Simple Tricks to Increase Customer Conversions on your Website

Your website isn’t just a storefront, it’s a map of your customers journey! By using data easily available, you can visualise the story of how your customers interact, unlocking valuable insights into your strengths and weaknesses! You’ve invested a lot to get users to your website, whether it’s through paid advertising or the hours you spent on SEO or Socials – its such a waste to then lose them unnecessarily. We’ll help you understand how to identify your top opportunities for increasing customer retention & therefore conversions.

Below, we’ll outline where to find your data, what to measure & how to take action based on what you find! These proven methods will help you to focus your attention on what matters to your customer, instead of getting caught up in all the details.

Use Data to map your Customers Journey

Page views are a super simple piece of data to get your hands on, and they can tell you so much about your customer! We’re going to use how many unique user page views we got to understand which parts of our website or process could be better aligned to our customers needs and therefore retain more customers.

Understand your Current Customer Retention:

Categorise your web-pages Think about how a standard customer arrives to your webpage and how they flow through it to reach a conversion point (Sale, Contact Form Submitted, External Link clicked)? Write down the general flow of the category of pages they will visit. E.g. Home > Product Page > Cart > Purchase Confirmation
For each of your categories, collect the total number of users & the total traffic visiting this page in the period (e.g. one year, one month). Note: We suggest collecting both users & total traffic.
Calculate the “retention” of customers at each stage: Divide the number that make it to the next stage by the number at the current stage. E.g. The retention of users from Product to Cart is 300/1500 = 20%.

Identify your Strongest & Weakest areas of retention:

Now you’ve got a high level picture of how your customer flows through your website, it’s time to understand what this means for your business. If you’ve got a particular area of concern, you can start with this. Otherwise start with the lowest Retention score, in the example above it is between Product & Cart.

For each score, ask yourself some questions:

Is this number what I would expect it to be? Is it surprisingly high or low? Does it fit what I would expect?
Ask an AI tool or Google what the industry standards for this are. You can use the following prompt, replacing the words between * : What are the industry standard customer retention rates for users transitioning from *Viewing a Product to adding it to a cart* for businesses operating in *fast fashion*
Highlight any that are higher or lower than you expect, or vary greatly from industry standards.

Now that we’ve got some idea of where our strengths and weaknesses’ are, let’s make some changes and get those conversion numbers pumping! There’s two steps here, knowing what to change & making it happen.

Identifying Opportunities to get Customers Converting:

Just like any other part of your business, it’s not always easy to know what the root cause is.

Experience your site from your customers perspective: Whether it’s asking a friend to give their feedback or challenging yourself to look at your site with new eyes, think about how your customer experiences it. Customer Surveys & Heatmapping cost a bit more but will get you really strong insights into their experience.
What are industry standards: It’s not always the case, but often the reason everyone is doing it is because it works. Take a look at the sites of larger businesses in your industry, what are they doing differently.
Understand your Strengths: Where is your customer retention highest? What makes this part of your website different?
Use AI to get tips related to your industry: Use the prompt “what are 5 ways I can increase my customer retention between *Product Page & Adding to Cart* for a business Specialising in *Fast Fashion*

The top 5 things which may be impacting your websites customer retention:

Everyone’s experience is unique, but here’s a quick cheat-sheet to get you started:

Website Speeds & Usability: Check your scores on Google Search Console to see if your site is speedy enough for users & that it is optimised across both Mobile & Desktop.
Sense of Trust: Does your website & business seem trustworthy? Having information like your business address, phone number & contact details, customer testimonials are important. Linking to your broader online presence like Social Media also helps.
Messaging & Brand: Does your website tell a story? Is your messaging clear? Have you got clear calls-to-action across the site encouraging customers to convert?
User-Friendliness: Is your site user friendly? Are the buttons where users would expect them to be? Are your menu options logical?
Pricing: Pricing products too high may have an impact, but equally low pricing can lose customers through perceptions of quality, trust and “too good to be true.” Furthermore, are you presenting your pricing transparently without hidden costs?

Use 5-Whys Tool to Understand the Root cause of Customer Attrition:

The 5-Whys tool is a super simple activity to get beyond the symptoms of a problem and right down to the core of what needs to be resolved. All you need to do is state your problem and ask “Why” 5 times. Consider the example below:

Problem: We are losing a high number of customers between viewing our product and adding it to their cart

Why? Customers don’t feel a sense of trust in our product.

Why? There aren’t any customer testimonials on our site.

Why? We don’t have many customer testimonials.

Why? We don’t ask our customers for feedback.

Why? We don’t have a process to request customer feedback after purchase.

The power of 5-Whys is you can go as deep or as shallow as you feel is necessary, and you can branch off as many times as you would like.

Taking Action to Increase Customer Retention:

Use a Prioritisation Matrix Decide where to take action:

At this point, you’ve probably got a lot of ideas on how to increase customer retention and get more conversions, but it’s simply not feasible to do everything, and certainly not all at once! The quickest and easiest way to decide how to best spend your time and money is a Prioritisation matrix, simply mapping all of your ideas against their relative Cost & Benefit.

Map all of your ideas onto this matrix, for example sending an automated review request to customers after they purchase. When you consider value, take into account areas that align with your strategy, along with the classics like Revenue, Brand Image & Reduced Costs. Based on your overall strategy and the relative cost-benefits of each idea, select a few items from Low Hanging Fruit & Worthy Investments to get things started!

Now that you know where you want to put your focus, it’s time to take action!

Here are our three top tips on taking action to increase your websites Conversion rates:

Stop Waiting, Progress over perfection: There is never a right time to get started, so you’ve just got to take those first steps. You will of course need to adapt & re-think your plans throughout as you face obstacles or new opportunities come to light. But as they say, the secret to getting ahead is getting started
Always refer back to your strategy: When things get confusing and you start questioning if something is worth it or whether it’s the right priority, circle back to your strategy (even if your strategy is just the prioritisation matrix at this point).
Track your results: In a month’s time, reflect on the data and see if it has changed and adjust your plans accordingly. It can be hard to draw out trends on a short term basis, especially if your business has seasonality, but the better you understand your data, the better you can adjust your path.

Your Next Steps:

By now, you’ve made some tangible progress towards increasing your customer retention rates, well done! Once you’ve got this far, there’s a few tips we have for maintaining & branching out further.

Continuously Improve:

Don’t treat this as a one off activity, reflecting on how to improve your customer journey should be part of your annual planning and you should always be taking some action towards it. This will become easier as you get a stronger strategy in place & lock down ways of working that encourage continuous improvement.

Delve deeper into the data:

We’ve really just scratched the surface of customer retention data, keeping it super simple at the user level. But there are so many fascinating questions you can investigate with the data in your Google Analytics. If you want to delve deep, investigate setting up Google Tags for key events across your website, this will make the process much quicker.

Here’s Five Data Points to investigate to retain customers to conversion:

Acquisition Type: Do customers from paid ads, organic search or socials have different retention rates?
Device: Do Mobile & Desktop Users have the same retention rates?
Demographics: How do age, gender & location impact the retention rates?
Product: Which products are high performers & which are low performers when it comes to converting customers.
Time: Are there times of day, week, month or year that vary in terms of retention rates?

By asking these questions, you’ll unlock so many more insights into root causes and opportunities for your retaining customers.

It’s that easy! Now go get started.

Every day you are loosing potential customers who have already made it so far on their journey! Stop wasting the investment that got them to your site & focus on getting them converted. It’s easy to funnel more money and time into advertising to more customers, but by focusing on building a user-friendly conversion-driven site, you’ll get infinitely more results.

If you want support to carry out the analysis for your business, reach out to Strategy Toolbox. We can both support & empower you every step of the way, allowing you to unlock valuable insights into your business & deliver the changes that will grow your returns.