With eCommerce sites increasingly looking to provide more engaging shopping experiences, they need to know which items their customers are looking at (or not) with the end goal of converting them from browsers into buyers. What makes or breaks the deal for your business often depends on insights that you must leverage to enhance shopping experiences and drive your eCommerce conversion rate.
Heatmaps are color-coded representations of how users interact with your website and product catalog. They record every touch a user makes over the page.
Heatmaps provide graphic representations of where users spend their time on your site, which products they are interacting with, and when they’re looking–allowing you to tweak pages so you can increase your eCommerce conversion rate.
According to the Digital Customer Experience Report 2021, nearly half (43%) of customer experience experts are in the dark when it comes to knowing key friction points or moments that matter in digital journeys. Heatmaps can help light the way.
What Is a Dynamic Heatmap?
Think of heatmaps as an X-Ray tool. They provide a detailed picture (in the form of graphical representation) of how users interact with your online store helping you to better understand their actual behavior across your web platform. You can measure how far they scroll, where they click the most, the products or pages they like or dislike, as well as how they interact with popups and forms.
At a time when improving digital customer experiences is seen as critical for success by 80% of organizations, heatmaps are crucial tools in collecting valuable customer data. You get a granular view of how effective (or ineffective) your eCommerce layout is. Consequently, it can help you pinpoint aspects of your online store that need intervention to help you drive traffic, improve retention, and boost your eCommerce conversion rate.
Why Use a Dynamic Heatmap?
Dynamic heatmaps can play a pivotal role in eCommerce optimization efforts. However, you might be wondering if it’s an area worthy of investment, given the range of data analysis tools on offer.
Here are three compelling reasons to consider:
- Reveal audience demographics and analyze interactions. Recent customer insight data show that only 13% of organization leaders feel they have a near-complete view of their customers’ behavior. Heatmaps can address this by analyzing site interactions to discover customer needs and interests. Armed with these critical insights, you can easily develop more effective marketing strategies.
- Determine whether your CTAs work or not. Call-to-action buttons are critical to your eCommerce conversion rate. So, to determine their effectiveness, heatmaps analyze clicks, detect low-performing CTAs, find distractors, and more.
- Help you find your online store’s effective fold. To maximize your site layout, heatmaps can determine your effective fold – the parts of a given page where web visitors spend most of their time scrolling. This helps you know that you are placing your products and CTAs where it matters most.
Heatmaps also allow you to evaluate your product catalog, validate your website architecture, gain more awareness of your eCommerce store, or simply measure customer sentiments. This way, you can increase engagement and enrich the overall shopping experiences of your customers.
Increase Your eCommerce Conversion Rate with Smart Merchandiser’s Heatmap Technology
Heatmaps play a critical role in any eCommerce optimization strategy as it offers the kind of graphical representations of customer data that no other format can. However, not all heatmaps are created equal, so it’s important to choose a solution that seamlessly integrates with your existing software ecosystem.
Smart Merchandiser’s heatmap technology is designed specifically for eCommerce sites, making sure you gain insights that will help you roll out smarter merchandising strategies. Smart Merchandiser’s heatmap feature visualizes product data in a category and displays it from hot to cold. This clear view of your entire category in terms of how products perform makes merchandising much easier.
Among the key features:
- Product Data Visualization. The strength of Smart Merchandiser lies in its ability to provide a comprehensive overview of product data. It offers insights into the performance of each product, noting down data such as items sold, items abandoned, conversion rates, product views, and inventory levels.
- Heatmap Configuration. Smart Merchandiser makes it easy for users to zero in on important data using heatmap configuration options. With this, you can specify metrics and date range as well as how the heatmap should display your data. This makes it easy to analyze historical customer browsing patterns, compare performance metrics from different time frames, and the like.
- Customizable Heatmap Colors. If you’re not comfortable with the default heatmap colors, simply customize it to suit. This is an effective option if you have color-specific preferences or have a color-coding system for your data.
- Mini Heatmap. Smart Merchandiser displays mini versions of the heatmap on the right-side panel of your product catalog. It serves as an index that you can refer to while tracking the overall performance of your catalog. This allows you to take a look at the page as a whole and see if the sequence of items is affecting how customers interact with them.
- Color Indicators. The mini heatmap is useful for seeing big picture insights but is sometimes not the best display if you are looking to crosscheck a product’s status with other product performance metrics. No problem. Smart Merchandiser offers the option to turn on color indicators on the blocks where your items are displayed.
With all these functionalities, users can collate data on site performance and customer preferences to keep pace in today’s highly competitive eCommerce world. Using Smart Merchandiser means data-driven approaches to catalog management, and the built-in heatmap technology enables you to develop smarter merchandising strategies while increasing your eCommerce conversion rate.
Optimize Your Online Store, Drive Your eCommerce Conversion Rate
eCommerce is a pro-active business that demands planning, patience, and persistence. Selling online is getting increasingly competitive as more companies set up web storefronts and consumers develop higher expectations when it comes to eCommerce experiences. So much so that a 2020 study by Kantar revealed 71% of companies feel they are merely keeping pace with other businesses in the industry.
If you want to move ahead of the pack, you need to have an in-depth understanding of your target market and the right tools to help you gain these crucial insights. Leveraging powerful visual merchandising software technology, such as Smart Merchandiser, can help you get ahead, fast. With access to dynamic heatmaps and data analytics, you have complete visibility of what your customers want (and don’t want) and how they shop.
Schedule a demo today and learn how Smart Merchandiser can help you optimize your online store operations, increase your eCommerce conversion rate, and gain an edge against the competition.