It’s no secret we live in an era of big data and deep insights—which is why market research is at the forefront of any business today.
Understanding where demand lies and how to encourage potential customers to choose your products are the vital responsibilities of business managers, product marketers, data analysts, and other leading eCommerce positions.
What do we mean? Working to increase conversion rates is important both online and in-store. A staggering 63% of companies do not include structured conversion rate optimization as part of their market intelligence plan. Boosting conversions mostly involves tweaking the website and the marketplace catalog in a way that increases profitability.
Read on to learn more about how you can use product data and demand intelligence to optimize your marketplace conversion rates for maximum performance.
The Basics: Understanding Conversion Rate Optimization
Most people think of conversion as a process of converting a store visitor into a paying customer. However, conversion can refer to any desired action taken by your clients, whether it’s a purchase or filling out a survey.
Physical stores often consider retail conversion rates, but the figure is even more prominent in the world of eCommerce. Here, it’s expressed as a percentage: the ratio of site visitors who make a purchase compared to the total number of visitors. There are a few things to know about optimizing this metric:
- It’s an ongoing effort: As demand changes, what you do to accomplish CRO will always evolve as new data comes in to influence your actions. Marketers will continue tweaking the advertising; web designers will always be coding smoother and more persuasive webpages; and catalog managers must always choose high-demand products with attractive prices.
- It’s heavily reliant on data: Market research and consumer data drive your marketplace management efforts. Most of the work that web designers, advertisers, and catalog managers do is in response to changes in consumer behavior and demand. Collecting and analyzing data is then necessary for conversion rate optimization.
- It’s tied to SEO: Search engine optimization aims to get new audience members onto your website to begin with, while CRO attempts to get those visitors into making a purchase. You can think of SEO as working from the top of the funnel, while CRO works at the bottom.
Not everyone who clicks on your website will be making a purchase, but conversion rate optimization (CRO) aims to give you more results for your marketing investment.
Why Should I Pay Attention to CRO?
Brick and mortar businesses are already performing retail tracking for CRO purposes, but the task is even more vital in eCommerce as more and more people are choosing to buy online. Investing in conversion rate optimization means:
- Higher profitability: The job of a marketer isn’t finished once someone walks in the door. There needs to be effort put into diverting interest into your brand’s offerings and pushing for the sale. CRO increases the chance that your marketing efforts result in a proper return on investment.
- More awareness of customer behaviors: Part of CRO for eCommerce companies is analyzing how your website might encourage or discourage a sale. In doing so, you gain an understanding of how site visitors perceive your brand and make their own purchasing decisions.
- A stronger customer experience: Nothing helps boost a sale more than making interacting with your business easy. Part of CRO is working to improve the customer experience. Websites should be easy to navigate, and purchasing policies must be easy to understand.
It’s this last point where CRO ties in with eCommerce marketplace management. A catalog manager’s responsibilities include identifying specific products, presenting ones that are relevant to the consumer, and improving the browsing experience by ensuring listings are both accurate and organized. In fact, catalog management really is a form of conversion rate optimization.
How To Approach Conversion Rate Optimization
It’s no secret that getting people to get out their wallets is a challenge, especially in an online context. A low conversion rate is one of the biggest reasons new businesses fail. However, there are some steps you can take to give yourself a competitive advantage.
Doing Market Research
You have to know what a buyer wants if you want to push the conversion. Gather various data points like:
- Purchasing history
- Direct feedback from surveys
- General consumer trends
You can generate buyer personas of your target audience this way and find specific ways to personalize the storefront towards those groups.
Removing Barriers
eCommerce web designers have found subtle yet impactful ways to streamline the purchasing process and raise conversions.
- Creating an attractive website that loads quickly.
- Adding call-to-action (CTA) sections to motivate next steps in the buying process.
- Making the site accessible through mobile device compatibility and streamlined checkout processes.
- Improving your listing information to answer any questions immediately. The more details, the more convenient the interaction.
- Building a sense of trust by including customer testimonials
Even small barriers can impede a site visitor’s willingness to make a purchase. Web designers and digital marketers improve websites through a rigorous testing process known as A/B Testing. Here, several versions of the website are created with small differences (such as colors, placement, pricing models, page layout, and others). Each of these versions go live, and the designers find the best combination that results in the best conversion rate.
Focusing on Your Most Successful Channels
It’s natural for certain parts of your marketplace architecture to be responsible for the majority of your sales. For instance, the conversion rate of some of your web pages will be much higher than others on the same website.
While you should always give every page some attention, prioritize by putting most of your CRO efforts into those most impactful ones. You can track page traffic and other performance metrics through online tools like Google Analytics to find where you want to focus A/B testing the most on.
Similarly, some marketing channels might give you a better return on investment than others. Visitors arrive at your website from various channels, such as organic search from Google, referrals through affiliate sites, display advertisements, email messages, or social media. Which channel has been the most promising for you in recent months?
Presenting the Right Offerings
Here’s where the work of the catalog manager comes in. While a beautiful website certainly improves CRO, you won’t go anywhere if what you’re selling isn’t what people are buying.
A catalog manager ranks search results based on suppliers and demand trends to find high-demand goods that can be sold at a competitive price. This process involves comparing with other storefronts for the same product and seeing whether you can undercut the price elsewhere.
You also want to provide as much information about the products as possible. What are the specifications and use cases? What is the exact package size? Details like these require market research to get right, and they minimize friction in the purchasing process by ensuring that visitors know exactly what they are buying.
Stay Competitive With Real-Time Marketplace & Product Insights
The eCommerce space continues to become more and more competitive each year. With the rise of new marketplaces, brands, and rapid shipping, today’s customers expect a flawless experience from start to finish.
Having access to real-time data is one of the best tools to create a data-driven conversion rate optimization strategy.
Are you looking to access deep insights into your marketplace, brand, and competitors? Sign up for Algopix today and access the data you need to optimize every aspect of your marketplace catalog, architecture, and more.
