Monitoring the performance of your apparel and accessories store is crucial to understanding the most and least successful elements of your website. You need to track the micro conversions of every feature on your site including page scrolling, detail-to-cart ratios, checkout steps, and other various engagement actions across your website. The goal is to have high pre-purchase conversion rates that ultimately lead to a purchase. Achieving higher conversion rates takes time, research and testing. To help, here are seven ways to improve your apparel and accessories eCommerce conversion rates.
Test Different Call to Action Variations
Call to action (CTA) buttons are crucial for a successful webstore. You can find CTAs throughout emails, social media, digital ads and the website. In most cases, the call to action is a simple button with written copy that describes an action like Buy Now or Add to Cart. Testing these buttons are often overlooked, but they’re typically one of the first aspects to test in a new conversion optimization campaign because of the exponential results more engaging CTAs provide. These variations can include experimenting with design, copy and placement of CTA buttons. When it comes to design, don’t be afraid to test different colors, sizes and fonts. Customers do have a viewing preference when looking at the design of any element on your page. Your CTAs should stand out, be easy to read and display front and center. For example, the investment in changing the Add to Cart button in the example below paid for 6 months of CRO work in 2 weeks:
When changing the copy of your CTA, stick to verbiage that causes shoppers to complete an action like buy now, shop now, add to cart and reserve now. Creating a sense of urgency and having a clearly implied result of what will happen is better than catchy phrases trying to be unique.
Create a Sense of Urgency
A sense of urgency lets shoppers know they only have a limited amount of time to purchase whether the item is low in stock or if a sale is ending soon. By creating an action, you are allowing customers to complete it. Action verbs work well in CTAs, emails, advertisements, social media and discounts. Your copy should have a customer wanting the product or deal by using action verbs like buy now, shop now, reserve now and save now. Many apparel and accessories webstores also use countdown clocks for special discounts to encourage shoppers to purchase before the time runs out.
Upsell Other Products
For apparel and accessories webstores that want to see more conversions on product pages or even at check out, upselling and cross-selling your other merchandise is a great opportunity. Similar to that impulse buy that many brick-and-mortar retailers use at the ends of aisles and check out, upselling your other items can potentially keep shoppers engaged and possibly purchase more products. Many customers prefer to see products that fall under similar price ranges and style or combinations that complete the look. Instead of manually mapping related products within your catalog, there are search and personalization tools like Klevu and Nosto that add merchandising functionality to upsell and cross-sell products. Understanding and using tools like these can be complex and take loads of time, so it’s important to work with a knowledgeable marketing firm that can help keep your site merchandising running efficiently. Macy’s does a great job of this.
Offer Various Payment Options
The ultimate end goal of any eCommerce store is for the customer to make a purchase. It is tremendously frustrating to succeed at all the tactics necessary to get customers to add products to the cart only to see them leave or abandon their carts. Every customer has their own reason for leaving, but in some cases, you can offer an easier path to purchase with different payment options.
The traditional payment gateways to pay with a credit card aren’t going anywhere any time soon, but there are more convenient options growing in popularity. Payment options like PayPal and Amazon Pay attract customers who prefer the 1-click type of payments since all their card information is already stored in one area, also making them more secure. Another rising payment option that popular stores use is payment installment apps or extensions like Klarna, AfterPay or Sezzle. These payment installment apps let customers pay for their purchases in equal parts over a specific period of time. Research has shown that 44% of users would have abandoned their cart if payment installments weren’t an option and 68% of shoppers increase their average order value if they can pay through installments. Adidas offers a wide range of payment options.
Improve Your Page Load Speed
The more technology advances, the faster everyone wants websites to load. If your apparel and accessories site takes over a couple of seconds to load, you will be losing potential customers. Increase the number of purchases and your conversion rate by improving your page’s load speed. Your company can accelerate your page’s loading time by reducing image sizes, eliminating unnecessary HTTP requests and using browser caching. Apparel sites are also very media heavy, so utilizing a CDN such as Fastly or Akamai has become standard practice to help with site performance. Newer options such as Magento’s PWA themes provide a lighter weight site for faster load times and also more mobile-friendly features to help increase customer lifetime value.
Optimize Your Mobile Site
If you don’t optimize your webstore to be mobile-friendly, not only will your conversions drop, but most likely your sales will as well. Mobile traffic now accounts for over 50% of traffic, so a site that renders great on mobile devices is vital. Responsive themes are the standard these days, but also consider additional mobile optimization, as Google now uses mobile-first indexing. Mobile-first indexing means that Google uses the content from the mobile version of websites for indexing and ranking. Having an optimized mobile site will help you rank higher and reach a larger, more diverse audience. For tips on how to help format a mobile-friendly webstore, keep reading here. ASOS is a great example of how to optimize your mobile site.
Utilize Google Analytics
Even though we recommend working with a knowledgeable marketing team when it comes to reading, understanding and improving your conversion rates, there are free analytics tools that can help you learn more about your webstore’s traffic. Google Analytics lets you analyze your website’s data to help you make steps closer to smarter business decisions. This analytics tool helps you understand your site and its users to help evaluate the website’s performance. Once it has evaluated your webstore’s performance, it provides and connects insights to help improve your site. Even though Google Analytics has many tools to read your website’s data, it doesn’t have everything you need to optimize your website to its fullest potential. Marketing firms will have additional tools like heat mapping utilities to help you better understand your conversion rates and how to improve them.
Conclusion
These are just seven ways to improve your webstore’s conversion rate. There are many other ways you can increase your conversion rates like including customer reviews and playing around with your content. A good marketing firm (like InteractOne) and analytical tools or extensions can help you better understand and learn different tips on how to improve your conversions. To better understand what your apparel and accessories eCommerce needs to improve its conversion rates, contact us today.
