If you’ve been struggling to keep visitors on your website, your bounce rate is likely to be through the roof.

So what’s the problem? There’s a number of reasons why someone would visit your website and then quickly leave.

Some of the reasons are in your control and some of them aren’t. But for the most part, a high bounce rate is a strong indicator that there’s something you aren’t doing right. For an eCommerce store, a high bounce rate leads to a low conversion rate, which also means low sales.

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If you want to reduce your bounce rate and grow your sales, you’re going to need to make a few changes.

Below, we’ll discuss a few strategies that should reduce your bounce rate and help to increase your store sales.

Get The Content Right

Everyone knows that content is king. But, is your content right?

You can have all the content in the world, and it can still be wrong. How? If your content …

  • Isn’t relevant to your audience, it’s not right.
  • Isn’t clear and to the point, it’s not right.
  • Is all one big paragraph, it’s not right.

All of these mistakes can send a visitor running to a competitor. So, you’ve got to get the content right.

Not to mention, you need plenty of landing pages. And landing pages are full of content (or at least they should be). Each landing page should be very specific to what you are selling. The content shouldn’t be a copied description of one product with just a few detail specific changes.

Not sure what to write about? No problem. Just go to LSI Graph and type in your product. It’ll give you all kinds of latent semantic indexing (LSI) suggestions to help you get your content right.

If your content matches what your visitor expects and is easy to follow, your bounce rate should go down significantly.

Use Popups To Save The Sale

Before you balk at this notion, hear us out. Popups can be very helping in reducing your bounce rate if used properly.

You should not hit your visitors with a popup as soon as they enter your site, as they’re still trying to figure out if they want to stay or not. But, if they’ve decided after a few seconds to bounce, then it’s appropriate to try one last time to capture their attention with an exit intent popup.

You can say something like “Wait! Were you looking for XYZ? Did you find it? Before you leave, here’s 10% off to buy XYZ.” Or you could use the FOMO principle to keep them from leaving too, by saying something like “Wait! There’s only 3 XYZ’s left in stock. Don’t miss out on this great deal!”

Remember, use popups only when necessary, as they can be annoying when over-done. But popups do work, especially when you’re trying to save the sale.

Use A Clear Call-To-Action (CTA)

One of the biggest problems that most eCommerce stores have is a weak call-to-action or a non-existent one. There are plugins that can keep a “Buy Now” button in front of your visitor at all times, but this is not necessarily a clear call-to-action in every situation.

The idea is that you are driving the reader to the “Buy Now” button, which means that your page, your layout, and your content should be leading the visitor to make a purchase immediately.

Think of a funnel, at the top there’s a lot of wiggle room, but at the end there’s no wiggle room – just one place to go, right? You should be doing the exact same thing, catching as many visitors as you can, and funneling them down to the “Buy Now” button.

Be clear with what you want them to do. People tend to follow instructions, which is exactly why we recommended using the “Wait!” statement in the popup method above. Give them clear instructions, and you’ll see your bounce rate improve and sales increase.

Don’t Be Everything To Everyone

While you want visitors, you don’t want to attract visitors who are interested in things you don’t sell. If you sell men’s shoes, then shoppers who are after women’s hats are useless to you.

If you’re getting visitors interested in women’s hats, then your content might not be right (problem #1). Or you could be miscategorized in search result queries (problem #2). Or your product could be named similar to a non-competing product (problem #3). Or your marketing campaigns could be targeting the wrong demographic and/or keywords (problem #4).

All of these problems have to be addressed in order to lower your bounce rate.

If a visitor finds your website because of an incorrect categorization, improper content, bad marketing campaigns, or because they were looking for something else, then your bounce rate will suffer.

Of course, some of this is inevitable, but you have to be proactive. Clean up your content, test your marketing campaigns using conversion metrics and block non-performing keywords, and make sure that you are categorized properly.

The more eyes you have on your site, that want what you have, are great for your bounce rate and store sales. But, the more eyes you have on your site, that aren’t interested in what you have, will kill your bounce rate and your SERP rankings.

Take The Risk Out Of Development

And finally, improving your site’s ability to convert visitors into buyers takes a lot of tinkering and experimenting. But making changes to your website can be gut-wrenching, especially if you’ve ever missed a semi-colon in your code. Everything stops!

It doesn’t have to be that way. Using a headless eCommerce solution, you can decouple your infrastructure from your commerce engine.

For instance, you might need to make some changes to the way your page templates display images, customer reviews, or whatever other elements that can help increase confidence and sales. In the past, you might have made coding changes on your ecommerce backend dashboard to influence the frontend.

But now, you can develop custom coding properties on the style sheets and test them, without any risk of causing your eCommerce functionality to “break.”

Most eCommerce solutions are directly connected, and therefore any changes can affect the site’s infrastructure, ultimately leading to a poor user experience and/or inaccessibility.

All it takes is a few upset customers to cause a massive spike in your bounce rates. Headless eCommerce solutions help to prevent this by making it easier to make changes without crippling your user experience.

Conclusion

If your bounce rate is high, there’s a good chance that your store sales are low.

It’s time to look at what you are doing, or not doing, and fix it. While there will be some that just bounce for no reason, most leave because they didn’t feel you provided what they were looking for. Using the strategies provided above, you should cut down your bounce rate drastically and store converting better.

Better conversions, paired with a lower bounce rate, will almost always equal more sales.