As a Shopify store owner, you probably get lots of traffic from your marketing. But how much of this traffic translates into a conversion? By focusing on your Shopify conversion rate, you can understand your customers, their habits, and increase your profits.
Marketing involves many steps and metrics. But for store owners, one metric trumps all others.
It's the conversion. Traffic to your store is either converting into sales or it isn't – and if it isn't, it means you may be wasting precious dollars.
In this piece, we'll be talking about what the Shopify conversion rate is and how it compares to other metrics, and how to use it to generate more profits for your business.
First let's define three things:
A conversion is when a person moves from merely someone scrolling your website or Shopify store to a buyer. One who clicks "buy now" or "check out."
For store owners, conversions are the "yes! Moment" when you see money rolling into your bank account.
But that's not the only type of conversion. There can be several types of conversions across multiple pages in your store or website.
Here's how Shopify explains it:
"A conversion on your homepage might mean having a visitor click through to a product. A conversion on a product page might mean a customer clicking ‘Add to Cart’. Conversions can be entirely dependent on the purpose that a specific part of your website serves."
Now that you know what a conversion is, let's move on to the Conversion Rate.
Put simply, it's the number of times casual website or store viewers becomes buyers.
By understanding your conversion rate, you can compare your ad spend to your conversions and overall profits. You want to see if your advertising is working or not.
Let's say you're spending $100 on ads and generating $1,000 in revenue. This means that your ads are working well.
If, however, your $100 are only generating $100, it means you're not making any profit. You're breaking even. If it's generating $200, you're making a small profit.
To measure the impact of your ad spend and conversions, you need to optimize your conversion rate.
By doing so, you can maximize the use of every cent and dollar you spend on ads.
"Conversion Rate Optimization is a technique for increasing the percentage of your website traffic that makes a purchase," explains Shopify.
What does this mean for my Shopify store?
Great question!
Now that you have an idea about the conversion-related metrics, you can focus on how this benefits your Shopify store.
For a Shopify store, a Shopify Conversion Rate means "the number of purchases or the overall number of sessions," according to Shopify.
The e-commerce platform for online stores explains that most viewers or shoppers will need more than a session to complete a purchase.
If "your Shopify site has a transformation pace of somewhere in the range of 0.6% to 3.1%, then you are average compared to this benchmark. With under 0.3%, you are unquestionably failing to meet expectations of the benchmark’s conversion rate," Shopify adds.
Read: Here Are the 20 Best Shopify Apps to Support Your Store
Meanwhile, Littledata.io notes that a good Shopify Conversion Rate is 1.75%, whereas for larger stores this rate rises to 1.85%.
"If you are more than 2.8% you are in the top quartile. The highest conversion rate we’ve seen on Shopify is 8%," says Littledata.io in a report.
Moreover, "Shopify calculates your store’s conversion rate automatically, and you can access the current figure from your store’s Analytics dashboards, explains Nudgify.
It's important to note, however, that conversion rate optimization isn't for everyone. As a store owner, you need to be generating enough traffic to calculate your Shopify conversion rate.
If you have little to no traffic, then the first step would be to generate that high volume traffic so you can measure accordingly and conduct your A/B testing.
A/B testing helps you identify what's working and what isn't, what the customer enjoys and what they struggle with.
With little traffic, you won't be able to measure correctly and your results won't provide usable insights about how customers are interacting with your store.
So how does a Shopify store owner calculate their conversion rate?
The conversion rate equation is simple. You'll need to divide the number of conversions you have received by the number of people who visited your landing page or website. Then multiple the result by 100%.
Here’s what it looks like:
To improve your Shopify Conversion Rate, and see how your ad spend is working out, you'll need to regularly test every aspect and page within your website.
You should also remember that optimizing a store or website isn't a one-time thing. It's a constant process, but one that will help you learn more about your customers and how they interact with your business.
There are various reasons why a website or store won't convert.
Sometimes it's product related, like products being too expensive or not being the brand the customer is looking for and sometimes it's the pages themselves or even the checkout process that derails customers.
At other times, it could be the layout of your Shopify store that's off-putting for customers.
It could also be the lack of information on products or product pages, or the lack of payment options.
That's why testing everything in your Shopify store plays a role in your Shopify conversion rate.
Remember: Optimizing for a better Shopify conversion rate isn't a one-and-done thing, "it’s something that you should always be doing to get better." - Shopify.
Now that we have covered the main elements of the Shopify Conversion Rate, what impacts it, and the importance of A/B testing, let's see what can be done to improve this conversion rate and ultimately boost your Shopify sales.
Here are nine tips and ideas to help you increase your Shopify Conversion Rate. You can use one or more or combine all of them.
Landing pages are super important in anything marketing related. A good landing page will convert your customers and a bad one will drive them away.
Landing pages involve design, copywriting, and of course your products and services. How do you display these products? Is there enough information to get customers to buy those products? Is your landing page convincing?
These are all questions to consider when creating a landing page.
Further reading: 12 Tips to Create a Successful Shopify Marketing Strategy
A tip: When you finish writing and designing your landing page, try to look at it as your buyer would. Imagine you have the same pain as your customer and look at your landing page with that problem in mind.
Does the landing page solve this issue and convince the buyer?
You know what sells? Having a clear product description. While products may differ from seller to seller, a clear product description not only helps customers compare products, but also supports their decision-making process.
You probably already know that there are hundreds if not thousands of Shopify apps for everything you could possibly need.
The important part is to decide on your needs and use the Shopify apps that fulfill your need and help your customers.
Let's say you need a logistics service provider. Check out the list of Shopify apps that provide this service, see what reviews have to say about them, and which are available for your audience and market.
Weren't we just talking about reviews? Just like you when you're looking at reviews for logistics service providers, customers also look at reviews to help them decide.
They like reviews from real people. And there are Shopify apps to help you show reviews for your products on your store. In fact, Judge.me is one of our must-have Shopify apps for sales boost.
Did you know that global mobile-commerce revenues are forecast to grow 33.8% on a year-on-year basis to $3.56 trillion by 2021?
Also by 2021, it's expected that 72.9% of "all retail e-commerce" will come from mobile commerce, a significant increase from 58.9% in 2017. (Statista)
What all this means is that there's a major shift towards online buying using cell phones. If your Shopify store isn't mobile-friendly, chances are you could be losing many customers, which is hurting your Shopify conversion rate.
A great way to retain current customers and attract new ones is by creating or rather integrating a loyalty program in your store.
Plus, according to Accenture, 57% of consumers tend to be more willing to spend on brands they are loyal to, while PDI data indicates that 50% of consumers join a loyalty program to "earn rewards on everyday purchases."
There are many Shopify apps that offer loyalty programs, including Gameball. In addition to free and paid plans, our game-like experience retains customers and makes them excited to use your store and buy from you.
The shift to digital has created FOMO, that is, the fear of missing out. Customers no longer want to miss out on a good deal, a limited-time product or offer…etc.
Another great way to attract customers, get them to buy, and accordingly increase your Shopify conversion rate is by offering personalized experiences.
How? This can be done in several ways. A simple "Hello + Customer Name" is a kind of personalization. Loyalty programs also provide you with personalization options, especially since you can launch triggered or push messages (pop-ups) to segmented customers.
For example, let's say you have 10 customers who like to buy a certain brand of shampoo. You can send them triggered messages with a special offer you're running or if the item is back in stock.
With Gameball, we have lots of ideas and use cases about using customized messages to create unique and exciting experiences for your customers.
Chances are you have used a product or service yourself based on a recommendation. Referrals or recommendations work well with customers. In fact, referral programs require little-to-no investment but generate big results.
Roughly 78% of B2B marketers said that having referral program helped them generate “leads of good or excellent quality,” according to a Social Media Today report.
Read: Referral Marketing Best Practices: Everything You Need to Know
This makes referral marketing an inexpensive way to acquire new customers.
As a store owner, understanding how your Shopify conversion rate works and how to calculate it helps you increase that conversion rate.
A higher Shopify conversion rate means more customers are turning from visitors or people browsing your store to actual buyers.
Having a loyalty program in place will take you a step further and retain those buying customers and entice them to keep coming back.
Having a referral program facilitates and reduces the cost of customer acquisition.
A combo would be combining your loyalty and referral programs and rewarding current loyal customers for referring you to friends and family. And you can find this combined experience via Gameball.
Start your free trial with Gameball today and give your customers several reasons to come back to your store
