Growth Fundamentals: 4 Reasons Why Your eCom Conversion Rate Isn’t Great

A piece of the profitable growth puzzle is “what happens to customers once they land on your site?” Your advertising efficiency depends on getting this right. And yet, it’s quite hard: it sort of lives in performance marketing, and sort of lives in digital product management / web dev. As a result, it’s often overlooked - or worse, the departments point fingers at each other as the responsible party, while the business suffers. 

In the past few years, I had a chance to help a dozen consumer companies accelerate their growth. In a series of blog posts, I share stories about the kinds of problems that, after solving, were “visible from space” for the financial outcomes of the relevant businesses. This one focuses on conversion rate optimization, aiming to cover the functional gaps created by traditional CRO approaches. 

Problem 1: Your Ad and Shopping Experience Don’t Match

Perhaps the most important factor in your conversion rate is, simply: are the people that you’re bringing to your site seeing what they expected to see? 

For paid traffic, you know exactly what the prospect saw before landing on your site - they saw your ad. In the case of Google and Facebook, they clicked on that ad, and as such, something in that ad seemed compelling. You have to use that knowledge to get the customer over the finish line. 

To do so, what you say in the ad must also be present on your landing page and the downstream shopping UX. Let’s look at a couple simple use cases. 

1. You’re running a digital library, and your Google ads are attempting to capture customers that search for specific titles. You bid on the query terms for that book. Then:

• Your ad copy must play back to the customer that you, well, have that book;

• Your landing page: don’t take the customer to your homepage - take them to that book page!

• Your conversion funnel, starting with the Buy button on that product detail page, is punctuated with mentions of that specific book. This is where most companies will fail - this is the piece where Product must pick up the torch from Marketing.
  

2. You’re running an online fitness company. You’re attempting to capture customers that are trying to lose weight. Then:

• Some of your Facebook ads will talk about losing belly fat;

• The landing page for those ads must be again talk about losing belly fat - not just exercise equipment that can be used for various purposes;

• Ideally, your checkout experience is punctuated with references to the specific customer scenario they showed up with - losing belly fat - to help them convert. 

• Your abandon cart emails should also mention losing belly fat. You get the drill.

The core premise here is simple: if you know a prospect is engaged for a specific reason, keep reinforcing that your product is a good fit for that exact reason; don’t think that a single mention buried somewhere in the ad copy is enough to get the customer to remember or believe this. 

Following this premise will produce alignment between “digital product” and “marketing” groups - and this exact piece has been key to a significant efficiency improvement (CAC decrease) for several of my clients. It pays to break those functional barriers!..

Problem 2: Your Landing Page is Always Your Homepage

Are 90% of your digital ad dollars landing the customer on the same page? If so, keep reading - there are wins to be had, especially if that page is your homepage. 

If your product is a great fit for multiple different audiences, your homepage simply can’t serve all of them as well as a specialized page. So making a custom landing page that matches a specific scenario (say, a set of search queries for SEM) is a promising thing to test. Let’s look at some examples:

1. You’re running a food company. You discover that a meaningful chunk of your prospects follows a specific diet (“diet for IBS”). Creating a landing page just for them for related SEM queries and Facebook ads - reflecting back to the prospect that your product is a great fit for their needs. 

Now, can you imagine surfacing an IBS-focused “low FODMAP diet” front and center on your homepage, if you’re a mainstream food company? Probably not - an average consumer is unlikely to know what it even is. By talking about such a narrow diet on the homepage, you would likely turn your mainstream customer away, reducing their conversion. Instead, create narrow, problem-specific landing pages.

2. You’re running an apparel brand. You constantly launching new products, and all those products end up in the “New Releases” collection / landing page. Is most of your Facebook traffic going to just this “new” collection and your homepage? 

If so, try creating more collections - curate inventory, that’s what your merchandisers are for! Create multiple copies of each collection, make that items mentioned in ads point to landing pages with the relevant items at the very top. Try to mix-and-match your top-performing ads with top-performing collections / landing pages. 

Problem 3: Your Checkout Funnel is Too Short. Yes, too short. 

If you’re selling to businesses, or your consumer product costs a thousand bucks, or if you’re selling a subscription, it probably won’t be an impulse purchase for your customers. They’ll read the reviews; they’ll visit your site a few times after talking to their trusted circle; they’ll compare you to the alternatives. One mechanism you can use to help shepherd them along the way is setting up a longer, deliberate conversion funnel that asks the customer about their needs before allowing them to buy. That is, try adding a quiz, like Noom or Hungryroot. 

Key psychological concept in play here is self-persuasion. By answering your onboarding quiz questions, the prospect is convincing themselves that your product is a good fit for their needs. Here’s how this works. 

Let’s say you’re selling a fitness product. As a part of your shopping experience, you ask a prospect, “do you have any injuries?” - with some options around common injuries for them to pick from. The sheer act of answering increases the conviction that your solution will work well for their specific need - thus increasing the conversion rate. 

Look at how Noom does it. The formulation of the question and answer is a part of the persuasion… It helps them reinforce their core message: unlike alternatives, Noom is all about helping you lose weight “for good.”

Now, your product better be a good fit for the prospect, otherwise you’re simply manipulating the user into purchasing something they don’t want - and this will ultimately bite you in the form of an unsustainable business with a leaky bucket. That is, don’t manipulate bad-fit prospects into buying your product. Stay on the light side of the Force, Anakin. 

If you implement a quiz:

• Your advertising that specifically mentions anything that you are asking about in the quiz will become more effective (that’s the piece where the marketing group needs to follow product’s lead!);

• The quality of your “leads” (prospects that have filled out the quiz, but have not yet bought) will be higher than ever: you know things about them that can help you run an extremely effective CRM/retargeting program to get them to ultimately convert. 

Moreover, if they do buy, you now know much more about the buyer, so you can customize their experience (and subsequent cross-sell offers) to meaningfully improve retention. This data-driven understanding of buyers has been key to retention improvements we’ve been able to achieve at Hungryroot. 

Problem 4: You Aren’t Monitoring The Sub-Programs

Looking at the overall site conversion rate for your brand is a pretty useless activity: there’s far too much noise in that data. There’s one important exception, though: if it suddenly tanks - overnight, by a lot - and does not recover quickly - you know that something broke, badly. It could be your payment processor. It could be inventory. It could be ads. Something very significant broke to cause the conversion chart to look like a “fall off the cliff.” 

The same technique can and should be used to monitor “sub sections” of your growth marketing program. That is, set up conversion rate charts for your paid search, split out by program - ex. shopping, brand/non-brand. Do the same for paid social, perhaps by audience type (targeting existing vs new customers). 

Monitor conversion rates and volume for each of these sub sections. If the conversion rate of a program suddenly tanks overnight, something in that program just broke. For example, if your feed-based paid search ads suddenly see a conversion drop, it might be that your product feed, ahem, died. Wouldn’t you want to find that out right away, and not a week later, when a “wild goose chase” is triggered by a sustained drop in revenue?

Once you have the basics down, look at funnel progression, as opposed to just conversion rates, for each sub section. 

Conversion Rates Determine Your Ad Costs

Your on-site conversion rate is fully under your control; unlike the rest of the advertising marketplace. Zuck might raise prices on you, a competing advertiser might spend a truck full to compete with you, raising prices - but what happens to your prospects after they come to your site will be as, if not more, impactful than that. Make sure to take care of the fundamentals. Email me if you need help.