Displaying products so that they achieve off-the-scale eCommerce website conversion rates isn’t easy. But it’s certainly not impossible. You just need to deploy the right tactics.
The latest case studies show that brands need to experiment with 3D and AR technology – one of the latest CRO innovations – if they want to not just stay ahead, but keep up with the competition. And, let’s face it, achieving a good website conversion rate increases your raison d'être. Seeing those shopping carts get filled is inspiring for any Head of eCommerce, Growth, or Marketing Chief.
Of course, it’s not just about images, words matter too. So does the whole visitor shopping experience. So, if you want to win at conversion rate optimization – attract those customers and achieve those website goals – you need to take action & strategize. And we think that the following are some of the best website conversion strategies around to achieve product conversions.
Even though we love or need a product/service we are about to add to our shopping cart, we will still read what others have to say about it. Especially if, in a review, it has only received a single star. What are we missing here, we wonder?
Admit it – a negative review makes you think twice. A positive review, on the other hand, has us breaking out the credit card and feeling confident in our purchase. Having customer reviews provides extra information and is one of the most effective ways to boost website conversions. If you don't have any, rectify that right now. Working with an independent customer review site, such as Feefo, can be beneficial here.
Looking for proof that it works? BazaarVoice recently completed research, analyzing the purchasing behavior of over 9000 consumers. Buyers said that ratings and reviews (47%) were second only to price (67%) when it came to factors impacting purchasing decisions.
Why is your customer buying the product on the page? If it’s clothing, it’s to look good. A small backpack? To allow them to carry easily what they need on a walk or hike. If it’s a new floor cleaning solution, then it’s to make their tiles sparkle.
Boost your business website conversion by showing the visitor what they are looking for in action, and tell them how it helps. Don’t make them guess by just showing a static image with a title.
Make shoes or furniture spin on-screen in a 3D viewer or in real-life, using augmented reality (AR). Interactive 3D product visualization makes everything more compelling, giving potential buyers the option of seeing what items look like from all angles. Use 3D visualization on product pages to highlight certain features - a close-up of the textured wood in a console table, or beautiful embroidery on a bag. It offers users a better understanding of their purchase. It can help answer questions, too.
Over time you will find that 3D rendering is more versatile and cheaper to work with than standard photography, and a top way to boost eCommerce website page conversion rates for your business.
With 3D rendering, it’s possible to adjust the one bag in various colors, textures, and sizes from a single 3D model (rather than having to take individual images as you would with standard photography). Meaning your marketing budget could be spent elsewhere! You are also in control of the light, setting, and how you represent your brand visually.
As an example, Rollie Nation, one of Modelry clients managed to increase the conversion rate by 39% after implementing the 3D visualization to the company's product pages.
Clutter can lead to audience confusion and a drop in page conversion rates.
You don’t need us to tell you that. Look how brilliantly Apple have marketed themselves with their clean, information-led minimalist design. Do the same with your product pages and website.
Keep benefits, features, and information in neat bullet points to make them easy for users to scan. Use a headline and subheads for this reason too. Not sure what to keep and what to discard? Try using heatmap software which shows you what parts of your website visitors aren’t using.
Forget calls and emails- live chat is the new way of interacting with your customers online. (Source: CGTrader)
Who bothers to telephone a company these days? And with email, you don’t know when it’ll be read – today, tomorrow, next week? A contact form is a great idea. But with live chat pop-ups, your visitors can look forward to instant response, or at least within five minutes. A competitor analysis will help you determine how important this tactic is – if data shows that competing websites prioritize customer support, you don't have much choice but to deliver on customer expectations.
When people can ask a question and have it answered quickly, they’re more likely to go ahead and buy. It’s an easy way to boost conversion rates if your business has the resources to employ someone to answer it. If you can't, then consider outsourcing - companies like Deskmoz might be able to help. Is it worth the investment? Well, when you have likes of Guru achieving a 95% CSAT score, and an additional 900 monthly conversions after handling a 179% increase in inbound conversations, it would seem so.
As a side note though, avoid chatbots with pre-recorded messages. Visitors generally find them frustrating.
Is your call to action (CTA) clean and concise? Or does your website visitor have to scan the entire screen to find it? What could be simpler than a ‘buy now’ or ‘add to cart’ button beside an item?
Just make sure there are no distractions around the 'Buy Now' or other CTA buttons that make it difficult to see. For instance, placing a newsletter sign-up form close to the main CTA will most likely hurt the conversion rate.
Use block color, such as white text against a black background, to create contrast and grab the consumer's eye. It also gives a big hand to your website conversion rate.
What we mean by ‘big’ is, do visitors who aren't on one of your website landing pages know it’s you? It could be they have arrived on your company’s page via a link from social media or another third party.
So, let them know where they are by weaving business branding through your page in terms of content, font, visuals, and anything else that identifies the site as belonging to your company. This doesn’t just keep visitors on your site, but it also helps increase website conversion.
As a side note though, avoid chatbots with pre-recorded messages. Visitors generally find them frustrating.
A huge chunk of people buy from phones or iPads. If the website you are working with isn’t already converted for mobile use, increase conversions by ensuring that the website's eCommerce pages are.
A website that is difficult to see because the item visual is half off-screen is going to turn away visitors instantly. Make sure too that you are optimized for both iOS devices and Android. Better still, get a shopping app – that should really see your website conversion rates increase.
When Walmart Canada decided to embark on a project to make their website fully mobile responsive, they achieved a conversion boost of 20% on all devices. On mobile, orders went up by 98%. The difference? Product pages specifically tailored for the mobile market.
Make sure you do the products you are listing justice. Increase conversions by ensuring that you always add in the key features and specifications in as much relevant detail as possible.
If you feel there’s a lot of detail or functions to note, use bullet points. This will make it easier for customers to read, which will help increase your website conversion rate.
At the same time, include keywords and their variations. Just remember to keep your descriptions unique – and definitely not the same as those of the manufacturer (these will be copied a ridiculous number of times and you definitely want to steer clear of repeat copy). This can be time-consuming, and it's often worth outsourcing via freelancing platforms, such as Upwork and PeoplePerHour, to get you through the bulk of your website in the early stages.
The quicker your pages load, the better your conversions, and the less likely people are to leave the site and go to another. Ideally, you want those pages to load within three seconds or less. In 2019, Portent reported that website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time (between seconds 0-5). Another reason for this is that the quicker the website loads, the more products your visitors are likely to spot.
Slow-loading pages have a negative effect on web conversion. They’re not great for your keyword ranking either. To test your site speed, use some online help such as Pingdom’s Performance monitoring tool.
Some companies use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to help quicken up page loading speeds. The CDN achieves this by storing static resources on a network with faster-loading and better-located servers to those you use. It’s useful, but it’s not essential if you action some of the methods we mention in this article.
Use business product pages to upsell other items on your website. Restaurants do it all the time by asking if you’d like a side with your main dish, or a large coke, rather than standard.
With an eCommerce product page, you can recommend a number of other products that match that particular item - a fashion site showing a women’s dress can suggest a matching scarf, handbag, and shoes beside the main item. It's an excellent method to help customers find what they want while optimizing for your conversion goal.
Sharing meaningful suggestions and tips also helps with navigation and encourages the buyer to pop over to another page for additional purchases that will complete the outfit. Newsletter mailouts, inspiring articles, and user-generated content can help drive desired actions too.
No one wants to experience Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) and that’s exactly what you create in your visitor when you tell them there’s ‘only one item left'. Ebay is good at this by telling someone who ‘favorites’ an item that there is a limited supply of it left on the site, together with the number of people who ‘already have it in their basket.’ Fear of another person buying it can often prompt an undecided user to click the buy button, resulting in increasing website conversions.
Another means of creating urgency is to have a limited-time sale and show a clock with the minutes clicking down. Try sending it to your email list for extra impact.
As well as having all the features and benefits of the products on the page, remember to add in some lightness too. Make the content chatty and fun (if appropriate) so that your visitor will want to keep reading. Keep it short too. No one has time to read screeds of text these days.
Long, robotic content on landing pages is a real turn-off and won’t make visitors warm to your brand. Website conversions can hang on it. Remember this when adding a blog post, sending a newsletter to your email list, and other marketing efforts too.
The one area many people loathe about buying online is that you don’t get to try on or try out, or even touch the item you’re buying. So, if they don’t like what they receive, they want to know that it’s easy for them to return it.
That’s why having a clear returns policy and a money-back guarantee is comforting to the customer and a good approach to increase website conversions. A good policy outlines the exact information your audience needs, including the steps people can take and when they can expect to receive their refund. Place it on the item page or another main landing page on the site.
By the way, 93% of buyers consider shipping costs before making a purchase. Most people expect free shipping. The National Retail Federation (NRF) reports that “75% of online shoppers expect free shipping!”
We have all gone eagerly to a website page at some time or another, only to be confronted with a big 404 error. What happened to the fab phone we believed we were linking to? It’s gone because the product has a new URL but the original page hasn’t been redirected. What a website conversion rate blunder that is.
Instead, set up a 301 permanent redirect and optimize your URLs. Keep them short, in lower case, and with keywords. Clean them up and make sure they sit underneath the title to optimize for search engines.
Some experts say 3D rendering is up to 10 times less expensive than using standard photography. Which seems counterintuitive, but is true.
That’s because, in the old days when you wanted to display several colors and textures of a sofa, you had to photograph each separate product. With 3D product visualization, you only need to produce a single model, on which you can superimpose different colors, designs, and other variants.
This means you don’t need a lengthy photoshoot or the cost of transporting products to a photographer’s studio. And if there’s a mistake, well, it’s easily edited on-screen. Before 3D, it may have meant redoing the entire photoshoot. Not only does it save you time and money, but it also boosts customer engagement rate, time spent on a page, and ultimately, your website conversion rate.
It’s possible to produce thousands of different angles from a single product 3D model. And that’s handy these days with the 18 to 44 audience expecting to see at least 8 different angles of an item, according to a 2019 report by researchers Salsify. The 3D viewer & AR features in Modelry platform allow people to customize their experience, viewing what they wish to see. From the comfort of their own home.
Copyright issues aren’t a problem when it comes to 3D. It’s possible to use and reuse 3D models in various formats - print and digital. The 3D model is yours to use in whatever way you wish.
Using a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system it’s possible to store and manage all 3D assets in one secure place. That means having the most contemporary 3D files, videos, and images at your fingertips first. These can also be classed according to type or formats - or both.
To implement your 3D assets into your eCommerce store, all you need to do is copy then embed each product's individual code. You can access DAM for free, with ourselves, here at Modelry.
Using 3D modeling can considerably boost your on-site conversion rates and dramatically lower returns at the same time. But first, you may be wondering: ‘what is a good conversion rate?’ These two Modelry case study summaries should help to clarify:
Australian fashion brand Rollie Nation boosted website conversion by 39% using 3D product visualization and augmented reality solutions.
They also experienced an impressive 26% increase in orders from Sept to Dec 2020 compared to the previous year. Meanwhile, time on the page increased by 28.45% for one particular sneaker type.
The success, in both B2B and B2C sectors, didn’t end there. The brand found they can now boost design by testing materials directly in 3D.
They can display shoes from every angle and zoom in for a detailed close-up. They use the Modelry platform for their Shopify store in more than 10 countries and on more than 35 different products.
Rollie Nation Founder Vince Lebon describes the 3D model revision platform as “a game-changer in this space.”
He adds: “Instead of emails or me having it to bring in Photoshop and point to certain things, the platform does it for me. That is really well done.”
Rollie started using 3D with a brand new category of sneakers they were introducing to the market. Within two months of its launch, that particular sneaker became the third highest-selling category on the Rollie website.
Vince adds: “3D had a significant part to play in it all. People thought it super cool the way they could spin the sneaker around and see it in their space.”
Fashion brand Rebecca Minkoff notes customers are 44% more likely to add an item to their cart if they have interacted with an item featured in 3D on their website. Likewise, their chances of placing an order go up 27%.
Web visitors who use AR to interact with a product on the site are 65% more likely to take action and buy it.
The company, which specializes in handbags, chose 50 items to feature in 3D and AR. Executives found that using 3D and AR provides a more ‘intimate’ connection for customers on the site. Using their phone, people are able to ‘place’ a handbag they are considering purchasing in front of them to see how it will look.
Rebecca Minkoff execs also feel that encouraging a deeper connection to the handbags gives customers a stronger commitment to complete their purchases. Ultimately it boosts website conversion.
3D modeling hasn’t been around as long as photography so it is perfectly understandable that the knowledge isn’t there on how to use 3D rendering best. But many suppliers, like ourselves here at Modelry are here to advise on the strategy of how to get started on transitioning from photography to 3D visualization.
Are you ready to take action to improve your company’s website conversion rates? Sign up for a free Modelry platform today. Book a demo before you buy.
Haidi Kelly is the CMO at Modelry. Formerly at WeWork, Haidi loves the challenges the B2B space brings. Excited about the transformative power of digital assets and content in eCommerce, Haidi helps individuals, teams, and companies reach their full potential. In her downtime, she is also a foodie, world traveler, and enjoys live music.
