How to Increase Conversion Rate: Focus on the User Journey

Creating a seamless and personalized user journey is no longer a “nice-to-have,” it’s a critical component when it comes to ecommerce conversion rate optimization.

Ecommerce sites with strong customer journeys are more likely to attract long-term customers, elevate the brand, lead to increased conversions, and motivate visitors to share their positive experiences via social media accounts.

In this article, we’ll cover some of the most common ways to optimize user journeys so that future customers and returning customers will likely look forward to visiting your site, routinely add items to their shopping carts, and potentially click the button to purchase your products or services.

We’ll also take a look at how Ping can help you boost conversion rates by implementing solutions like PingDirectory, PingOne for Customers, and our passwordless authentication technology on the backend.

If you operate an ecommerce website and want to increase your conversion rate across all your customer touchpoints, your user journeys must be personalized, automated, and clearly solve a business problem or meet a personal need.

At the most basic level, you must provide visitors with an enticing look and feel, pages that load quickly, distinct calls to action, and an easy checkout process. Whether your goal is to get visitors to download a white paper, view a promotional video, or purchase a product or service, user journeys must be built with conversion in mind.

The goal is to provide a consistent, easy-to-use, automated, and personal customer experience on all digital interfaces – website, mobile site, and app – so visitors automatically go from “window shopping” to conversion.

Design

Users expect designs that are mobile-friendly. Keep the design simple to accommodate the growing number of users who shop via mobile and smart devices.

Speed

Make sure your site has quick-loading pages. Users will abandon websites that take forever to load. Optimize your site for speed by compressing images, caching pages, and reducing use of heavy scripts.

Call to Action

Use clear CTAs. Users want to know where to click and why. They expect buttons such as 'Add to Cart' or 'Buy Now' to be clearly visible and easy to understand. Experiment with the color, size, and position of these buttons to see which ones generate the most conversions.

Checkout Process

Streamline checkout. Users want to complete the checkout process with a minimum number of steps. Keeping checkout simple is a critical factor in reducing cart abandonment. Providing a guest checkout option is also beneficial as it removes the barrier of mandatory registration. To capture their information, however, you can offer customers another opportunity to register toward the end of the checkout process.

Intuitive design, speedy page loading, clear CTAs, and seamless checkouts are absolute must-haves if you want to increase customer conversions and increase revenue. But if your registration is overly complex, sign-ons are inconvenient, or other processes are confusing for the user, they’ll most likely go elsewhere and not come back. 

Passwordless sign-in is another way businesses can improve their conversion rates. When customers don’t have to enter a password to buy your products or services, the hassle of remembering a password is no longer a barrier.

To illustrate what an optimal user journey may look like to a potential customer, we’d like you to meet Camille, a shopper on a popular ecommerce website. 

• Camille spent her entire lunch hour viewing products on the site because it was thoughtfully designed, the pages loaded quickly, and it was easy to use. 

  • When lunch was over, Camille went to close the page, but she first spotted a clear and obvious CTA inviting her to create an account. 

  • Clear instructions told her that doing so would store her browsing history and save items she added to the cart. 

  • It looked easy enough to do quickly, so she took a few extra seconds to register. 

• The next day, Camille rode the train to work and decided to visit the same site again so she could keep shopping. 

  • She brought up the company’s mobile website on her phone’s browser, signed into her new account with the ease of passwordless sign-in, and spent her entire train ride adding items to her cart. 

  • As her train pulled into the station, she noticed another clear and obvious CTA that prompted her to enter her phone number to receive a link to download the company’s app. 

  • She quickly entered her phone number and immediately received a text with the  link. She made a mental note to download the app during her lunch hour. 

• At lunchtime, Camille downloaded the app and used passwordless sign-in to access her account. 

  • She was greeted with several “you may also like” choices based on her browsing history from the last few days, so she added a few of these items to her cart and started the checkout process. 

  • Before she could finish, she was interrupted and had to close the app. 

• When Camille opened the app again that evening, she was delighted to see that she could pick up right where she left off in the checkout process. She reviewed the contents of her cart and quickly completed her transaction.
  
  

Camille is just one of the many potential customers who have converted to active customer status based on a stellar user journey –  the design was inviting and easy to use, the pages loaded quickly, the calls to action were obvious and clear, the sign-in process was passwordless, and the checkout experience was just a few steps. 

She was so pleased with her experiences on the website, mobile website, and app that she immediately shared the website on her social media channels and texted her friends the link to download the app. 

Camille’s personalized, automated, and integrated digital experience was possible because the ecommerce company collected her data across all digital touchpoints, stored it in one unified directory, and managed it with customer identity and access management software. They were able to track and manage her identity at every stage in her user journey, which provided them with a well-developed customer profile that allowed them to customize her experience and get her to conversion quickly. 

To top it off, she shared her positive user experience by word of mouth – and that kind of free advertising is always welcome. 

We have solutions that can help you hone your digital experiences (app, website, and other channels) to provide an optimal user journey that leads to more conversions. Our directory and customer identity and access management solutions are integrated and scalable so that your customer never has a subpar experience, even during peak times.

PingDirectory

PingDirectory software can handle millions of entries with sub-millisecond latency and extremely high availability, which is critical for environments where seconds and minutes matter – like customer conversions, for example. It acts as a source of truth for customer identities so that your customers’ data is aligned across all digital touchpoints. And it’s legacy compatible, so after deploying your directory from Ping, you can migrate or sync your data.

Ping’s directory solution can consolidate, categorize, and streamline your customer data to give customers a customized unified experience so they are more likely to purchase your products or services.

PingOne for Customers (CIAM)

PingOne for Customers is our customer identity and access management solution. It combines no-code identity orchestration with authentication, user management, and multi-factor authentication. It offers simple registration, consistent sign-ons, and tailored interactions across all your customer interaction points.

PingOne for Customers can simplify and strengthen your visitors’ user journey and deliver an optimal customer experience, which may lead to increased customer conversions.

Passwordless

Passwords are becoming outdated. Strong-password policies and password managers are no longer the best solutions. Users get frustrated if they constantly forget their password and have to stop and reset their credentials. And when it comes to security, standard passwords are no match for hackers, who have multiple tools at their disposal to easily crack them.

Passwordless is no longer a futuristic technology or something reserved for only the most sophisticated and deep-pocketed enterprises. Advances in technology make passwordless available for a wide variety of use cases and requirements.

Ping’s passwordless solution can help you deliver frictionless and secure experiences for your customers, which may help increase your conversion rates.