If you’re not sure what a conversion is, here is a short explanation. In fact, any action users can perform on your website eventually becomes an element of a potential conversion rate; the main aim of every retailer is to make them want to do this action. The more you encourage your visitors to interact with your website, the greater conversion rates you have. In other words, conversion is a ratio of those visitors that can be transformed into leads or customers to the total amount of visitors on your website.

Accordingly, Conversion Rate Optimization is a number of special techniques that retailers can use to increase their conversion rates. These techniques often include utilization of various analyzing tools, performing specialized tests, and cooperating with expert conversion optimization services that could help you to better understand which elements of your website need to be improved to help you reach your aims.

Last year saw a more increased use of various conversion optimization techniques among e-commerce merchants trying to improve their performance on the global market. This year shows that most of them proved to have gained success in their strategies. But you should admit that even if a current technique brought you to increased conversion rates today, the same might not happen tomorrow, as consumers never seize to seek for fresher and newer things. Thus, it is necessary to keep on moving your website in the direction of dynamic adjustment to up-to-date needs of your customers.

Here you will have a useful insight into which conversion optimization techniques are considered to be the most effective for e-commerce industry these days and get acquainted with the powerful tools and services for analyzing, managing, and improving your conversion rates.

Conversion rate optimization tips to follow today

Because conversion optimization appeared to have a positive effect on a great number of businesses, more e-commerce developers turned to working on analyzing and testing tools that can become optimal means of increasing retailer conversion rates. For instance, the most popular tool for introducing new elements to a website’s interface is A/B testing tool which is embedded into almost every existing e-commerce platform and is used in combination with other tools as a part of different conversion rate optimization techniques.

Let’s see now which conversion optimization techniques are considered trendy this year.

Mobile A/B Testing

As mobile technologies have become a part of people’s everyday life, e-commerce industry is being steadily adjusting online stores for mobile devices. As a result, it becomes even more important to use A/B testing on mobile apps for conversion rate purposes.

Thus, one of the brightest examples of a company utilizing A/B testing is A View From My Seat whose mobile app is constantly being improved with the help of Artisan Optimize tool. The website owners regularly test new features and interface variations that could be more suitable for a better user experience. It resulted that after two months of working with Artisan Optimize, A View From My Seat acquired 22% more impressions and user interaction to their mobile app.

Among other options for providing mobile A/B testing environment there are such tools as Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer and Liquid.

Personalization tools

Personalization is a way of attracting customers by providing a website with an effective user categorization system. Personalization tools can help to determine the category of a user depending on such factors as geo-location, searched keywords, and referrals. Later, a retailer can use the obtained data for sending personalized e-mails to each determined category of users. This creates an improved merchant-customer relationship that is likely to have a positive effect on your conversion rates.

There is a number of testing tools being developed specifically for personalization purposes, which induced the emergence of a separate niche called Customer Relationship Management. Adobe Target tool is considered to be the most effective means of personalization that allows adapting your website for individual needs of each user.

However, it is highly important not to overdo it. There are things that are better to keep unrevealed when interacting with your customers. This includes any type of personal data that is likely to evoke distrust to your website and lower your conversion rates.

Cross-Platform testing

By now, there are two options for e-commerce merchants to perform cross-platform testing both of which are closely connected to Google. They are Optimizely tool, developed by Google’s former developers, and the inner toolkit of Google Analytics Universal that came out in 2014. Not only did it become possible to effectively test new website elements on web as well as mobile environments, but also it allowed retailers to use mobile versions of their website for tracking their visitors’ activity online.

Marketing videos

This method of improving your conversion rates assumes that you will make your customers more familiar with your website activities and products specifics. Creating commercial video may seem much more complicated than writing SEO texts, but it has rater promising prospects in terms of your conversion rate optimization strategy.

Numerous studies have proved that watching a video grabs more attention and time of a user than reading an article, so if you follow this strategy, you’re hardly to bear any losses. As you might suggest, marketing videos of any kind have more chances to reach target audience if placed on landing pages of your website. Marketing videos are also widely utilized by small and large companies to improve credibility in their customers’ opinion.

One of the types of marketing video that reached the peak of its popularity in 2014 is autoplay video which starts playback after a web page has been loaded. Such websites as Airbnb and Dropbox have already adapted this technique to explain the main concepts of their services in a simple and visual way.

Online shopping recommendations

There is a way for online store owners to maximize their conversion rates as well. If you imagine yourself as a customer, you will realize that the primary reason of why a person visits one and the same store is that he or she expects it to offer something new. What is more important, visitors don’t tend to always be clearly aware of what they want or what website features might be of the greatest interest to them. This can be used to provide individual product suggestions for potential customers even before they address themselves to product list page itself.

The technique features personalized ads, offers to complete a short questionnaire before starting the shopping itself, and displaying recently watched products with a subsequent suggestion to look through more alike products. The latter is being actually utilized by Amazon where a visitor can instantly meet such categories as “Related to Items You’ve Viewed”, “Recommendations for You”, etc. right on the home-page of the website. However, you don’t have to be so much into shopping personalization to gain more conversion rates, especially if your business is not that huge.

Questionnaires are especially popular among beauty stores like Julep, for instance, that offer their visitors to customize their own beauty boxes so that the store could later recommend the most appropriate products based on the answers and preferences given during the signing up procedure.

Household optimization

If your store deals with modern household appliances, you might understand the necessity of optimizing their work in such a way that people could feel secure about their homes when they are away. Testing wireless electronic devices is also largely motivated by the fact that Nest, specializing in smart home appliances, has recently acquired Dropcam; their partnership allows users to monitor their houses 24 hours a day and receive live video records that are activated in case of emergency related to breakdown of some of the appliances.

Because all the electronic devices are linked to mobile-apps, more attention must be paid to analyzing the efficiency of their performance under various external conditions. Home automation requires a higher level of responsibility because your products will be used by people on regular basis; every improvement you make is likely to increase your reliability and keep you revenues positive.

So adapt it

Conversion Rate Optimization is now at the core of every marketing strategy due to being even more relevant for increasing conversion rates than usual advertising. The main advantage of dealing with CRO is the ability to test new features for your website without customers even being aware of that. Changing the design is harder to hide but it allows to objectively analyze its quality based on the amount of visits for the period when the testing was in run. Thus, investing into improvement of conversion rates is one of the most important objectives for becoming a competitive member on e-commerce market.

The most powerful conversion analysis, testing, and management tools

By this time, you might be already knowledgeable enough about various CRO tools, but can find hard to choose the one that would suit exactly the needs of your business. So, depending on whether you want to simplify the obtained data for further management or just seek for a reliable collaboration, you can choose one or several tools and services that can significantly improve conversion rate of your e-commerce website.

Cloud Conversion CRM for Magento

The service is based on Saleforce platform which allows Magento retailers to effectively integrate into Saleforce cloud system to optimize their database management. All the website information including customers’ purchase details, lists of products and product categories, order statuses and the amount of visits can be carefully stored in the cloud to allow a more simplified and centralized access for conversion rate optimization purposes.

Specifically, you can literally track all your visitors by utilizing Saleforce’s customer profile system that captures any type of customer-website interaction. In result, you have a neatly organized database that provides you with an opportunity of improving your customer-merchant relationship within the limits of one unified environment. Trough Saleforce you can also manage financial and other official matters such as refunds, order billings, shipping, and many more.

Cloud Conversion CRM guarantees that all the information you store in the cloud is only available for you, so there is no probability of losing your conversion rates. Because every Magento retailer strives for being unique, the service offers a range of useful customizable features that you can use on the basis of your personal preferences.

A successful Saleforce integration by Cloud Conversion CRM is possible, however, only after you make sure that your store inventory is full so that there were not any inaccuracies in data display. Later, if one of the items is stocked out, this data will be automatically delivered to your website causing no misunderstanding between you and your customers.

CloudGento

Quick Start Cloud Conversion CRM program

This is the basic package of Cloud Conversion CRM services which contains the most relevant procedures that are likely to be needed for marketing management schemes of every Magento retailer. The package includes:

• individual training on the most important elements of your business;
• giving access to the major e-commerce channels settings (including Amazon and eBay);
• providing a client with Case Management Workflow Analysis;
• setup of basic order queues and customer profiles;
• setup of Assignment and Escalation Rules;
• informing about frequent case reasons and their solutions;
• setup of Public Knowledgebase on all of your e-commerce websites;
• providing retailers with automatic e-mail response templates and rules;
• creating of Agent Productivity Console;
• configuration of Customer Service View;
• training on the basic reports and dashboards;
• utilization of the most effective conversion rate optimization practices.

The Quick Start program is mostly preferred by retailers who want to make a good start and acquire the basic experience of CRM practice aiming at developing individual approach later on. The program is intended for 45 days setup after which you will have to continue customizing your database on your own or with the help of additional support packages provided by the same Cloud Conversion CRM.

There are three types of Quick Start packages you can choose from depending on the volume of available content: Silver ($499), Gold ($999) and Platinum ($1000+) packages.

Conversion Tools from TradeTracker.com

TradeTracker.com Conversion Tools is a specialized Magento extension that will help you to track your website conversion rates on conditions that you run your marketing strategy or affiliate program on TradeTracker marketing platform. After you download and install the extension, it will become available on your Magento Configuration Panel. You will only have to enter your TradeTracker company ID and product ID to get it started. After submitting the given data, all orders that have been previously completed through TradeTracker will be automatically copied and re-registered within your personal dashboard. You will also manage to monitor your website performance stats and rates including the number of impressions, ad clicks, sales and conversions for any given period. The extension is available for only $39.99.

Comindware Project

Comindware Project is a handy tool created specifically for conversion optimization experts who have to deal with a huge list of tasks and not knowing which rates to consider for making a high-quality analysis. Comindware Project combines in itself simplicity of use, effectiveness of website management, and dynamic social collaboration, so this is considered to be a kind of software that creates a unified workspace for CRO experts and their teams. Collaborative base allows Comindware Project’s members sharing their data, viewing their projects status and current resource availability. As a result, you get a tool which:

• helps to unite experts for a collaborative work on the same projects;
• enables your team to perform the tasks  efficiently and in time;
• allows controlling your team’s workload and distributing it wisely across each member;
• promotes better resource usage;
• makes your work perfectly structured and organized.

If you’re sure you want to acquire Comindware Project tool, be ready to spend only $29.99 per month. Otherwise, you can always try a trial version for free.

Five Second Test

This is a useful online tool that reveals a true picture of your landing page first impression. The service allows you to upload screenshots of your landing page and run them through five second test performed by one or several users representing various demographic categories. For these five seconds users view your page images and then asked to answer several questions concerning its content, design etc. The questions are by default similar for every person, but you can customize them to get the most relevant information about the impression users receive based on the page elements you’re most interested in. After analysis is completed, you will receive a profound report containing all the answers from testers combined in a nicely made chart.

Five Second Test allows you to invite your own testers for performing analysis, which will cost you nothing. In case if you want to use services of the website’s official testers, you will pay $1 per each response. You can also acquire a specialized pro account for $99 per month which enables you to configure additional settings for more accurate analysis results, such as the ability to choose testers belonging to specific demographics.

PadiTrack

PadiTrack used to be a fine tool for building visual representations of retailers’ past conversion funnels until it was closed in April of 2015. The service they offered was basically called Conversion Funnel Tracking and it could be run free of charge. It was possible to configure the analysis procedure according to your specific needs; for example, you could skip the less relevant steps visitors of your website took before getting to a purchase itself. As a result, you received only the most important information that could help you make appropriate decisions about which steps to take in your current CRO strategy.

The price for retroactive analysis service was usually free, but if you wanted to also analyze your landing pages, micro-conversions or overall marketing performance, you could sign up for pro account for only $29 per month.

Formisimo

Ever wondered why your visitors don’t complete a purchase or personal data forms? This tool will open your eyes on this mystery by providing you with a profound report on how long it usually takes a customer to complete a form on your website, what fields were edited by customers more often than others and at which step of checkout procedure customers become reluctant to continue the order submission.

Formisimo is available for free for 14 day period. Then you can choose between small business, medium business and small agency plans which cost $49, $99 and $249 accordingly.

RealtimeBoard

RealtimeBoard is what you need for keeping a lot of important data in one place. Unlike specialized CRO tools intended for storing website information about the clicks, views and orders, this tool is more generalized in that it allows providing an easy communicative experience to you and your team. In fact, the service is an online alternative to real life whiteboard that is used for making schemes, outlines, notes, memos, etc. Despite creating simple text files, you can use Google Drive service to upload documents and PDF files to your real time board. Moreover, you can also upload pictures and videos to maximize the advantages of data sharing.

You can create up to three boards for free with the maximum capacity of 100 MB. However, if you want to get more useful features from the service, you might like using paid accounts like Premium or Team account that enable more storage space, the function of screen sharing, video and voice chat, and manual backup possibility. As for the confidentiality, paid accounts allow limiting access to your board and guarantee that every online meeting or brainstorming session will remain private.

The price for Team and Premium account is similar: $8 per month if billed annually and $10 per month if paid monthly. The actual difference lies in that Premium account aims at working on individual projects, while Team account is intended for a group of coworkers.

Verint + KANA

Verint + KANA are two cooperating companies, where the latter is actually a subsidiary of the former. They offer a wide range of data analysis products in combination with a high-level cloud service for providing e-commerce website owners with a profound Customer Engagement Optimization. KANA is more engaged into optimizing customer experience on the web, social, and mobile level, while Verint aims at improving your company’s workforce and the quality of management and bringing more customer interaction.

The set of the companies’ products and services helps to easily convert a simple user into actively engaged customer that later will be converted into clear revenue. It includes:

1. Strong workforce management. The companies will effectively distribute the tasks among your team members so that each of them could do exactly what meets their personal skills and experience. Combined with efficient resource utilization, your project potential is likely to unleash.

2. Specialized employee desktop. Your team will be equipped with the powerful tools and applications allowing it to instantly react to customer inquiry and provide fast and high-quality services.

3. Access to profound analytics of your website performance which captures the most relevant data that is necessary for estimating testing results and understanding which steps to take to get more from you CRO campaign.

4. Evaluation of technical aspects of customer-employee interaction. This includes minor but not less important aspects of communication with customers such as the quality of connection during voice chat or flexibility of feedback giving.

5. Providing your team with guidance as for the whole customer lifecycle that would make them confident in any types of cases that customer can face during the process of their interaction with your website.

6. Analysis of customer technical support calls which is important for understanding the negative tendencies in service delivery on your website.

7. Providing customers with a high-end self-service to make them feel natural when dealing with your website interface and satisfy their curiosity by making all the necessary information accessible in one-click distance.

8. Offers convenient individual and group couching and e-learning to increase the power of your knowledge and provide an environment for implementing theory in practice.

The main set of products for business owners consists of:

KANA Enterprise

This package is created for large corporations that want to sort out their daily routine and understand the key principles of providing a high-quality customer engagement optimization. You have an opportunity to connect multiple business processes into a unified coordinated system. The package includes more specified solutions such as Agent Desktop, E-mail Management, Knowledge Management, Web Self-Service and Experience Analytics to optimize customer-company interaction making this process highly personalized.

KANA Express

A cloud service intended for convenient storage of customer related information which can be instantly retrieved when dealing with customers directly. It is also a useful means of monitoring daily transactions and phone calls especially when you have to deal with thousands of them every 24 hours. KANA Express package gives opportunity to have a real-time view of customer activity and status throughout the whole period of interaction with your website. Moreover, you can acquire a strong set on connection services for maintaining constant contact with customers as well as team members on the proper level.

Lagan Enterprise

Targets specifically Public Sector organizations and governmental institutions. Provides simple solutions to complex data management and enables integration into web, mobile, and social media spheres.

Each of the Verint + Kana programs costs as minimum as $100/user/month with a following cost for additional expenses that vary depending on the size and the type of a client-company. The minimal number of users for one package equals 10 persons.

Genesys

Genesys is another leading company in the sphere of providing multi-channel customer experience on the both local and cloud level. The platform makes its best to lead customers through every point of interaction with a client company to ensure that they experience no difficulties in familiarizing themselves with available products and services. Genesys is a good solution for large and small businesses with an equal distribution of customer interaction experience and knowledge. By now, the company has successfully cooperated with over 4 500 enterprises in more than 80 countries of the world and managed to reach the overall amount of 100 million company-customer interactions per day.

1.      Genesys Premier Edition itself is the cheapest package intended for small and middle Contact Centers that need to be effectively maintained. Your company’s agents will access a profound customer database to get all the necessary information needed for getting along with case customers. The system will allow you distributing customers to the most appropriate task managers to prevent a low-quality service and misunderstandings. All the necessary metrics and stats of your website performance will be constantly available for evaluating the conversion rates and the overall quality of offering services. Genesys Premier Edition can contain up to 250 users connected in one virtual contact center. Also, it offers an easy and intuitive integration with Saleforce.com and Zendesk customer service platforms.

2.      Genesys Business Edition is targeted for medium-size companies with staff containing not more than 1 000 members. The program delivers the simplest functionality to meet service-level agreement, optimize the quality of customer-company relationship, gain more conversion rates, and, as a result, increase the company’s overall revenues.

Contact Centers that work with Genesys Business Edition package experience the smooth and instant database interaction which combines in itself a range of useful interdependent features. Your team members can choose between working with on-premises appliances, through the Cloud storage, or within a hybrid Cloud environment. On-premises hardware appliance has a number of pre-configured features, so users won’t spend precious time on getting adjusted to the system. Hybrid Cloud environment allows you to adjust both traditional means of telecommunication and the Cloud storage service for having opportunity to easily analyze and manage the received data. The package also offers efficient workforce management, so that while one category of managers remains within reach for customer communication, another category of managers keeps on working on maintaining and improving the website’s performance and responsiveness.

3.      Genesys Enterprise Edition package will be the most effective for big enterprises that have to deal with multiple channel conversion funnels and still require keeping track of every customer with the highest level of precision. Moreover, the program helps to manage big scale contact centers that often locate in multiple places and even countries.

Although being more sophisticated that the previous editions, Genesys Enterprise Edition, the package will assist you with optimizing customer contact procedures in such a way that overall costs will be minimized giving opportunity to concentrate more on other management operations.

As well as in the previous editions, you can choose between running your Contact Center on-premises, in the Cloud or within a hybrid Cloud environment. This edition is perfectly adjusted for both customer self-service and human-assisted provision.

As always, you can get free 30 day trial version of The Genesys Cloud Centre which is a part of Genesys Premier Edition package and which has a wide range of functionality, the guarantee of secure storage of the entire data, and a user-friendly interface.

Improvely

Improvely is a progressive analytics tool that can help you track and improve current results of your marketing strategies. This tool is capable of:

• capturing every customer’s step beginning from clicking on the ad to completing an order;
• sharing a list of the most frequently used keywords for getting to your website and searching inside of it;
• identifying the exact information about every visitor of your website and storing it in a form of easily manageable user profiles;
• showing you the results of e-mail marketing campaigns;
• showing the sources of revenues and conversions, so that you could know which one of them is more profitable for you;

…and many more. But there are a few things which make Improvely even more reliable:

1.      The ability to automatically detect, block and deter click fraud.

Not all of the click you get from your ads come to you from real users; it often happens that about 17-29% of them are fraudulent, which makes you pay more than you really need to. Because Improvely allows you detecting the source of every click, you’re unlikely to get into trouble. Moreover, you should not even perform every hour monitoring due to the tool’s ability to notify the user about suspicious ad clicks. In the following report you will receive all the necessary information including IP address, location, referral website names, time and date of the fraudulent entry.

2.      Specialized tracking tools for affiliate marketers.

With Improvely you get the detailed reports about which ad campaigns and landing pages bring you the most of the customers. Furthermore, you receive the list of the keywords and links that lead to the subsequent lead or sale on your website. You can also secure yourself from unreliable affiliate managers trying to steal your keywords and potential customers by letting the tool limit the access to the direct links you share with them. Improvely also supports link cloaking feature that enables hiding the link destination from your website visitors and showing only the most appropriate link and the title text instead. What’s more important, the tool can be integrated with any affiliate program supporting tracking pixels or subid parameters including Comission Junction, ClickBank, ShareASale, ClickBooth, Affiliate Future, Affiliate Window, TradeDoubler and many others.

3.      Conversion Rate Optimization tools.

Because Improvely provides you with a detailed information of which campaign source is more reliable in terms of conversion, you can filter those of them that appeared to be inefficient and to concentrate more on those that can drive more revenues to your company. Moreover, with Improvely’s ultimate system of user profile management you can clearly define the most loyal customers and their prevailing demographic data, the places those customers tend to come from, and improve your ad campaigns in such a way that your ads could become appealing for other demographic groups as well. Additionally, you can receive e-mail and audio notifications each time you get a new visitor or sale to your site.

4.      Enterprise and Agency features.

If you do the analytics job for other websites, you can use Improvely to make it for you but under your own domain, so in result you will get personalized reports featuring your company’s name and logo. Also, you can limit the access to your reports for the clients and show only the most relevant information. Thus, you get an opportunity to get the full control of their marketing campaigns. Furthermore, you can enable you team members to access your account under separate login names and passwords which can vary depending on whether you want to grant them a full access or just read-only one. You may also adjust Improvely for sending e-mail notifications to your clients about new conversions on their websites. A very useful feature is represented by the possibility of exporting PPC cost data from Google AdWords as well as reports from Bing Ads to convenient Excel format.

Improvely offers the following plans:

• Freelancer ($29/user/month) – contains the most basic features including:

–          Tracking of 10 000 visits per month

–          Conversion and revenue tracking

–          Click Fraud Protection

–          Built-in Split Testing

–          Export Reports to Excel

–          Affiliate Marketing tools

• Startup ($79/user/month) – includes all the previously mentioned features plus:

–          Tracking of 50 000 visits per month

–          Multiple logins support

• Small Agency ($149/user/month) – includes all the previously mentioned features plus:

–          Tracking of 100 000 visits per month

–          Sub-accounts support

• Large Agency Plan 1 ($299/user/month) – includes all the previously mentioned features plus:

–          Tracking of 250 000 visits per month

–          Unlimited amount of client users

–          White Label Reporting

–          12 Month Data Retention

• Large Agency Plan 2 ($599/user/month) – includes all the previously mentioned features plus:

–          Tracking of 500 000 visits per month

• Large Agency Plan 3 ($899/user/month) – includes all the previously mentioned features plus:

–          Tracking of  1 000 000 visits per month