eCommerce CRO: 7 Powerful Tools to Boost Sales

As an eCommerce store owner or eCommerce Manager, you know that having thousands of website visitors is only half the game. The other half is converting them into paying customers. However, as I am sure you have already realised, this is no simple task.

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The process of eCommerce Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is critical for that endeavour. Recently, CRO has evolved into a craft by itself and people specializing in that earn respectable amounts of money. Naturally, the same trend has been followed with eCommerce CRO tools.

This article will share seven highly rated conversion rate optimisation tools to help you optimize your eCommerce conversion rate, while better understanding the behaviour of your customers. Those are the cornerstones in making better-educated decisions and improving your average eCommerce conversion rate.

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Before diving into conversion rate optimisation tools, let’s get some understanding of some basic concepts around eCommerce CRO.

What is Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)?

Conversion rate optimisation is the process of strategically improving and fine-tuning your website to convert more customers. It involves experimenting on your existing website and applying changes based on data so that more shoppers end up as paying customers.

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However, here’s a more user-centric way to define conversion rate optimisation: the process of focusing on understanding what drives, stops, and persuades your users so that you can give them the best user experience possible.

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There are multiple ways to optimise a website’s conversion rate: you can A/B test different elements on your website, simplify your checkout process, improve your site’s navigation, offer different payment methods, etc. The list of hacks and strategies you can apply is long, but it takes effort to understand the shopper's behaviour on your website and implement something that works. To make this process easier, we use conversion rate optimisation tools.

Why is conversion rate optimisation (CRO) important?

1. Conversion Rate Optimisation Gets You More Revenue

If your conversion rate rises, that means more shoppers are buying your products and converting into paying customers.

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For example, if you get 25,000 monthly visits and your average monthly orders are around 600, your conversion rate would be 2.40%. If you increase that by one percentage point to 3.40%, that means you get 250 additional orders. Let’s suppose the average order value is £100; then, your additional revenue would be:

250 orders x £100 = £25,000.

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The higher your ecommerce conversion rate, the more efficiently you convert your website traffic.

2. Conversion Rate Optimisation Improves Your CPA

With paid media costs increasing dramatically and organic results flooding the SERPs, the competition for ad space is fierce. New customer acquisition can be costly, but when you improve your ecommerce conversion rate, the marketing channel you use becomes less expensive. This is because more of your site’s visitors from that marketing channel are now converting and producing sales while you spend the same amount of money as before. In addition, you increase your return on investment when you lower the cost of acquiring customers.

3. Conversion Rate Optimisation Keeps You Focused on Customers

A customer-centric approach is always central to conversion rate optimisation. A CRO approach allows you to see your website from your customer's perspective, not your web designer's or your preferences. Ecommerce conversion rates are more likely to increase with customer-centric decisions about design, copy, and ad placement.

The best conversion rate optimisation tools

Although it is easy to define conversion rate optimisation, it isn't easy to implement and doesn’t happen overnight. It is a process that takes time as it involves understanding your customers in depth. However, certain conversion rate optimisation tools can make it simpler for you to implement CRO and help to get a good ecommerce conversion rate for your website. Here’s a list of our most recommended conversion optimisation tools:

1. Google Analytics - website analytics made easy

In order to optimize something, first, you have to measure it. This is what Google analytics is there to help you with. In terms of self-service web analytics, Google Analytics is one of the most popular tools. It seamlessly integrates with your website and comprehensively maps the performance. It helps you understand how your customers interact across your website throughout their entire lifecycle.

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This conversion rate optimisation tool, once integrated, collects the data automatically and gives you in-depth analytics about your website visits, page views, bounce rate, ecommerce conversion rate, cart abandonment rate, revenue and other important metrics. It also lets you create customised and shareable reports using your own metrics and parameters. Google Analytics is one of the best conversion rate optimisation tools you can get started with.

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2. HelloBar - easy to use popups for your site

Another great conversion rate optimisation tool is website pop-ups. Pop-ups can play a massive role in keeping customers on your website for longer and even enticing them to buy. There are multiple occasions when the shoppers need a tiny push to complete their purchase or be reminded that not many pieces of the item they want to buy are left in stock. In these situations, pop-ups can be used to turn traffic into customers.

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HelloBar or similar tools help you to integrate a variety of pop-up banners on your website. It integrates with website platforms like Wix and Shopify in just a single step. You can also create pop-up banners in minutes with this conversion rate optimisation tool since it is compatible with various website templates.

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The two great things about HelloBar are customisability and compatibility. It provides advanced targeting options via which you can target by device, location, visit, page and more. This way, you can have different pop-up banners for different targeting.

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3. HotJar - understand how users behave on your site

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Hotjar actually offers a variety of tools that helps you understand how your users behave on your website. One of the most powerful tools that Hotjar offers are session recordings. Using them, you can watch actual user sessions on your website and understand what they are interested in, where they struggle and how they navigate.

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Additionally, Hotjar allows you to create heatmaps, colour -graded visualizations that show you where your users clicked the most or in which areas of your website users spent most of their time while scrolling. Among other tools, Hotjar also allows you to run surveys on your users to collect real-time feedback from your users.

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As a tool, it is super easy to integrate and its user interface is very user-friendly. You can start with a free plan to test the waters and upgrade in one of their paid plans in case you want to further invest in this tool.

4. SurveyMonkey - get real-time feedback to improve

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With its easy-to-use and customisable survey designs, SurveyMonkey has become a go-to platform for designing online surveys in recent years. Over 200 survey templates are available, along with 13 question types that include image-based questions, making it a super useful conversion rate optimisation tool.

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Through this conversion rate optimisation tool, you can ask critical questions to your customers about your products or website, and understand what they actually want, need & expect and create exceptional customer experiences based on that. There are also impressive data visualisations on the platform, with the ability to customise displays based on different chart types. The responder data can also be viewed individually or collectively.

5. Intercom - engage with users on your site

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Customers might have questions regarding your products or how to buy them on your website, and they want answers instantly, or you’ll lose them. Intercom is a chatbot service that lets you connect with website visitors in real-time. Engaging with visitors when they're on your website and most likely to help you shorten the time between intent and purchase.

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As a conversion rate optimisation tool, you can use it to communicate with prospects to see if they need additional help, how their experience is going, and how you can improve. It is an excellent tool for acquiring new customers and chatting with existing customers, as it opens a direct channel between your business and your customers.

6. Optimizely - experimentation made easy

As the name suggests, Optimizely is a conversion rate optimisation tool that lets you optimise your website based on experimentation. For conversion rate optimisation, A/B testing is the best way to see what works on your website and what is incremental improvement out of each change.

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Optimizely takes all the heavy-lifting related with spliting your test variants, exporting reports or targeting setup. You just formulate the hypothesis and prepare them and Optimizely take care of the rest. It works on all device types and platforms and streamlines the biggest part of the A/B testing process.

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Optimizely gives you a comprehensive and robust test results report (example shown below). You can set your own KPIs for each test and see which variant performed better. As experimentation is a big part of CRO, this conversion rate optimisation tool will give you everything you need to ace it.

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7. Simpler one click checkout - the simplest way to buy online

A complicated and lengthy checkout process is a major reason why shoppers do not complete their purchases online. No matter how much you optimise other things on your website, if your checkout is full of friction, customers will leave. A simplified checkout experience is critical for conversion rate optimisation.

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Simpler offers a one click, frictionless and hassle-free way to checkout for your customers. It does so by removing 90% of the steps from checkout, making it super simple for them to buy stuff on your website. Simpler reduces the number of clicks to one, removes redundant form fields and eliminates the need to remember usernames and passwords. It makes checkout 50% faster for first-time users and one click for second-time customers.

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For example, this is what the checkout journey looks like for a first-time customer:

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And this is what it looks like for a second-time user:

Not only does the conversion rate optimisation tool help you simplify the checkout process for your customers and reduce cart abandonment, but it also helps you achieve up to a 30% higher ecommerce conversion rate than an average checkout does.

From analytics about your shoppers’ details that can help you boost your remarketing efforts to revenue tracking capabilities, sales reports, and simple payout statements, Simpler is your all-in-one checkout solution designed for conversion rate optimisation.

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It can be installed on your website within minutes and supports all major e-commerce platforms. The best part? You don't have to replace your current payment processor at all.

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Stop leaving money on the table! Reach out to us and learn more about how Simpler can help your business grow.

You now have everything you need to start optimising ecommerce conversion rates across your website. These conversion rate optimisation tools range from free and for beginners to robust and more advanced. Choosing what's suitable for you is the first step, and once you've mastered the basics, you can move up to the more complex conversion rate optimisation tools.

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