How Personalization Can Reduce E-commerce Bounce Rates

How Personalization Can Reduce Ecommerce Bounce Rates

Every day, an e-commerce store dies at the hands of a high bounce rate. And if consumers were buying their product, e-commerce stores wouldn’t break. A visitor lands on your website and then immediately clicks the exit button because if consumers are leaving, they ultimately aren’t buying. It only takes about 0.05 seconds for visitors to decide whether they like your e-commerce site enough to stay or bounce away.

Given that the bounce rate is a common phenomenon, e-commerce stores have leveled up their engagement by grabbing their visitors’ attention from the moment they enter their site.

So What Is Bounce Rate? Let’s Understand

A bounce rate is the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) determined by various e-commerce analytics tools like Google Analytics. The bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your website after visiting only a single page. Your bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who navigate away from your website after viewing only one page.

A high bounce rate signals that there’s something off-putting on your site. It could also tell you that you might be attracting the wrong audience to your site. This directly impacts your conversion rate.

Here are some events that count as a bounce on your website:

  • The user clicks the back button after viewing a single page.
  • The user exits their browser after viewing a single page.
  • The user clicks to another website that takes them elsewhere after viewing only a single page on your site.

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Reasons Why Are Your Visitors Bouncing Back and Causing a High Bounce Rate?

Two primary reasons bounce rate hurts e-commerce stores are as follows.

First and most detrimental, a bounce means that someone didn’t make a purchase, and second, the higher the percentage of visitors who bounce on your website, the worse your rankings are. When people leave after viewing only a single page, Google takes note and demotes your domain authority.

A rising bounce rate is an obvious sign that your site has off-putting elements or underlying issues that you need to address. A bounce is triggered by several reasons and situations.

Though there may be many reasons for the elevated bounce rates in e-commerce, below is a list of the common ones:

  • Poor website layout
  • Uncertain and unfriendly site navigation 
  • Ill-favored and non-engaging web content such as Product or Banner Images, Text Audio, and Video
  • Only a few relevant pages on the website
  • No Effective Call-to-Action on product landing pages 
  • Not optimized for mobile devices or other devices other than desktop
  • Confusing UX and UI No trust symbols used in the website
  • High page load time of the landing pages
  • Too many intrusive ads or popups intervening with the user experience

Measures To Reduce The High Bounce Rate

It principally falls to the following implications: 

The quality of the website: If your site is unpleasant, uninviting, and technically flawed, it drives visitors to leave. These include slow loading pages, broken links, poor design, poor navigation, low-quality content, etc.

The visitor’s intent: If the site’s purpose and what visitors are searching for do not match, they are driven away to seek other content. This also reveals hidden problems like possible bad backlinks from referral sites and misleading headlines.

The completion of a goal: If visitors have already obtained the information they need from other sites.

Measuring the bounce rate is essential for any website, but measuring it right is more important. Now we’ll discuss exactly what you can do to improve your bounce rate, save sales, and build customer relationships.

Optimize Your Product Page

optimized-product-pages

The product page is one of your most valuable assets. Your product pages are designed as a sales pitch model to tell your visitors more about your products, their benefits and features, and why they’re worth it to buy. Thus, personalizing your product pages is an essential part of e-commerce personalization. It’s the final barrier between a prospect and a customer.

Prospective Users browse through reviews, deciding that marketers often play far too little of a part. Showing what other people bought alongside the product they’re currently viewing can also help you optimize your product page. 

Optimizing it for SEO is equally important, especially if any visitors are coming from search engines. One of the best ways you can enhance your store’s SEO is by using rich snippets. When people see the price, availability, rating, and number of reviews on a product they want to purchase, most can decide whether to visit the store or not. Automatically, this will improve your bounce rate.

Often, it’s the product page on your website that makes or breaks the sale. If you want to lower your bounce rate, you need to keep your product page clean, include reviews, post a prominent  CTA, and write compelling copy.

Segment Your Email List 

win-back-email-netflix

The more segmented your list of prospects, the more personalized the buying experience will be. Each prospect receives what feels like personal recommendations. Keep in mind, the concept of personalization doesn’t just apply to email lists. It also applies to website copy, live chat and messaging, and even customer service software.

Personalizing through list segmentation makes a huge difference. But why? Why are people less likely to bounce on your website with a segmented email list? Because you’re only sending relevant emails which are of interest to them.

So the more segmented your email list is, the better.

Exit Intent Triggers

deploy exit intent popups

An exit-intent pop-up can be displayed when a visitor is about to click the exit button. This can help you grab your visitor’s attention and momentarily stop them from bouncing away. Timing when and what offers should be displayed is a good customer experience booster because it’s real-time and personalized. An exit-intent overlay is a popup that comes to the forefront of the screen when someone tries to leave your website.

Use exit-intent pop-ups to get some of their attention if they’re leaving without purchasing. Add some flair to your exit-intent popup by offering something unique to the person who’s trying to leave your website.

Streamline The Shopping Experience

You’d think this is ordinary wisdom, but you’ll be surprised how many e-commerce stores unintentionally make the shopping experience difficult for visitors or shoppers. 

A study has shown that 11% of cart abandonment happens because shoppers see the checkout process as too complicated. According to this chart from the Sales Cycle, some flair industries experience cart abandonment as high as 83.6%. Providing a smooth user experience is the key to conversion.

Leverage Personalized SMS Marketing

Discounts via SMS for Cart Recovery

An average person will check their smartphone up to 85 times every day. That means up to 5 cumulative hours of checking notifications, browsing the apps, and communicating. Does this number imply a fair chance for personalized SMS marketing?

A comprehensive marketing study revealed that most e-commerce consumers worldwide prefer messaging as the mode of communication if they want to connect with a business or be contacted by it. In India, a staggering 34 percent of the consumers voted for messaging (SMS, WhatsApp, etc.) as their top preference for customer support and business communication.

Personalized SMS Marketing Use Cases for E-commerce Brands

An SMS marketing campaign can yield the following benefits for an e-commerce business vis-a-via ROI;

Reduce Digital Cart Abandonment Rate

SMS Nudge Automation

Digital cart abandonment is a problem that plagues almost every business in the e-commerce domain. A majority of your online visitors will fill up their carts with products of interest. But, in the last phase of the online journey, they’ll leave those products at the checkout without purchasing them. This will occur 7 out of 10 times on average. 

However, personalized SMS marketing automation can effectively address this problem. For instance, our tool Wigzo allows digital cart recovery via a single WhatsApp link. Wigzo’s industry-first WhatsApp cart recovery solution will send a personalized message over the visitor’s WhatsApp contact by setting the conditions for the event and the trigger. This message will have the link to take the prospect visitor straight to the checkout page with originally added products in the cart. For an audience that prefers the SMS route, the same works effectively.

Capture Anonymous Customer Contact

sms-opt-in-subway

This is a great route for the quick and seamless onboarding of anonymous visitors on your e-commerce site. SMS allows quick contact exchange along with the opt-in consent of the user. E.g., Wigzo’s Magic Links allows a link to be placed on your e-commerce business’ online assets (App, website, social media, etc.). Once users click on it, they are presented with a custom pre-populated message on their text-messaging app. Once they send it, you’ll be able to capture their contact and analyze their purchase intent (based on the type of campaign you are running). 

The bottom line is that SMS is a hassle-free route to discover and onboard your anonymous online visitors. 

Testing, Feedback & Reviews

E-commerce brands with excellent user experience & feedback enjoy a highly loyal customer base. This might sound intense considering the resources and campaigns to be created for feedback and review surveys. Here, the SMS marketing automation route comes in to spare your marketing team a great deal of effort. Personalized SMS marketing automation allows for custom questionnaires, opt-in surveys, promoting test offers/deals, getting developmental feedback on a product/service, and much more. 

Essential Tips For Your e-commerce Store For a Smooth User Experience:

  • Optimize your e-commerce checkout experience so that the customers do not abandon the carts. Show the trust signal to gain trust from a potential customer.
  • Translate your website content for international visitors.
  • Improve the navigation speed between different pages.
  • Write fresh content and Improve content readability.
  • Use the keywords that get high volume traffic.
  • Make your website cross-platform compatible.
  • Invest in a great UI and UX.
  • Make sure your website supports mobile devices.
  • Optimize the CTA button in the right place.

What’s a Reasonable E-commerce Bounce Rate Benchmark For Your Website?

The truth about an “acceptable” bounce rate is it’s always contextual and subjective. There are many areas of a factor such as industry, products, competition, etc. Each e-commerce website has different objectives and goals, so what may be acceptable may not apply to another. But, if you are looking for industry benchmarks, bounce rates generally fall between 46% – 65%.

Well, according to the latest data, somewhere between 30% and 55% is acceptable.

But, in reality, an acceptable bounce rate depends heavily upon what kind of page people are landing on.

To determine your bounce rate, you can use this formula:

Keep in mind that bounce rates of more than 50% can negatively impact your conversion rates. Your result should be a sale, and if that’s not as expected, it’s time to analyze why.

After reading about e-commerce and its personalization time and again, you must also be eager to learn what e-commerce personalization really is and how it can lower your bounce rate.

What Does E-commerce Personalization Mean?

The term e-commerce Personalization refers to the process of dynamically displaying tailored fit messages and customized experiences to each user that lands up on your website. This process is done by using and analyzing personal data like demographics, buying behavior, and browsing history to uncover patterns relevant to visitors.

Benefits of E-commerce Personalization

Here are some of the advantages that you can enjoy:

  • Better conversions
  • Increased sales
  • Improved loyalty

How Can Personalization Reduce Bounce Rate?

Increase Sales By Increasing Conversion

Personalization can help to improve conversions by presenting the information. Adopting a focused approach customized to their behavior and promoting a particular product will help their successful transactions.

Increased Engagement

According to a study, almost 60% of customers prefer it if an online store remembers their contact details and purchase information. The increased engagement directly adds to the company’s bottom line and saves you marketing costs to increase customer engagement.

Improve Customer Experience

e-commerce personalization helps build a long-term relationship with customers through customized landing pages, targeted ads, and automated email, allowing flair users to find a specific product that appeals to their needs. This also benefits businesses by improving customer satisfaction and the lifetime value associated with each customer.

Improve Customer Loyalty

The Exact Target and Forrester Consulting found that 84% of marketers believe personalization positively impacts customer retention and loyalty. For most allowing businesses flair, brand loyal customers are their biggest influencers and brand advocates who purchase the products themselves and recommend them to others.

Incorporate a Live Chat

In e-commerce personalization, real-time customer interaction and customer service like live chat are also vital. The primary purpose of a live chat is to help visitors with their questions in real-time without email or call.

Targeted Cart Recommendations

Suggesting relevant items on the cart page can help you increase your average order value. You can do this by applying upselling and cross-selling strategies. The shopping cart is an excellent touchpoint to upsell and cross-sell more products using the visitor’s browsing activity and cart items.

Display Dynamic Content & Messaging

Every traffic coming into your site has different motivations and goals for visiting. It’s a big no-no to display the same type of content for different kinds of traffic. If you do this, you are not stirring your visitors’ interest because they cannot relate to your content. A successful e-commerce personalization starts with a great understanding of your visitors. Your content and messaging must adapt to your visitors’ persona, intentions, interests, and likings. For instance, if you want to offer a coupon code to a visitor, you can personalize the copy or call-to-action of your popup coupon based on what the visitor is currently browsing.

Conclusion 

Remember that you’re building a relationship before you ever make a sale. If a consumer doesn’t trust you, they won’t buy from you. In the end, you should probably spend more time measuring and working on lowering your customer bounce rate than you do almost any other part of the website.

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Zaujan Baig

Zaujan Baig

Experienced digital marketer, currently working as an SEO specialist at Wigzo Technologies. In his free time, you can find him drawing cartoons.

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