The e-commerce market is an extremely competitive industry; hence, businesses always aim to follow creative ways to increase their sales and the number of satisfied customers. Online customers not only expect personalization on e-commerce websites but are also willing to share their experience and personal data for a personalized and enhanced shopping experience.
As an e-commerce brand, you may have encountered many visitors that may stay on your website for a few seconds but later bounce away without really making any purchase or leaving any trace. A study by tandfonline in 2011 revealed that It only takes about 0.05 seconds for visitors to decide whether they like your e-commerce site enough to stay or bounce away. The attention span of internet users has only gone down since then.
Today, for almost every major e-commerce brand, a high bounce rate is one of the most common growth killers.
To reduce high bounce rates, among the many digital marketing tactics, e-commerce personalization stands out as a powerful solution. According to a prediction by Gartner, there would be 15% profit boost by 2020 for those who successfully manage personalization in the e-commerce.
In this blog, let us take a closer look at what bounce rate in e-commerce is, reasons why the bounce rate is so high on e-commerce websites, how it affects the e-commerce businesses, and what data personalization techniques can help in reducing the bounce rate.
What is Bounce Rate?
By the definition of Google Analytics “A bounce is a single-page session on your site that is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session.”
The visitors bounce from your website by exiting the tab, entering another URL, clicking the back button, clicking the link for a different website. In the case of the web hosting errors, it can happen due to a session timeout. Current data puts the average bounce rate of ecommerce stores at 45.68%.
To determine your bounce rate, you can use this formula:
A higher bounce rate indicates that your website was unable to convince the visitor to stay and act on your CTA to buy your product.
Why do e-commerce websites experience high bounce rates?
Many reasons can cause a high bounce rate for your e-commerce store. Some of the common reasons are:
- Difficult site navigation
- Not user-friendly website layout
- Very few relevant web pages
- Non-engaging web content
- Not optimized for mobile and other devices
- No compelling CTA on products
- Lengthy load time for landing pages
- Complex UX and UI
- Too many interfering ads and popups
Such poorly optimized websites can cause a high bounce rate on an e-commerce store. Failing to make an impression on the users visiting a product page can make them leave without making a purchase. This means you were unable to convince your visitors about your products. A higher bounce rate on a website can affect and worsen its search engine ranking, hence affecting the e-commerce business overall.
How does personalizing the e-commerce experience help?
Enhancing the e-commerce website for individualized interactions and personalized experience for customers plays a great role in reducing bounce rates. Personalisation can be achieved in several ways. Dynamically browsing the user’s search history for displaying the contents, media, recommending a product, and more based on their cache demographics. To incorporate the personalization techniques in their marketing strategy, e-commerce corporations focus on exclusive factors such as website contents, advanced automation techniques, AI, and analysis techniques.
Furthermore, a study behind ecommerce personalization by Infosys speaks for itself:
- 59% of shoppers say that personalization influences their shopping decisions.
- 31% of customers would like their shopping experience to be more personalized than it actually is.
- 74% of customers feel frustrated when website content is not personalized.
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What are the most effective data-based personalization techniques to reduce bounce rate?
1. Personalized homepage
It is important to start personalization with your homepage. You can build a personalized homepage by dynamically changing its appearance and contents to match the type of visitor to your website.
There are two types of visitors:
New – You need to make your new visitors feel welcomed. They need to get informed and acquainted with your website as fast and efficiently as possible. Complex navigation could potentially drive away new visitors since they’re not familiar with navigating your site. Keep your interface user-friendly enough for new visitors to know where to go next.
Returning – Thank the returning visitors for revisiting your website. They will be thrilled and will feel valued if you recognize them. You can also offer them a reward or coupon as a token of appreciation.
For example, Sprint displays an exclusive offer for their returning visitors.
2. Plan a consistent content strategy
It is recommended for you to experiment with different content strategies to run a successful e-commerce website. But on the other hand, marketing experts also ask you to build and run your website on a consistent content plan. So how can we achieve both of these at the same time? Indeed, you can. Many successful e-commerce websites make use of both of these content strategies to enhance their user experience. If you want your visitors to stay on your page longer, then you need to have an adaptive content strategy and run your website on a content plan that best engages with your type of audience.
For example, Barilliance keeps track of its users location and changes the type of content in action accordingly.
On sunny days, this ecommerce store shows a summer outfit.
But when the weather shifts in the user’s location, the category page image actually changes.
3. Display dynamic content
To run a successful e-commerce store, you need to have a great understanding of every visitor coming to your website. To start with personalization, keep in mind every visitor has a different persona and intentions for visiting. It is highly advised by marketing experts to not display the same content and messages to different types of visitors. Not every visitor can relate to the same displayed content; hence, it will not stir your visitors’ interest. Your content must adapt your visitors’ persona, interests, and likings. For example, to offer a coupon code to a new visitor, you can personalize the CTA text of your popup based on what the visitor is currently browsing.
A great example is how in Zalora dynamically changes the CTA of its discount offers. A visitor browsing men’s t-shirt gets a pop up with a discount offer on men’s shirts too.
Also Read: AI-Powered Real-Time Personalisation: 6 Popular Alternatives to Dynamic Yield
4. Use high-quality images
Images are a useful content tool to grab users’ attention. Image contents are widely used on an e-commerce website to reduce the bounce rate. Many websites use high-quality creatives and photographs as their full screen backgrounds because they have proven to be very useful. You can use high-quality images on your website as background sliders, full screen background, parallax backgrounds and even as inline images next to your CTA buttons.
For example, the online clothing store Olive Ave, uses a variety of highly quality shots to showcase their product.
5. Use Videos Contents to Engage Visitors
Videos don’t just grab user attention, they hold it. According to MistMedia, 88% of visitors stay longer on a website that has a prominent video displayed. Plus, those that stay longer are 64% more likely to make a purchase. Videos contents have so many different forms of persuasion tools such as animated, review, guide, ad, brand aesthetic contents, and more. Many successful e-commerce stores make use of video content on their home screen and add a CTA button next to it.
For example, Lane Bryant has put video showing what the clothes look like while in motion.
6. Exit-intent triggers
When a visitor is about to leave your website, an exit-intent offer can be displayed to create a trigger that can help you seize your visitor’s attention momentarily and stop them from bouncing away. Good customer experience can be boosted by displaying the right kind of content, at the right time to the right type of visitor. The exit-intent trigger content has to be real-time and personalized. Some technologies help you automatically create an exit-intent trigger, such as a limited time discount offer could pop up for a particular visitor right before they leave your e-commerce store. Businesses can also use exit-intent triggers to capture visitor details such as email addresses.
Here’s an example from minimum that focuses on getting leads:
Final Thoughts
A growing bounce rate is one of the many difficulties shared by various e-commerce business owners. It is demotivating to see a potential customer visit your website but then leave without converting into sales. Though, as we mentioned above, there are many reasons for a high bounce rate, the key to overcoming it is to understand your customers’ purposes of visiting your website. This is only when you can create an engaging customer experience through personalization.
Follow these remarkable data personalization tips mentioned above to not only lower your bounce rates but also to enhance your business profits. Dropping of the bounce rate guarantees better customer engagements with your e-commerce stores. These techniques can help your e-commerce business to optimize its platform for the reduced bounce rate.
Do you know more useful personalization methods apart from these techniques? Do tell us in the comments below.
