing navigation.
Visitors may want to purchase, but have issues that have not been addressed. These might reflect on areas of privacy, security, shipping times, and shipping costs or refund policy. Visitors may also refuse to share the information you are providing them. Moreover, there could be useless elements on your checkout pages or your cart that might distract people during the payment or checkout process.
Conclusion
Conversion rate optimisation has been an ever-evolving and continuous process. It is known for storeowners to make the mistake of copying every change made by popular websites hoping that they will ultimately increase their conversion rates. Commonly, there are no two similar solutions to the problem you face when optimising your site.
Conversion rates should be optimised based on the type of visitors you have and the type you wish to have in the future. It is better having a single visitor who genuinely likes your products and recommends them instead of one-time passive visitors. Therefore, you need to convert quality visitors, which is essential as the number of conversions.
Conversion rate optimisation should not focus on now alone, but also the future. Using tips and tricks can temporarily improve your conversion rates, but your site will certainly suffer later. You may find websites filled with false positive or fluke recommendations on how to optimise your WooCommerce conversion rates, which are not necessarily effective. It is better to come up with a strategic plan to optimise your conversion rates and implement it successfully. Just stick to your website, run the necessary tests, and make the appropriate changes.
