Webshop owners want their customers to buy their products.

That’s self-evident.

But when you’re first getting started, your emphasis is (and should be) on the basics: making sure that the product is sound and desirable, that the website is functional, and potential customers can actually find you and your products.

Once the site is live – and if you’re so fortunate to have a steady stream of visitors – a lot of people emphasize growing their traffic or adding new products and services. That’s not a bad idea, but there’s also a risk of missing out on the most obvious way to promote growth:

Get your existing visitors to buy more via conversion rate optimization (CRO).

However, this is also quite a daunting task if you’re not already well-acquainted with the underlying principles of how website design incentivizes clicks and gets people to buy your products.

In this brief guide, we’ll teach you five tips on how to improve CRO on your webshop – without having to blow the bank on analytical tools, custom coding, or specialized web developers.

Tips for CRO for Small Webshops

Increasing your traffic or increasing your conversion rate are both tools that drive revenue. 

With CRO you can often grab low-hanging fruit that requires a lesser effort than a complete website redesign, ongoing ad campaigns or more comprehensive SEO-projects. In some cases, it can be easier to grow conversion than develop new customers.

Below you’ll find five actionable tips that can help you get started with CRO; that don’t require too many extra resources.

1. Optimize Your Conversion Funnel

Understanding your visitors is the first step to increasing your conversion rate.

The best framework for this is to establish efficient conversion funnels.

Conversion funnels are a set of specific pages that your users should visit on the way to a conversion. That requires mapping out – or creating new paths – from your visitors’ first interaction to their purchase.

You can use the AIDA model to get a better understanding of how to create a conversion funnel that takes into account all parts of the visitor journey.

2. Use Buttons & CTAs Strategically

When you first get started with CRO, it’s easy to reduce it to buttons and Call-to-Actions (CTAs).

That’s because they work. And they’re easy to implement.

But before you begin planting a million buttons on every landing page or blog post, it’s a good idea to think strategically. 

An effective button or CTA requires understanding how your customers navigate the site; what they’re experiencing as they click on a particular page; and thinking about when they’re most motivated to click on your “buy”-button.

It’s also a good idea to pair your button with microcopy. That’s a brief one-sentence paragraph that dispels your customers’ fears or apprehensions. This is an art in and of itself, but you can use your Unique Selling Points (USPs) – what makes you or the product different from your competitors – and emphasize the benefits of your product.

For example, an iPhone cover might seem expensive but not compared to a broken screen. Especially not if it only costs as much as that band t-shirt you wore once and never put on again.

3. Remember to Stick What’s Important to the Top

As a general rule, you want to concentrate the important bits (such as your CTA and the first button) above the fold. 

That’s a term used about what you can see when you’ve just loaded a page – without having to scroll. Like a physical newspaper placing the most important news at the top so it can be read without having to pick up the paper at the stand or kiosk.

Most heatmaps (tracking of user behavior on-page) will show you that users drop off the further down a page you scroll. A good structure that is easy to skim can counteract some of this behavior, but typically fewer people will look at the bottom of a page than the top.

You can create what is called a hero banner that has visuals, a button, a CTA and other important information. That should go at the very top of your landing pages.

Pictures and other visual elements are often a good idea. However, some websites will tend to emphasize the use of a featured image. That’s not necessarily a bad idea – but if the picture is so large that people have to scroll to find what they’re actually looking for, that can be harmful to your conversion rate.

Give them what they want – as soon as they want it.

4. Minimize Distractions

You should also work to minimize distractions.

Where pop-ups and slide-ins are often necessary tools to grab your visitors’ attention if you want them to sign up for a newsletter or be aware of a limited sale, they can also distract or annoy people away from what they were doing.

As well there’s not a set-in-stone rule here. The best practice is to split-test your page – and use your understanding of the audience to help them achieve their end-goal: buying the right product for them.

5. Test, Test, and Test (Again)

In Steve Krug’s seminal book on web usability, Don’t Make Me Think, he emphasizes the importance of creating an intuitive user experience.

Whereas much website design tries to create as few steps as possible, Krug states that:

“Two intuitive clicks are better than one non-intuitive click.”

But understanding whether something actually is intuitive can be difficult. When you’re designing and managing a webshop yourself, you get blindspots. You’ve made it yourself; you’ve gone through numerous iterations and you have a set goal that you want to achieve.

Your visitors/users might not be anything like you.

For that reason it’s important to test your website once you’ve implemented your optimizations. That can be something as simple as user testing people you know.

Optimally, you want people that aren’t close family or loved ones – they tend to spare your feelings rather than give you their honest assessments – but even friends or acquaintances can spot things you might not.

In addition to this, you can use analytics to track your actual visitors as they move through your site. Using Google Analytics and other tools you can usually set up goals and dive deeper into your statistics to learn where most users trip up – or fall off the site.

It’s a good idea to spend a little extra time setting up goals and tracking so your data is reliable.

With these five tips in hand, you’re well on your way to creating a better webshop for your users – that also results in greater revenue.