If you are an online store owner, you know that the end goal is to convert visitors into customers.
This is no easy task, especially if your ecommerce store has multiple pages and product categories. Not only do you want visitors to find the product they came for, but also other products with lower purchase barriers.
However, there are many factors that can affect the conversion of a visitor into a buying customer. Some common factors include your product placement, traffic source, page load time, and even the day.
You need to keep track of these factors to be able to boost the conversion rate.
And that’s where Session Replays come into play!
Session replay helps you understand what people do on your website – leading you to create a better user experience and boost conversion rate.
This article explains what session replays are and how you can use them to improve E-commerce conversions.
What Are Session Replays?
Have you ever wondered what it looks like when people use your website? Me too.
Well, now you can see for yourself by recording their sessions.
A session replay is a video recording of your customer’s activity while they browse your website. They help you identify your conversion issues, increase your website’s engagement, and discover how users interact with each section and element of your website.
Here’s an example of session replay by FigPii:
You can see how website visitors move around the page, what they click on, and where they leave your website. It also lets you identify if there are errors preventing them from completing a specific task.
Use Session Replays to comprehend:
- What do users actually do on your website (instead of what they said they did)?
- Where do users get stuck?
- Where did they abandon the cart?
- How do users interact with some aspects of a page?
And focusing on one device isn’t enough.
With mobile devices generating nearly 54.8 percent of global website traffic, you can’t overlook how your mobile website performs.
Record events that happen across multiple devices. Record authenticated vs anonymous sessions. And so forth!
Luckily, many session replay tools make it possible to filter and record sessions based on different audience types.
How to Use Session Replays to Improve Ecommerce Conversion Rate?
In a nutshell, a session replay is a way to replay your visitor’s actions on your website, so that you can understand which elements of your website grabbed the attention of your visitor.
By replaying sessions, you can see: precisely what caused users to bounce, which elements they interacted with, their mouse movements… but enough of that.
It’s time to show you how to improve your ecommerce conversion rate with the help of session replays.
1. Fix Dead Links and Bugs.
It’s been an issue ever since web pages became dynamic – visitors clicking links on a web page aren’t always taken where they expected to go.
Sometimes this is caused by a dead link. Sometimes it’s just a bug in the code that should be easily fixable (and not really considered broken links).
However, catching these issues is an astronomical task.
Imagine having to manually click every link on every page and refresh pages as necessary, slowly clicking your way through your website.
It’s nearly impossible to undertake this if you have a dynamic website with a comprehensive navigation path. There are good chances that you’d end up missing more than a few dead links and bugs.
A session replay tool makes the task decidedly easier.
You can be the firsthand spectator while your leads browse your website and peruse which links in your e-commerce site are not functioning as they should and are buggy and fix them. It also gives you the “why” behind the numbers.
You can even use session replays in tandem with heatmaps to get better results.
For starters, you can use heatmaps to understand the overall context of visitors’ on-page behavior. Next, you can review recordings to discover more minor bugs and problems that require fixing.
Take CCV Shop’s case study, for instance.
The UX team at CCV Shop, a SaaS platform that generates leads via landing pages, incorporated session replays and heatmaps to boost conversions.
According to Gregor Doornbosch, UX Designer at CCV:
“By using videos, you see how people are on different browser versions, resolutions, etc., and sometimes you see small bugs within your own software that you’ve never seen before.”
Using data and information extracted from heatmaps and recordings, they ran A/B tests and implemented successful variations. As a result, they saw a tremendous increase in conversion rates on their site.
2. Improve User Experience.
If you believe usability is all about how data flows, you might want to pay attention.
It’s not just about the pages. There’s another dimension that makes your data usable: user behavior.
Studying user behavior gives you a key advantage over usability that plays out in a multidimensional way.
To learn from your users and to better understand their behavior, you need to be able to watch them in action — live. This is the holy grail for user experience teams everywhere. Session replays provide the unique ability to replay a visitor’s interactions with your website as they happened in real-time, giving your team the ability to do amazing things.
With a session replay tool in your arsenal, you can get a complete view of user interaction and the different ‘steps’ a visitor takes through your website. You can use it to improve user experience by observing your users’ behavior and understanding their intentions, pain points, and preferences.
For example, e-commerce websites require users to log in or register before the checkout process.
At times, these site features can be poorly optimized. You’re probably not even aware that your users are having a hard time with the signing-up process. This may lead to losing potential clients – that too, unknowingly.
Session replays can help you catch these minor snags and improve user experience.
For instance, it can help you identify issues with users not being able to log in or register.
Here’s an excellent example:
Audiense’s Head of Product observed a sudden drop-off on their sign-up page. So, they looked at their session replays to find out what was happening.
After a few sessions, they noticed that the password validator feature was not working on the sign-up form. Users could not finalize their sign-up process, causing conversions to drop.
The team could fix the bug within hours after they leveraged session replays.
That’s not all. Whenever Audiense releases a new feature, the team now views around 100-300 sessions and takes notes to spot bugs as well as opportunities for enhancements.
3. Enhance Customer Support.
When you’re looking for ways to enhance your customer service, one solution you may want to consider is Session replays.
For many businesses, when customers contact them about an issue, it’s not always easy to get clarity as to what exactly happened, what the problem was, or why they were contacting the company in the first place.
Using session replays can give businesses a clearer picture of what exactly transpired on end users’ screens.
When you see what users are doing with the mouse in real-time, you will be able to guide them through the process and solve customer support tickets.
That means more conversions, happier customers, and HUGE savings in support costs.
Let’s look at a case study of Great Lakes, a non-profit organization dedicated to making student loan repayment successful in collaboration with private lenders and the U.S. Department of Education.
Great Lakes leveraged session replays to improvise on their customer support.
The organization unearthed the following details that helped them optimize their customer support:
- Points of struggle regarding page flows and navigation of their flagship website.
- Disputes regarding their borrower support team.
- Measure the site experience.
They saw significant benefits in six months’ time, including decreased turnaround time on support tickets.
4. Get Firsthand Feedback on Newly Implemented Features.
If you want to get your newly implemented features tested – and tested fast – by real users, you must deploy Session Replays as a part of your software testing strategy.
You might find out that the latest feature that you were anticipating to be a big hit is, in reality, not being used at all by the users.
Session replay tools are especially beneficial if you have recently updated your site or you are in the habit of altering your site’s features often.
You can get feedback on the new features without even bothering the visitors.
The way sessions can provide you with real-world insights is incomparable. And when paired with on-site polling and surveys, it gives you the opportunity to gather data on brand perception, customer satisfaction, and even customer intent.
5. Optimize Your Sales Funnel.
The sales funnel is the underlying concept of any business. So, it deserves to be optimized well so that the revenues are pumped up for the benefit of your ecommerce business.
But, how would you use session replays to achieve that?
Session replays help you analyze each and every step our customer goes through while signing up. You can also take a note of where exactly the customers hit the roadblocks and what kind of difficulties they are facing when they navigate through your sales funnel and landing pages.
These details will come in quite handy to know what exactly the customers want.
Suppose a significant chunk of your visitors is bouncing back at a certain point in the funnel. It could be while logging in or while choosing the payment method.
Now you know the problem and can optimize that precise step in your funnel. No more guesswork and hit-and-miss tests to optimize your site when you can monitor how customers are interacting with your website and know what they do before they make a purchase.
Not just that, you can use session recording tools like FigPii to identify how visitors coming from different sources behave with your website.
If you discover that visitors coming via email campaign are showing more interest in your products than the ones coming through a paid ad, you can work on optimizing the latter.
Once you identify the problem, solving it is a matter of time.
6. Reduce Checkout Abandonment Rate.
An abandoned cart is a missed opportunity for your business to earn more revenue and increase customer satisfaction.
Among many strategies to avoid a high abandonment rate in your shopping basket, one which is not exploited enough is using session replay tools to record users’ activity sessions and see where customers click during the checkout process. And what makes them abandon the cart without making the final purchase.
It’s best to narrow down your audience while using a session recording tool. Use filters based on the type of visitors you want to include in the recording.
Here’s an example from FigPii’s session recording tool:
For instance, run the recording for visitors who are using your site using mobile and desktop sites separately. Are mobile users abandoning your cart at a higher rate than those using it from their desktop?
If so, that’s your “aha” moment.
Maybe you need to make your website, especially the checkout page, more mobile-friendly than it currently is.
Are you sure all your CTA buttons are working correctly on your mobile site? Or maybe the problem lies with the payment gateways?
Whatever the cause is, you can get a 360-degree view of customer interaction and deduce every pain point.
Afterward, you can run A/B tests and even get other experts to analyze your mobile site’s checkout process.
Over to You!
The bottom line when it comes to improving the e-commerce conversion rate is to move away from guessing. Knowing specifically how customers interact with your site will enable you to tailor every aspect of your site, including the design, features, images, and copy, to optimize for a higher conversion rate.
Sessions are a gold mine for conversion optimization!
This is your sign to get on a session-replay tool. You’ll be able to analyze every aspect of your visitors’ experience with your company, tweak the page templates to make sure the flow is optimized, and remove all points of friction.
By using session replays, you can get detailed insight into these interactions, eliminating uncertainty and making it possible to achieve new heights in your conversion rate.
