As an eCommerce retailer, you may have encountered a problem that visitors click your website, stay for a few seconds and and then bounces away without really converting. Which is known as bounce rate in eCommerce.

If it is happening, the chances of bounce rate from your website is quite high.

A bounce rate is the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that can be determined by various eCommerce analytics tools like Google Analytics.

In this article, we’ll discuss what is bounce rate in eCommerce, how it affects eCommerce business, and what role can personalization play in eCommerce businesses to lower the bounce rate.

What is Bounce Rate?

Wikipedia defines “Bounce Rate” as an internal marketing term used to measure or analyze the web traffic. In simple words, bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave”, instead of visiting to other pages of the website.

According to Google Analytics, bounce rate is defined as the “percentage of single-page sessions in which there was no interaction with the page. A bounced session has a duration of 0 seconds.”

A high bounce rate indicates that there’s something off-putting on your site. It could also tell you that you might be attracting the wrong customers to your site. If you have a high bounce rate, this directly impacts on your conversion rate. The more people leaving your site, the less people you have left to convert. This means less revenue for your eCommerce store.

You can calculate the bounce rate using the equation:

Benchmark in eCommerce Bounce Rate

When a visitor lands on your website, your primary objective is to keep the visitor as long as possible. 

In eCommerce, the bounce rate is correlated with the purchase conversion rate. If the number of purchases is lower, the bounce rate is higher.

An “acceptable” bounce rate is always contextual and subjective. Keep in mind that bounce rates of more than 50% can negatively impact on your conversion rates. At the end of the day, your result should be sale, and if that’s not as per expectation, it’s time to analyse why.

eCommerce bounce rates can be triggered by considering any of the following scenarios:

• Returning to the search results page after visiting one page in your website
• Entering a new web URL in the address bar
• Exiting the web browser after visiting one page
• Following an outbound web link
• Staying on one page without clicking – subsequently leaving
• Clicking on another website after visiting only one page on your website

According to a data, the average eCommerce bounce rate at 45.68%. The same data shows that typically, eCommerce and retail websites can have bounce rates between 20%-45%, which is acceptable and considered “not so bad”. But, if you are looking for the industry benchmarks, bounce rates generally fall between 46% – 65%. Here’s a full benchmark comparison:

In reality, an acceptable benchmark of bounce rate is always lower than what you had before. The most alarming thing is a rising number of bounce sessions. This needs to be understood and pointed out as soon as possible.

Why Visitors are Bouncing Away

A rising bounce rate session is an obvious sign that your site has off-putting elements or underlying issues that you need to immediate address. A bounce rate is triggered by a number of reasons and situations. It principally falls down to the following connotations:

Website quality: If your site is unpleasant, poor in quality and technically flawed, it drives visitors to leave. These include slow loading page, broken links, poor design, complex navigation, low-quality contents, etc.

Requirements of visitor: If the site’s purpose and the visitors searching item do not match, they will leave to seek other contents. This also discloses hidden problems like possible bad back-links from referral sites and misleading headlines.  

The completion of search: If visitors have already got the information they need from other sites.

What is eCommerce Personalization?

eCommerce personalization is the term that refers to the practice of creating personal interactions and experiences on eCommerce sites by dynamically showing content, media, or product recommendations based on browsing behavior, purchase history data, demographics and psycho-graphics.

To begin the journey to advanced eCommerce personalization, any business company with a transaction eCommerce site should be able to capture data and personalize experience based on:

• Context
  • Type of device
  • Time of day
  • Time and location
  • Referral source
• Behavior
  • Recently viewed products and categories
  • Products from abandoned carts
• History
  • Past purchases
  • Loyalty program member
  • Past email interactions

Beyond those initial data points, there are thousands more of data that can be considered.

Benefits of eCommerce Personalization

Here are some of the advantages that you can get when you apply to when eCommerce personalization:

1. Increase Sales by Improving Conversions

Personalization can help to improve conversions by presenting the information. By adopting a focused approach, customized to their behavior and liking, to promote a particular product will definitely appeal them and helps in a successful transaction. According to Infosys study, 86% of customers and 96% of retailers said that personalization has some impact on their purchase decisions.

2. Increased Engagement with your Website

According to a study, almost 60% of customers prefer it if an online store remembers their contact details and purchase information. The increased engagement directly adds to the bottom line of the company and also save you marketing cost to increase customer engagement.

3. Improves Customer Experience

eCommerce personalization helps to build a long-term relationship with customers through customized landing pages, targeted ads, and automated email, which helps users find specific product that appeals to their needs. This also benefits businesses by improving customer satisfaction and the lifetime value associated with each customer.

4. Improves Customer Loyalty

The Exact Target and Forrester Consulting found that 84% of marketers believe that personalization positively impacts customer retention and loyalty.

For most of the business brands loyal customers are their biggest influencers and brand advocates who not only purchase the products themselves but also recommend them to others. According to a study, reducing attenuation by only 5 percent can boost profits by 25 percent to 80 percent.

Why eCommerce Websites Experience High Bounce Rate?

Though there may be many reasons for the high bounce rates in eCommerce, below are some common ones.

• Poor website design
• Complex and unfriendly site navigation
• Unappealing and non-engaging content such as Product/service or Banner Images, Text Audio, and Video
• Only a few relevant pages on the landing page
• No Effective Call-to-Action on product landing pages
• Not optimized for mobile or other devices other than desktop/laptop
• Confusing UX and UI
• No trust/award symbols used in the website
• High page load time of the landing pages
• Too many intrusive ads or popups intervening with the customer experience

High bounce rates can affect your eCommerce stores badly. First, as the visitors visited a single page and left without making a purchase, it means you failed to convince them for buying your products.

So, how to overcome these problems, let’s see.

How Personalization can reduce Bounce rate of your eCommerce site?

Many eCommerce brands are now steering their business gears towards personalization. According to Gartner’s prediction, business company who are using personalization, their profit will be increased by 15% by 2020.

According to a study by Deloitte, 48% of customers reported that they would be willing to wait longer in order to receive personalized product or service.

Websites facing high bounce rates between 40% to 70% can reduce bounce rates by more or less 20% to 30%.

Let’s see the calculation:

According to the above calculation, if 48% of your 40% to 70% leaving customers are willing to stay if personalized experience is offered, you can significantly reduce bounce rates by roughly 20-30%.

eCommerce Personalization Techniques

Those days has gone when personalization was just about addressing a customer by name. Today, savvy marketers and sellers practice the following eCommerce personalization strategies to improve bounce rate, drive sales, and build strong customer relationships.

1. Personalize Home Page

Personalize should start from your homepage. When visitors land on your website, you should be able to grab their attention with relevant messages and direct them to the products that might have their interests. Personalizing your homepage can help you to increase sales by 7%. You can have a personalized homepage by dynamically changing its contents and appearance to match the type of visitor.

New visitors

Remember, your new visitors are not familiar with your website. Complex, confusing and poor navigation could potentially drive them away. Make sure that your visitors should know where to go next. You also have to welcome new visitors and get them acquainted with your site as quickly as possible.

For example, if you visit the website of Uniqlo, you will see a welcome popup message, if you are the new customer. The site’s homepage also includes a sweet discount to catch its visitors’ attention.

Since new visitors are not familiar with your products, you can also show your popular items or trending products at the homepage to get them acquainted with your offer just like Adidas home page.

Returning customers

Your returning customers will be also delighted if you recognize them when they come back to your site. Thank them for visiting you once again. Delight them with a personalized gifts as a token of appreciation.

For example, Zalora offers a sitewide discount to its returning customers.

2. Offer Customer’s Browsing History

Offering browsing browsing history is an essential eCommerce personalization technique. Many eCommerce giant use this technique. eCommerce giant Amazon is using this strategy.

The interesting thing is when any visitor return back and log into Amazon’s website, he can see a ‘Browsing History’ link is in its navigation menu.

Offering customers’ browsing history makes their online shopping more convenient because they already have access to the products they are most likely to browse again. This cut down the browsing time for different links. Thus, speeding up their conversion path and can help you to increase sales up to 10%.

3. Personalize Search Results

Providing personalized search results to visitors is a great way to reduce the website bounce rate. Here are some ways to personalize the search results on an eCommerce website:

Decrease number of clicks to find products

Let your customers see the products that will be most relevant to them with a little effort. You can achieve this goal by offering a visual experience alongside the search bar itself. Results shown alongside the search bar should be based on the visitor’s real intent, browsing behavior, his old purchases, and the behavior of people similar to that visitor.

For instance, there’s a visitor who has visited your website several times and has always browsed cosmetics item but has never purchased anything. When a visitor begins typing something into the search bar, say with a letter “P”, all the products starting from letter ”P” should be displayed on the website’s search bar based on the collected knowledge about visitor.

Create Custom Search Result Page

You can create a personalized collection of products by personalizing the search results page. It can be done by sorting products according to real intent, past behavior, purchases, and preferences of similar visitors.

For example, if the same visitor searches for shirts, he could be shown both men and women’s shirts in the search results page. Since he had already shown that he is interested in men’s clothes, so the men’s shirts should be displayed. This way, you are making it easy for the visitors to find what they are exactly looking for.

Recently Viewed Results

Your eCommerce website should make it simple for a visitor to search any items from the previous search results page even after they have purchased the product or navigate to the other product page. The visitor should be able to find the products quickly by displaying under “Recently Viewed”.

4. Segment email list

The more segmented of your prospects list is, the more personalized your buying experience will be. The list segmentation is when you group prospects based on their behavior with your website, products, and emails.

After segmenting your prospects you can send them offers with their interests. Each prospect will receive a mail what they will feel like personal recommendation.

B2C Community generated a result considering list segmentation, where 39% of respondents reported that email segmentation increased their open rate and 24% of respondents reported that the email segmentation increased the ROI.

Email segmentation helps you to send only those emails that are quite relevant and interesting to the prospects. A specific person only receives a specific email. The more segmented your email list is, the better it will be. This will let you know which specific product or service will be the most appropriate to send to each group.

If you treat all the prospects as same, then your bounce rate will only increase. However, your conversion and engagement rate will also increase if you segment your email list.

Theconcept of personalization applies not only to the emails, but also to your website product pages, customer support, live chat and messaging.

5. Display dynamic contents and messaging

Every traffic coming into your website has different goals for visiting. It’s a big no to display the same type of content to different types of traffic. If you do this, you will not catch your visitors’ interest because they cannot relate to your contents.

A successful eCommerce personalization starts with a great understanding of your visitors. Your contents and messaging must modify your visitor’s persona, intentions, interests, and liking. For instance, if you want to offer a coupon code to a visitor, you can personalize the copy or call-to-action of your coupon based on what the visitor is currently browsing.

6. Optimize Product Pages

Product pages are the main pages that tell your visitors more about your products, their benefits and features, and why they’re worth it to buy. So, optimizing your product pages is an essential part of eCommerce personalization.

Here’s an example of a product page of Walmart:

Make sure to provide the following in your product pages:

• High-quality photos that are appealing to eyes.
• Write a detailed product description for focusing on the features.
• Provide a return and exchange offer.
• Provide additional payment gateways.
• Display the seller name.
• Attractive call-to-action button.
• Increase trust by displaying user reviews and ratings.

You can also follow the two tips to personalize your product pages:

Display supplementary or complementary products

Almost 27% of customers said that they want to get personalized product recommendations. So, it’s important that you showcase supplementary items that your customers might be interested in. 

The demonstration effect

Showing what other people bought alongside the product they’re currently viewing can also help you to optimize your product page.

7. Provide Smooth User Experience

Providing a smooth user experience is the key to push your visitors for making a purchase. Here are some important tips to include in your eCommerce store for smooth user experience:

• Optimize your eCommerce Checkout experience so that the customers do not abandon the carts. Show the trust signal to gain trust from potential customer.
• Translate your website content for the international visitors.
• Improve the navigation speed between different pages.
• Write fresh content and Improve content readability.
• Use the keywords to get high volume traffic.
• Make your website cross-platform compatible.
• Invest in a great UI and UX.
• Make sure your website support mobile devices.
• Optimize the Call-to-action button to the right place.

8. Using Geo-location Services

Another important tactic to reduce bounce rate is using the geo-location services for your eCommerce to redirect your website visitors to the right store. For example, the giant Amazon uses the geo-location services. When a user who purchases from USA’s Amazon.com store now decided to shop from India location, a banner is displayed  to choose between USA or India.

Segmenting your eCommerce business to use geo-location is just to keep your visitors informed about the shipping availability to their particular location. Implementing the Geo-location services in your eCommerce is a great way to reduce bounce rate. 

9. Creating customer journeys

From the very first click on your website to making a purchase, customers walk through certain journeys and you have to guide them to your desired path.

Personalization of customer journeys lead to better customer experience as you provide them with the specific requirements that they are looking for.

However, it is important that you deliver right message to the visitors at the right time. Most of the messages can be overlooked if sent too early or too late.  

Incorporating the ‘Artificial Intelligence’ can help you to find trends to offer the right suggestions at right time. AI can help you use customer’s past experiences, collect your customers information, greet on special days, set triggers based on visitor behavior, and more!

Furthermore, with the use of recommendation you can display the product a customer is most likely to buy. This type of personalization is crucial to ensure that the digital customer journey is relevant and successful in reducing the bounce rate.

10. Implementing 1:1 Profiling

1:1 profiling is another personalization technique that is based on each customer’s unique profile like demographic data, purchase history and more. However, unlike the email segmentation, 1:1 profiling uses certain algorithms for creating the dynamic content that change according to each recipient.

This can take the form of:

• Category-specific content based on purchase history of specific recipient.
• Dynamic banners displaying discounts which changes depending on the visitor profile.
• The content blocks that are time-limited i.e. changing soon or discount has expired.
• Weather-based content which is accommodating weather conditions. For instance, personalizing the Homepage banner by product category.
• As an eCommerce merchant, you can provide the product recommendations as an important tool to decrease the bounce rate. To execute product recommendation for your visitors, you can:
• Recommend product categories based on your visitors browsing behavior.
• Show personalized offers to returning visitors.

All these factors make 1.1 profiling the future of personalization, thus reducing bounce rate.

11. Re-target abandoning customers

According to statista, the conversion rate of eCommerce sites on an average is about 2.6%. To achieve the growth, re-marketing is the best solution. The use of artificial intelligence can help you ensure an effective re-marketing.

Using AI, you can increase conversions with personalized recommendations. Or you can boost the re-targeting performance with the help of AI.

Re-targeting provides higher return on investment because it interacts with the specific customer who once abandoned your products. So, eCommerce conversions rate are more.

12. Incorporate a live chat

In eCommerce personalization, real-time visitor interaction and customer service like live chat are also important. The main purpose of a live chat is to help customers with their questions in real-time.

You can offer a live chat on your site by using different tools. This type of live chat is much more personal because your customers can use their Facebook Messenger accounts to instantly start an interaction with you.

According to a report by insight, 33% of people who use Messenger to chat a business actually want to know more about a product and make a purchase.

Final Thoughts On Reducing the eCommerce Bounce Rate

These above mentioned personalization tips can help eCommerce businesses to optimize their stores to reduce eCommerce website bounce rate. Reducing the bounce rate ensures better customer engagements with your eCommerce stores.