How to optimize the conversion rate (CRO) of your Shopware-Store?

Conversion rate optimization is an important indicator of success on web for every company with a web presence. After all, the costs that go into marketing and sales should also be profitable. CRO is one of the most important methods in online marketing, because the conversion rate is important for SEO and SEA. 

Unfortunately, the hard truth is that over 78% of businesses with a web presence are dissatisfied with their conversion rate. But do you know the meaning of the term conversion rate?

The conversion rate is the number of visitors who decide to take a direct action on the website ( for example, subscribe to the newsletter, place an order). There is also a formula to calculate this conversion rate correctly. 

(Number of conversions * 100%) / Number of visitors = Conversion Rate

Here, any desired event can be set as a conversion.

If you are connected with Google Analytics you can check how much people are interested on which pages. You can see things like how many people are buying something there too.

Did you already know this formula? 🤓

Now the conversion rate can also be optimized. But how do you do that? And what does conversion rate optimization (CRO) mean anyway? 

CRO means optimizing all customer contact points with the company so that customers perform a specific action. In this context, a goal for the optimization must be defined. If you take a newsletter subscription as the goal, all content that is in contact with the visitors should be optimized. So the visitors subscribe to the newsletter.

Well, in order to optimize the conversion rate, all points of contact between the customer and the company should be analyzed and optimized. Thus, all online marketing measures that should lead to a better conversion rate are referred to as CRO. Examples would be landing page optimizations, SEA campaigns, product pages...

Why is conversion rate optimization important for your store?

Conversion rate optimization helps to improve the website. After all, the analysis shows how visitors move through the website and at which points more problems arise. 

Conversion rate optimization therefore brings the following benefits: 

• Improve the user experience
• Optimize user trust
• You get to know your target group better
• You improve your ROI

Is it possible to make mistakes in CRO?

Yes - Unstructured and haphazard optimization can lead to declining conversions in the worst case. The following mistakes are often made in CRO: 

Too many changes in one go

You made several changes on one page? - Users are leaving your site even faster now? - That is annoying. And now you can't even filter out which specific change it's due to. 

It's best to change only one thing on a page at a time and track page departures.

Optimization without prior analysis or surveys

And no. Optimization based on a comparison with competitor sites does not count as analysis. Even if you sell the same products, you may be targeting different audiences. So it's best to rely solely on the optimization measures mentioned below. 

Visits instead Unique Visits

Visitors are often counted under visits. However, visits also count the same users who access your website more frequently. While Unique Visits counts each page visitor only once. Although this makes little difference in total, "Unique Visits" is the more meaningful metric. 

Tests too short

Yes, the effort for a decent CRO is enormous! Keeping tests small is possible - but does not bring significant success. Only small tests, which also only have a short runtime, cannot produce clear results. 

Use A/B tests in any area. By the way, a result only counts as significant if it exceeds the 95% mark. Everything else could be just random results. By the way, there are also special pages on the web that help you to determine the significance of your A/B tests.. 

Which elements can be used to optimize the conversion rate?

Basically, everything can be optimized for the conversion rate. Below we list a few elements. 

The homepage

It is probably the most important point, which you can and should optimize. After all, the first impression is often decisive, right?

Your homepage is the first impression you give to your visitors. So, examine your homepage for points that might be uncomfortable for your visitors. 

Points for this: 

Can people find your products well and without any trouble?

Are all links and buttons functional?

Is there a "Register" button - if so, is it easy to find?
Would a chatbot be useful? 

The texts on your website 

The design of your site is nice and well....naturally it should be nice to look at. But let's be honest - what good is a beautiful cover without content? - It's like going to a really cool restaurant at a beautiful place where there's nothing to eat..

So your website should also be filled with texts. And best of all, these texts should be easy to read and also relevant to the topic. 

The more relevant and easy to read your texts are, the longer visitors stay on your website. And even if they don't convert afterwards. - The search engines recognize the longer time spent on your website and will favor you in the ranking! 

So now let's look at the points that are relevant to making your content easy to read. First of all, the headline usually catches the visitor's eye. 

Here you should consider the following things: 

• Appealing font, size and color
• Understandable headline
• Headline must not be too long

After that it’s about the body text:

• Relevant content
• The offer is clear
• Clear structure

Do you have a blog?

Use Call To Actions (CTA) in your blog whenever possible. Here you can split test whether the CTA works better in the middle, at the beginning or at the end of the post. 

The CTA

Your Call To Action doesn't work, right? - Try changing the phrasing when optimizing. Shape and color can also make a difference. Just try your way through A/B testing and see what works best 💪

The Landingpage

A landing page exists virtually only for conversion optimization. Through the right design of the landing page, you can already ensure on a purely psychological level that visitors feel addressed by your offer. 

Try to make your landing page as intuitive as possible and perform A/B tests as part of the CRO.

The checkout-process

Often, the reason for bad conversion is a checkout process that is not well-thought-out. If the checkout process is poorly optimized, there are many shopping cart abandonment.

As a rule, they do not visit your store anymore. However, the standard checkout process of Shopware is a good choice. So, if you don't want, to have too much action, just use this one.

In general, there is a lot to say about shopping cart abandonment. Avoiding them is of course important for your Shopware store. - Learn everything you need to know about it here.

Your prices

Don't worry. We don't mean you should recalculate your prices from scratch. 

If many of your site visitors break off on the price page, however, you need to think a bit, because then something is not right here. 

1. Try to better convince your visitors about the price on the page. 
2. Test whether visitors prefer a monthly or yearly counting method. You can then visually highlight the preferred payment method. 
3. Try to highlight the most important content of your products more clearly. 
4. Does your customer need help? - Place a chatbot, service number, or service email clearly visible. 

Embedded forms

Do you have forms on your website? - Then you should optimize them as well. 

Basically you can say: 

1. The fewer questions, the better the conversion rate. 
2. Visitors prefer to answer important questions first, then unimportant ones.

But of course, as part of your optimization efforts, you can also test the forms split and see what works better for your visitors. 

The page structure and navigation as well as product-pages

This point is super important for the user experience. And therefore also for the conversion rate. 

Usually, a user can click through a well-optimized website without having to think about anything. 

The process is as follows: from the homepage to the product page and from there to the subcategories. Look closely at if and where your users are bouncing to optimize your critical page structure. 

By the way, a simple and clear page structure is very important not only for your user experience, but also for search engines. 

Be sure that all your product pages can be funded easily. Like here in the shopware store of Philips.

Load times

Slow loading times affect the user experience, conversion rate and search engine ranking. Therefore, it is important to regularly check and optimize loading times.

Two measures for conversion rate optimization

There is no exact instruction for the implementation of a conversion rate optimization. Mostly, a colorful mix of many measures is carried out to achieve the desired goal. 

Below you will find two measures. 

Qualitative

In this method, you do not focus on the numbers, but on the psychological realities. For example, use surveys to collect data. Ask quality questions such as "Why do you use this website?" Or "Which areas on this website do you like the most?". By asking such questions you will also get high quality answers and can build on them.

Analytical

To find out which areas need to be optimized for your success, you should first analyze. Analyze how visitors behave on your site. This will help you answer a lot of questions, such as at which point visitors usually leave the page, where they spend a lot of time, or how they get to your website in the first place.

So analyze all the data you can find. Which page gets the best traffic? - This is where improvements can have the best effect. 

If you have the possibility, you should combine both variants at best. This way you will get the best results and the highest ROI. 

What other factors can increase the conversion rate of your shopware store? 

By the way, there are other factors, besides the normal optimization, that can increase your conversion rate. You might want to keep an eye on these factors as well, but at least it doesn't hurt to know them.

• Your corporate identity in connection with the brand story
• neuromarketing (uniform color scheme)
• Use trust-building measures like seals of approval, FAQ`s & reviews.

So there are many ways to optimize the conversion rate. Basically, there is nothing particularly difficult about it, but it is very time-consuming. We hope this article could help you and wish you much success in optimizing your store. 🤓