10+ Ways to Increase Website Conversions [+Examples]

You know what they say about a website conversion rate—

You're never really done optimizing it.

That applies to both new and websites generating good revenue.

In this post, you'll find proven ways to increase website conversion rate to keep it above the average 2%. Whether you're running a new store or have one gaining traction, you'll find a helpful strategy to apply even today, without extra costs.

Get started:

• Factors that define website conversions

• Strategies and tips to increase your website's conversion rate

What defines a website's conversion rate

These important factors ensure that an ecommerce website is fast, user-friendly, provides a positive shopping experience and covers most conversion opportunities.

How to increase website conversions

• Share contextual discounts

• Engage visitors with personalized notifications

• Use AI to generate product recommendations

• Try gamification campaigns

• Add upsell and cross-sell offers

• Find failure points in the customer journey

• Implement a product quiz

• Add trust signals in strategic places

• Recover carts with multiple channels

• Check your competitors

• Collect customer feedback

Share contextual discounts

You're probably using discounts in your online store, but you can improve their effectiveness by making them more contextual and personalized.

Examples:

• Welcome discounts only for first-time customers

• Special discounts for returning visitors (repeat visitors who did not make a purchase)

• Discounts for visitors who viewed two items in the "shoes" category

• Discounts for shoppers whose cart value exceeds $50

• Discounts for customers who bought within the last 30 days

This website conversion strategy in action

Blume, a skincare store, gives a 20% off to new customers in this campaign.

They use a popup to improve the visibility of the discount and convert 5% of visitors:

Next—

Codage Paris offers a personalized deal for returning visitors:

And—

Oddballs gave an extra 10% off to reward repeat customers:

To implement this strategy to increase website conversion rate, use display rules options in your marketing software. They help deliver the right personalized message at the right time by determining who sees your discounts and when.

If you're using a marketing platform like Wisepops, use Shopify campaign properties to ensure that the discount will appear only to the intended shoppers. For example, here are the settings for a popup campaign for VIP customers who haven't purchased in 30 days or more:

If you want to give this strategy a shot, use our popup builder (rated 4.9 on Shopify) for free. Connect your store to access the properties.

Follow these steps to make a discount popup with a personalized offer:

Free trial with premium features, no cc needed

Engage visitors with personalized notifications

Shopping experiences can be a bit unappealing because they're mostly static. If you feel like that could be an issue on your website, you can make the shopping experience more interactive with onsite notifications.

Think of onsite notifications as a personal inbox on websites.

It's added to a website header and appears as a bell, which, if clicked (only if clicked—notifications are non-intrusive), shows a feed with messages like this:

One helpful thing about onsite notifications is the built-in targeting (history of previous visits, pages visited, cart content, UTM parameters, and more). That means you can create different notifications to cover many points in your customer journey, without being intrusive.

Here are some stats on onsite notifications:

• They reach between 5 and 15% of visitors

• Out of all visitors who buy, up to 42% view the feed

• Notifications contribute 8% of revenue for Shopify websites

• Visitors who view onsite notifications generate 3.5 more conversions than those who don't

This website conversion strategy in action

OddBalls, a British clothing brand, used onsite notifications to increase conversions and sales. By sharing discounts through this channel, OddBalls generated over $50,000 in revenue.

Use AI to generate product recommendations

You might be using a recommendation tool already to display related items on product pages. Many such tools, however, are traditional (eg rule-based), meaning they don't use real-time data to give highly personalized suggestions.

That's why 85% of customers aren't satisfied with their shopping experiences and 50% even want real-time suggestions. AI can help with that—AI algorithms continuously learn, so they adapt recommendations for every visitor even on the go.

Apps like Wisepops AI Wishlist, Bloomreach, and Dynamic Yield are some of the best to check out. But here's the list of product recommendation software with reviews and more info.

This website conversion strategy in action

émoi émoi, a clothing store, uses AI Wishlist to generate lists of viewed items for visitors. This AI product recommendation app is efficiently housed within the onsite notification feed (the top message opens the recommendations):

The AI algorithm uses data sources like browsing activity, visitor profile, and sales performance to list viewed items in order of likelihood to be bought by each visitor:

In just 30 days, AI Wishlist generated a 9.3% visitor engagement rate and 11.4% order rate from recommendation clicks.

Try gamification campaigns

Interactivity and gamification are two website conversion rate strategies that can improve customer satisfaction with shopping and make your brand more memorable. Even a basic spin-to-win campaign can boost conversions by up to 11 times.

There are a few simple ways to gamify shopping:

• Spin-to-win wheels (for generating leads and sales by giving incentives)

• Product giveaways (to promote new products and increase average order value)

• Holiday contests (to increase sales during special days)

This website conversion strategy in action

Faguo, a fashion store, needed to accelerate lead generation and sales. So, they activated a spin-to-win wheel on the website, which generated 5,000 new leads monthly:

The average CTR of the campaign was 15%, which is 11% higher than the average lead generation popup CTR:

One more CRO example:

Soi Paris, another clothing store, ran an Easter Egg Hunt. Visitors needed to search for "eggs" (specifically egg-shaped popups) that offered discounts valid exclusively for that weekend.

The "eggs" were placed on product pages to encourage website and product exploration:

Soi Paris was able to boost website conversions, as 233 customers redeemed discounts on that weekend.

Learn more: Soi Paris Easter egg hunt campaign

“We are really satisfied with the results of this campaign, it exceeded our expectations. In three days, it helped generate 42% of our revenue (month to date) with a nice average order value. We also received a lot of positive feedback from our customers. They really enjoyed our egg hunt!”

Elodie Trebuchet, Director of Digital Marketing, Soi Paris

If you're curious about how this campaign was put together, you might be surprised at how easy it was. As long as you have some nice graphics ready, we managed to set up the same campaign in about five minutes:

More: How to create a gamified popup campaign

Add upsell and cross-sell offers

Upselling and cross-selling your products is one of the best ways to increase conversions on your website. You can show pre-made offers to your visitors both before and after visitors add something to the cart.

To begin:

• review your inventory and sale history to find the best products to pair

• create bundles of two or more products at a discounted price

• find high-end product versions that can be promoted naturally

• create campaigns to share them on your store.

This website conversion strategy in action

There are many ways to implement upsell and cross-sell, including a dedicated app (here are options from Shopify App Store), embedded forms, and popups.

émoi émoi, for example, embedded a form into specific product pages (earrings) to promote a related product (a gift box for earrings) like this:

Also—

Black Ember uses a popup campaign that appears when a customer adds a product to the cart. Note that adding the bundle to the cart is possible in one click:

Find potential failure point(s) in your customer journey

Customer journey is the steps your customers take to interact with your brand, from initial contact to purchase and beyond. If there are some problems on the way, they will walk away.

Consider these tips:

• Analyze your purchase funnel. Assuming you have Google Analytics 4, check the pages your visitors leave (go to Find leaks in your funnel section in our website conversion funnel guide for an example of how to do it inside GA4)

• Check pages with most drop-offs. Look for potential UX issues, navigation problems, page layout, content quality and relevance issues, etc.—maybe give that page to another person to have a fresh look

• Evaluate incentives to buy. Maybe just free shipping won't do the trick. Consider coupling it with or changing it to a 10% discount, for example

• Check if your marketing is consistent. Say, if a paid ad promised the best deal that turned out to be a 10% discount or out-of-stock product, something must be done. Besides promises, this tip also applies to the design and tone you use

This website conversion strategy in action

Stumptown Coffee Roasters needed to encourage product exploration. They added a popup to their homepage with links to important pages to help explore the site. This campaign appeared only to those who spent over 20 seconds on the page, indicating that they needed help:

Implement product quiz

If your online store gets visitors, then helping them choose the best product for them with a quiz could increase your website conversions. About 19% of Shopify websites have quizzes, making it the third most popular website personalization strategy on the platform.

Examples of product quizzes:

• Find your perfect routine (Blume)

• Find your mouthpiece match (Syos)

• What type of beardsman are you? (Beardbrand)

This website conversion strategy in action

Implementing this website conversion strategy requires several things: a quiz app, content, and promotion on your store.

There are many quiz software available (you can find great free and paid options in this email list building tools list). They'll help you create a quiz in a matter of hours. Check the examples of quizzes above to understand what kind of questions and images you'll need.

And lastly, promote your product quiz strategically. That means adding the link to the store main menu and promoting it with channels like banners, sticky bars, popups, and live chat.

Syos does that with popups that appear only on product pages:

And Manduka does the same with live chat:

Helpful resources:

Find reliable live chat apps and best popup software to promote your quiz.

Add trust signals strategically

Social proof is a major way to increase website conversions: customers who read reviews convert 120.3% more than those who don't. One thing to know about customer reviews is that you can make them more visible by adding them strategically.

This website conversion strategy in action

WP Standard has social proof element on the checkout page—see the lower right corner of the page below. It mentions three important things: easy returns, a customer quote, and product quality comment:

Here's a closer look:

Recover carts with multiple channels

Cart abandonment is something every online store has to deal with. Most ecommerce businesses send cart recovery emails but they aren't the only game in town.

If you'd like to increase the abandoned cart recovery rate, experiment with more channels. The idea is not to bombard cart abandoners with every channel possible, but try to see what works and focus on it.

Consider these channels:

• Cart abandonment popup. An exit popup that either reminds visitors about the cart or gives a discount when they try to leave checkout or cart pages

• Onsite notifications. They can also show a reminder on pre-determined rules (say, if a visitor adds a product to the cart but then goes on to view five more products)

• Push notifications. Perfect for engaging customers outside the website and bringing them back

• Automated email workflow. They drive an average revenue-per-email of $3.65 and are a must-do for every online store

This website conversion strategy in action

Delightly uses this exit intent campaign below to stop visitors before they leave. It's a very nicely designed campaign, which also includes an extra discount:

See how to create a cart abandonment popup (with examples from businesses like TOMS, Dolce & Gabbana, and Prada).

Next—

Ferro & Company showed this notification to the visitors who had items in the cart but then went to other products. It also has a small discount:

Next—

Beau Domaine sends this push notification, which also includes a small image of the abandoned item:

And of course, emails.

Here's an example of a typical cart abandonment message:

If you'd like to try exit campaigns to stop cart abandonment, watch this 5-min tutorial below.

Our ecommerce marketing expert Lisa Fockens will show you how to make a campaign in a way to protects your profits:

Check your competitors

Check out your close competitors to see what they're offering, at what price, and what content they have. It might spark an idea, or you might find that you're already doing great. Either way, it's worth a look.

For example, you can check out:

• CTAs

• checkout page design

• order shipping options

• product page content (images, videos, descriptions)

• places where they added customer reviews, both star ratings and videos

If you'd like some recommendations:

Here are 30 top Shopify stores to check out, along with their revenue estimations.

Also, consider these Shopify success stories for growth tips from founders.

Collect customer feedback

Collecting feedback from customers is one of the best ways to find issues preventing you from getting more conversions and sales. The simplest way to implement this website conversion tip is to use customer feedback forms, emails, and NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys.

This website conversion strategy in action

NEOM Cosmetics gets feedback from visitors with a popup survey. This campaign appears on exit (when the visitor is trying to leave) and has check boxes for easy answering:

Get feedback like NEOM Cosmetics:

How to create a website exit survey

This two-min video will also help create a simple NPS survey:

Summary

By implementing these website conversion strategies, you'll be better equipped to transform casual visitors into loyal customers. From creating engaging product quizzes, leveraging social proof, and recovering abandoned carts through multiple channels, each tactic plays a crucial role in optimizing your online store's performance.

Keep an eye on your competition, too and actively seek customer feedback to continually refine your approach.