How to increase sales by improving the user experience of your ecommerce store

According to a User Experience Survey Report, almost three-quarters (74%) of businesses believe that the user experience is important for improving sales and conversions.

So, actually how do the user experience and the sales is connected? How can you improve your sales and revenue by improving the user experience of your ecommerce store?

By improving the visitor experience, you’re making them to spend more money on your ecommerce store. Here are a few ways…

• Convert: Acquire customers through various channels and encourage them to buy. On each page, make it clear what a customer is supposed to do and direct them to the next step of the sales funnel. Thus, you can see more conversions.
• Encourage them to buy more often: By making a superb user experience, earn your customers’ loyalty to your brand.
• Encourage them to spend more: Increase average order value. You can find more on this below

Let’s take a look at few ways to make more sales and thereby revenue by improving the user experience.

Remove friction by building trust

Web visitors are passive. Whenever you ask your visitors to take an action, for example to buy from your website, there remains some sort of friction that keeps them from buying from your site.

The reasons for the friction can be many. Maybe your prospective buyer is afraid to purchase from your store. In fact, as digital crime rises higher and higher it’s absolutely vital that prospective buyers trust their vendors.

If there’s no trust, it is more likely the buyer will hesitate to purchase from your store. One of the best ways to strengthen this trust is to assure the user that their information is safe with you.

Here are a few ways to reduce friction and increase sales by building trust.

Add an SSL certificate

Adding an SSL certificate to your website helps build a perception among your customers that you are trustworthy. It also tells your customers that sensitive data like credit card and personal information will not be intercepted, sold or misused.

That said, does adding an SSL certificate increase sales?

Let’s examine a few case studies.

After featuring an SSL badge on their site, online hotel booking site Central Reservation Service saw a 30% increase in their conversion rates.

Let’s look at another case study. According to Symantec, adding EV SSL to their clients has increased their conversion rate anywhere from 10% to 87%.

Looking to choose the right type of SSL for your online store? Follow this excellent guide: How to Choose the Right Type of SSL and SSL Provider.

Add reassurance copy

Adding reassurance copy beside your call to action button is another great strategy that can strongly encourage your prospects to take an action. Joanna Wiebe of CopyHackers.com calls the reassurance copy “click triggers” as it can help entice users to click the CTA button.

Here are a few examples of reassurance that work great for ecommerce store.

• Free shipping: Because free shipping is everywhere, one would think that’s the only way to do ecommerce. Adobe’s Digital Marketing blog reported that free shipping is an expectation from consumers all around the US. Studies reveal that 93% of customerswould buy more products if they found the shipping was free. So if you’re offering free shipping on your site, make sure you prominently display the term free shipping where the call to action is.
• Privacy policy: Another best way to increase conversions with reassuring copy is to place a privacy policy statement near the CTA button. However, if you’re not careful about choosing the right wording, you could seriously hurt the conversion rate.

Personalized content

If you’ve ever visited B2C websites like Amazon.com, you might have noticed that you are being served by a series of product recommendations that Amazon believes you might be interested in. Amazon shows recommendations and related items based on your previous purchases, searches, preferences and interests.

For example, if you searched for ‘Google Nexus’ on Amazon, on your next login you would be probably seeing callouts to buy a Nexus phone. In addition, you’ll also be shown some related items that Amazon thinks you might be interested in.

This way of providing personalized content is one of the most user-friendly marketing methods out there. It’s no surprise that compared with untargeted promotional content a user is more likely to convert when they are shown relevant personalized content that is tailored around their interests and preferences.

So how would you create a personalized user experience on your ecommerce store?

Use a recommendation engine

Use a recommendation engine to target your customers with personalized recommendations across multiple pages of your website and multiple channels such as email, website, landing pages and promotional copies.  You can see a complete list of recommendation engine software here.

Focus on metrics

It is true that you can’t determine the effectiveness of a user experience design based solely on the statistics data. However, you can still make assumptions using statistics by conducting quantitative and qualitative analyses.

In fact, validating your assumptions can often reduce the likelihood of failure. On the other hand, wrong metrics and false assumptions can kill off your business. So it is important that you make the right assumptions by measuring the right data.

Here are a few data sets you should be tracking to know if the user experience is in line with your business goal of making more sales and thereby more revenue.

• Visits to purchase: How long after visiting your site for the first time does a visitor makes a purchase?
• Average order value (AOV): The average order value can be calculated as follows: AOV=Total revenue/ number of orders. Calculating conversion rate along with the AOV can give you the whole picture about the profitability of your store. Here are a few usability hacks you should consider for improving average order value.
• Net promoter score (NPS): According to David Gilboa, the founder of Warby Parker, Net Promoter Score is a measurement of customer satisfaction. It is basically a way of labeling customers on the scale of one to ten based on a single survey question- how likely are they to recommend your company to their friend? It is an important data for your ecommerce store because it determines how likely your customers are to become loyal customers and mini-referral engines.

Use RJMetrics

RJMetrics is a tracking tool that helps you get important metrics of your business like lifetime value, churn rate, average revenue per customer, etc. Knowing more about these metrics can help you make smarter decisions to grow your business further.

Summary

The user experience of your site can have a direct impact on your business. Let’s sum up various ways to improve sales by improving user experience:

• Build trust: Buyers might be afraid to share personal information with you. In order to encourage sales, show them you’re trustworthy.
• Personalized content: Personalized content tailored around each user’s preferences is more likely to help in conversion rather than regular content. Use automation tools or recommendation engine software to create personalized content.
• Focus on metrics: Validating your assumptions with metrics can improve the user experience and reduce the likelihood of failure.