Your online store needs to work hard for you. You want every potential customer coming through those doors to leave with something. And if they don’t make a purchase — you’ll want to retarget them with relevant content and products. But how can you improve your in-store experience? How can you increase your conversion rates fast — when you’ve only get a few hours, days, or weeks to play with? Here are some quick and effective ways to improve your conversion rates STAT.

Love data

Seriously — data is at the heart of every good CRO (conversion rate optimization) strategy, especially in ecommerce. Get to grips with your web analytics and keep pushing for deeper insights. The best way to spend time with your data? Open your data dashboard and investigate the following:

1. Where do customers usually drop off?
2. How many failed product searches is your search bar returning?
3. What are your highest (and lowest) converting pages and products?
4. Does seasonality affect your web traffic and conversions, and how?
5. What’s your overall & page-level bounce rate like?

Armed with data that answers these five questions, you should have a pretty good idea of things that you need to focus on. Start by addressing ‘problem pages’, and then replicate strategies that worked on highly converting pages.

You need this same data-driven attitude when it comes to evaluating your marketing campaigns, especially paid ones. Don’t forget to put your in-store conversion rates in context with where your traffic is actually coming from. A store reliant on organic search vs. a store mainly getting traffic through Facebook or Instagram ads will look very different from a data perspective.

Don’t go for scrolling carousels

Kill the carousel.

The ruling from Peep Laja’s CXL blog is pretty damning: “conversion killers”. It’s been consistently found that scrolling carousels and image sliders are bad for conversions. They confuse users, dilute the brand voice, and create a user-experience nightmare.

A static hero image is a much better way to tell your brand story in an engaging visual way. If, like most people, you struggle to come to a decision on things like this: change your hero image every now and then to spice things up. A seasonal banner or a refresh of your visual identity is always a good idea, as long as you keep your branding consistent.

Confusingly, an image gallery on a product page is actually a good idea — so keep slideshow content to product pages only.

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It’s not enough to throw up an ecommerce store on a platform like Shopify or WooCommerce and wait for customers and their dollars to roll in. You need to think through how people will get from where they are on their computer to your site so they can even consider buying your products.

Here are our top suggestions for paid ad and organic SEO strategy for ecommerce stores.

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