Wondering whether it is worth considering ecommerce optimisation in the year ahead? Also known as ecommerce conversion rate optimisation, or sometimes CRO, this strategy focuses on combining ecommerce marketing and development to create a highly optimised user experience for customers.
There are many factors that are brought into account, from navigation to layout, speed, content, images, checkout, usability, and various other on-site elements. Essentially, ecommerce optimisation focuses on increasing conversion in the best way possible.
How Ecommerce Optimisation Helps You Thrive
There are a number of benefits offered by ecommerce optimisation, including the following:
- It helps you understand your customers. Conversion optimisation helps you gain critical insight. Shopping cart abandonment is every bit as common as one-time purchases, browsers who never complete a purchase, low sales, and high bounce rates. Having the ability to know what customers want, expect, and think is crucial to your growth.
- It enhances customer experience. When you start to listen to your customers, you also start making it easier and better for customers to use your shop. Whether that means simple navigation, useful features such as wishlists and product filters, a streamlined checkout process, faster payment gateway or better personalisation, all of these changes help to create a better experience for customers.
- It helps you gain (and keep) more customers. Optimisation also helps you gain more customers. Once customer experience improves, customer acquisition and retention also improve. The easiest it is for customers to shop, the more likely they will be to shop. Removing barriers to purchase is the simplest and most effective way to win hearts and customers, after all.
- It helps you grow your profits. At the same time, when you have happy customers, you have higher spend. Trust plays a vital role in spend. When customers feel safe shopping at your store, they will be far more likely to spend more at your store. This has a knock-on effect on your bottom line.
- It leverages your current traffic. Finally, one of the most interesting benefits for smaller shops battling to compete with the big guns is the ability to use the traffic you have. If you do not have ridiculously high traffic, it is usually a lot harder to enjoy sales. By using the traffic you have, you will be able to scale and grow, without relying on high traffic.
Simply put, no etailer can afford to afford to ignore poor conversion rates. Whatever size your store may be at present, ecommerce optimisation is essential for short and long-term growth.
