The web store owners often encounter such trouble as conversion drop. For non-seasonal periods such swings are unusual and they indicate changes in market sales.
Let us review reasons for a web store on Magento ® conversion drop.
Why do your ecommerce conversion rate optimization strategies fail?
Analyze your products. It would be quite natural that heating devices’ price is reduced in summer, or no one buys T-shirts and shorts in winter. But even if such changes take place when the product is in its season – do not be afraid or astonished, this happens quite often. In order to get rid of this ‘small’ trouble you first need to find the reason and eliminate it.
Possible reasons for sales level reduction:
1) Error 404
Make sure that your 404 error page is customer-friendly. First of all, it should correspond to the site design. There should be understandable text that will explain to the customer that the page they are trying to access does not exist. Also, you should offer customers something in exchange.
There are several ways of resolving this task:
- Offer a discount or a present for a completed order;
- Show a form to search products;
- Suggest to visit pages with the most popular products;
- Provide site search form.
2) Change of prices
Let’s say your business has been very successful, you have accomplished a lot and left your competitors behind, but you have completely forgotten to monitor the prices and market policy. At some moment all your competitors just dropped their prices several times. Now you’ve been left far behind because a customer will leave you if they see a better proposition in another store.
This is fraught with consequences for you not only as a seller but also as a store administrator. It is possible that search engines will rate your site much worse due to a high refusal level.
In order to resolve this problem you need to:
- Drop the prices together with all your competitors;
- Offer presents to customers if they make an order (your present’s value should surpass your competitor’s propositions);
- Highlight the quality of your products, better time of delivery, warranty conditions and other possible privileges that your store offers;
- Unique product. Explore the fields that others have not touched yet (e.g. other stores sell jeans, and you may use GoMage Product Designer extension to offer customers to create their own jeans or add their own text on a T-shirt).
There is a wide range of options here.
3) Slow chat
Chat option on a site is a great idea. Customers can instantly contact the company representatives and ask the questions they want, this is free of charge and very convenient. The idea is good but, as with any other tool, you need to know how to use it. In good hands, the chat will help you to significantly increase your profit, in the opposite case it may become a big minus for any client.
In order to maximize the chat usefulness it is necessary:
- To answer fast, not make a customer wait too long;
- To give concrete answers;
- To do your best to sell your service or product. Use special offers, think and act quickly, because customers often do not want to wait, they just go away if the answer takes too much time;
- A manager should always be available for chat during working hours;
- If possible, transfer the conversation from text to voice, this gives more chances to sell the product.
4) Feedback
Remember to always pick up when customers call you. Any call is important, as a customer who could not reach you will call your competitors. Watch your speech quality, the correctness of your answer. Always answer emails in time, try to reach your potential customer as soon as possible.
5) Out-of-date products
Let’s say, some years back your web store was a manufacturing leader, you offered unique products, everyone was happy. But years passed, and now there are dozens of other stores offering the same products as you. In order to avoid that you need to update your products regularly and make sure that people still need them.
6) One-time visits
One-time visits are good but expensive. Your best clients are those who visit your site regularly, those who constantly cooperate with your company. They keep making orders in your store and recommend your company to their friends, relatives, and colleagues.
But how to make people be interested in doing business with you?
The answer is simple – content-marketing. Maintain and constantly update several accounts:
- A blog on your site;
- YouTube video channel;
- Social network groups;
- Newsletters.
7) Main page links
Evaluate your links objectively. Blinking banners in the footer have already gone into the past, make a poll asking your customers whether or not they would like you to change the site design, ask their opinion of what they would like to have changed, check how they react to the presence of some of the existing links.
