Online stores have been tremendously flourishing in the post-covid world, but how many of you know if you’re doing it all right? Are you also a new online business owner fresh into the field? How familiar are you with the E-commerce CRO Audit and how it can benefit your online store? Before using a business technique it is definitely important that you are aware of its functioning and benefits. That is exactly what we are going to guide you through in this article.
When you start an online store and are trying to understand the way business works for you, growth is of course one of your prime motives. It is not just the diligent hard work that matters but also how efficiently you use techniques to grow. This is also what will make your online business stand out from the rest. Let us dwell right into the topic and make sure you know everything necessary for your business growth.
What Is E-Commerce CRO Audit?
CRO or Conversion Rate Optimisation is one of the most important things that empower the growth of businesses no matter what industry they are under. A strategy that enhances the assurance of succeeding in your respective field can be achieved by conducting a well-formed CRO audit. For conducting this audit, it is required to gain the knowledge of how exactly visitors navigate to find your online store and how do they experience it.
When you hire a conversion agency, they help you bring out all the possible ways to pinpoint bigger issues that exist on your website, which might be restricting traction. Performing this audit is essential because it helps you find the problem and eradicate or rectify the mistakes. Your online store might look satisfying from your eyes, but its growth completely depends on the customers viewing your site. If your store design or other functions do not satisfy your customers and fail in giving them a pleasant experience, your reach will eventually drop.
Therefore, a conversion audit is done to sweep up your website thoroughly, without leaving anything to find blind spots. This will help you identify technical and/or usability issues that can be rectified from your end. Focusing on the end-to-end customer experience is the priority here and that is exactly what the e-commerce CRO audit delivers.
Why Is It Necessary For Your Online Store?
It is quite evident from its definition of why this audit is necessary for your online business, but let us break it down here. If you need to follow the ecommerce conversion rate optimisation process, which yields splendid growth for your online business. Conducting the audit will obviously not give you an immediate rise in conversions, but it will help pinpoint any issues.
Knowing your weak points in your business is necessary because you can focus more on those areas. The areas of latent problems have the potential to affect your sales, therefore, you can give your attention where it’s required to rectify the issue. Doing so will gradually bring up your sales as well as an increase in your audience interaction. When you conduct an e-commerce CRO audit, what is most focused is on the data of your business.
The focus stays on all the data you have of your business because that is plain evidence of how your customers have found you, through which medium, and their experience. When we talk about customer experience here, it includes their journey to finding your website, how easily they could operate it, and how helpful they found it. All this can be acquired from the data containing information about your online store.
The key here is to prioritise areas on which you need to work on. While conducting the audit, the conversion agency will collect the data required to understand what areas to focus on. This way you will be able to reorganise your work plan and can focus less on the areas that are already doing well. Once you start troubleshooting the problems, your online store will start running smoother and gaining more reach which will enhance sales. Whatever you find as a problem from the audit, can also be eliminated given that it’s not extremely necessary for the website. If this is diligently done, you will soon see an improved rise in conversion rates because of the improved customer experience.
What Does The CRO Strategy Include?
While doing the audit, it is also important that you are aware and are ready with a solid CRO strategy for your brand. You need to be thorough and sure of the goal of your brand, be it big or small. The customers want to see what you have to offer; therefore, you should be ready to illustrate your plan of action for your store and what you have to put forward.
This will let the users of your website know that you have something authentic to provide them and you are also easily accessible. This will help your brand to gain their trust. So what form can you put this out to your customer? The following are some of the ways;
- E-Books
- Brochures
- Catalogue
- Brand Bible
- Any downloadable material that explains your brand and products.
You may use any of the adobe or any other option which you feel fits the kind of your business the best. It is essential to keep in mind that whatever option you choose, shouldn’t further burden your work or increase difficulty. These options should be able to easily direct your customers to you and make yourself more accessible and useful to them.
Steps To Completing The Conversion Audit
To find out the main component that could be sabotaging your online business, the CRO audit should be well performed on the data you have. If you are unaware of how exactly the audit is done, the following are the few main steps explained in short;
Define Objectives
The first step is to clearly define your objectives. You need to be well aware of what exactly are your goals to achieve through this process. These objectives may include; increasing the average order value and reducing abandonment of your shopping cart. IT can also include improving the conversion rate to purchase. These are the most common objectives, but they could vary according to the type of your business.
Define Target Audience
In the next step, you should be able to define your target audience. You need to be able to point out what kinds of people you are targeting with the nature of your products. What kind of people will be able to benefit from your products? This is important because according to this you will be able to point out the issues on your online store.
Conduct Quantitative Research
Step three would be conducting quantitative research. Doing the e-commerce CRO audit requires a lot of advanced and professional research. This is where conversion agencies step in. This step is vital to find out the areas that need your most attention. Through this process you will also be introduced to two things as follows; optimisation areas and baseline metrics. They help in paving a way to guide the customers to reach the landing page of your website.
Conduct Qualitative Research
Apart from quantitative research, qualitative research is also necessary to be done during the process. This includes collecting all the data collected from cataloging session recordings, user surveys, etc. Data you have gathered might show you where you are losing customers but qualitative research will show you why it happens.
Test Hypotheses
After following these steps thoroughly, what is important is to develop test hypotheses. Doing this will help you identify patterns and trends developed from user behavior on your website. This way, you will know where it happens and why it happens and how often it happens. Studying this will help you eliminate the problem and work on your drawbacks.
You are now well informed about the e-commerce CRO audit and you know how it works and how it can help you. But one of the main tasks you need to focus on initially is on finding the right conversion agency for the task. Your online business, be it big or small, is something you are giving your everything to grow. Therefore, to Shopify CRO the right way you need a reliable agency to do the work for you. Click here to check out one of our top recommendations when it comes to handling CRO auditing for online business owners. Choose wisely and watch your online business grow to its deserved glory!
