Magento is the world’s most flexible platform. Its enhanced accessibility features, omni-channel experiences, and extended community make it a giant player in the e-commerce world.
Whether you already have an online store on Magento or if you’re planning to build one, you need to tread carefully. Running a successful online store requires a thorough understanding of the factors influencing buying behavior, changing market trends, and customer expectations in terms of products and services. You’ll need comprehensive knowledge of digital marketing practices to sell your products effectively and efficiently.
Magento stores without any effective conversion rate optimization strategies may end up with low ROI and poor revenue streams, in light of cut-throat competition. Seeing as the ultimate goal of any e-comm business is sales, that’s where we need to focus.
Though the Internet is piled up with all sorts of conversion optimization remedies and ‘tricks’, boosting revenue is still the biggest concern. How can you turn a nice dime, seeing as even high traffic guarantees nothing? Here are five proven optimization strategies which offer a steady flow of traffic to your online store, increase your conversion rates and boost your ROI.
- Improve your navigation, merchandising, and site search
The key area to work on in order to guarantee a smooth buying experience is simplicity. The principle of making it easy for people to find what they’re looking for is central, and there are plenty of options for improving on Magento’s basic features in this area. To start, use layered navigation to allow shoppers to filter products on product list pages so they can quickly find the items they’re looking for.
Another important strategy you should familiarize yourself with is product merchandising and categorization. These can have a big impact on customer experience and reputation, which is why it is important to invest in a solution making it easier for you to merchandise your product list pages.
For better site search, use a high-performance Magento search extension to provide a rich searching experience. This significantly enhances customer experience by considering synonyms, acronyms, weighted attribute values, and stop words. Investing time in improving your site’s search function can have a tremendous positive impact on your conversion rate.
- Create UX friendly product pages
The majority of e-commerce store developers and owners tend to focus their UX efforts on the home page, as well as selected landing pages. However, these limited efforts rarely contribute to improving the conversion rate, because customers are coming to your Magento site to find both products and related information. Therefore, product pages should get some TLC in terms of UX, and a defined development and optimization strategy to boost metrics.
By enhancing the UX of product pages and the entire Magento site, you’ll increase the chances of customers pulling the trigger more often. Ensuring each product page contains product images taken from different angles, investing in a good zoom-in feature, etc – all of these tweaks will interest consumers, relieve their need for details and more information, and thus reassure them on their journey to completing a purchase. Of course, you should also invest in the content (the product description), which must be crisp yet informative, and focused on conveying the desired message about the product, and the services you offer along with it – such as warranty or accessories.
Finally, Social Media integration can further enhance the shopping experience. Magento has a large number of search extensions and built-in features available to optimize your product and category pages using Social Media.
- Streamline the checkout process
When it comes to checking out, speed is key! The checkout process is the climax of an entire shopping experience. While Magento offers great checkout features, some stores exceed the capacity of these features during implementation, introducing development and conversion roadblocks.
Originally, Magento’s checkout consists of 6 time-consuming steps which might result in a significant conversion rate decline due to shopping cart abandonment. You can accelerate the process by installing a one-step checkout extension. Moreover, you can remove unnecessary fields, offer several payment methods, choose a pleasing and crisp design, offer easy-to-understand delivery options, auto-filling enabled fields, and conspicuous security badges. Each of these elements in itself may have a small impact, but combined they will get you considerably closer to making a sale.
- Offer multiple and highly secure payment options
Money transactions completed through a preferred payment gateway and in a secure way are prime factors to enhance the conversion rate in your Magento store. Today, the latest versions of Magento, like M2x, have a built-in PayPal payment gateway integrated with the latest features.
However, defining payment method strategies in favor of popular payment gateways for your target audience based on demographics may prove beneficial in the long run. Therefore your best strategy is to ensure support for the multi-currency and multilingual features of Magento in your payment gateway integration.
- Make your Magneto store mobile-friendly
Mobile shopping is huge, so creating a mobile-friendly web store is a no-brainer. Mobile e-commerce not only improves SERP rankings but also allows you to drive more mobile customers towards your store and raise chances of conversion. The larger the number of mobile customers, the higher the overall sales volume. If you don’t want to miss any leads, ensure your Magento store is responsive and compatible with various common screen sizes and devices.
These are some of the most effective strategies on Magento conversion optimization. Naturally, your store will also need to be interactive and user-friendly. Magento has an exceptional content management system for e-commerce solutions, realize it’ll take effort in order to improve the sales of your online store. Make use of Magento’s array of built-in features and functionalities to help you create a highly-interactive web store with ease, as well as tools to optimize the conversion rate of your business. While Magento is definitely a wise decision for an e-commerce storefront with a good web identity, remember that in order to make a lasting improvement in your results, you’ll need to track best practices.