19 Brilliant Ways to Get More Micro-Conversions (For 2025)
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17% of consumers visit your website to make a purchase and only 2% actually do.
When these numbers are so low, how do you count your wins? Let’s take a look.
First, a fact - a majority of your eCommerce store visitors won’t be going in with the intent to purchase.
While most people aren’t ready to make a purchase just yet, there are steps you can take to increase the likelihood that they’ll buy in the future.
These steps are called micro-conversions, and they help increase brand loyalty, trust, and comfort the shopper experiences while interacting with your storefront.
You can think of them as low-hanging fruits i.e. steps that lead to the final objective—conversions and sales—known as “macro conversion”.
When you know which micro conversions to target based on your best-performing funnels, getting those larger conversions automatically gets easier.
This post will also cover:
How can you boost conversion rates by monitoring micro conversions?
4 micro conversion best practices you can’t ignore
Among the first touch points shoppers will encounter in forming a brand & product perception on your site, is the hero section.
This is why optimizing it can get you more micro-conversions than you’d expect.
The good news is that 69% of all shoppers head to the search bar when they land up on an eCommerce site—which means if your search bar is prominent and attractive, the chances of shoppers wanting to stay longer on the site increases.
If that’s not enough, searchers are also known to generate 60% of all eCommerce revenue.
Around 81% of businesses credit email marketing as their primary driver of customer acquisition.
From announcing new offers to sending cart abandonment reminders to establishing a connection by communicating brand values, emails are versatile. What’s more, the ROI on email marketing is insanely rewarding ($42 being the return on every $1 spent).
Hey, you’ll love: 28 No-BS Ways To Get More Email Subscribers in eCommerce
Forrester research has found that a good 68% of shoppers will drop off if they have an uneasy time searching for relevant products.
Now that’s a problem your category pages can partially solve if you optimize them well—since they’re intermediaries between your homepage and product pages, micro conversions like clicking on “quick view” or filtering the search can easily happen.
Beauty brand ILIA Beauty features an autoplay category page GIF banner and a super succinct descriptor:
Product pages are ultimately the one-stop shops for ALL product information—making them one of the topmost reasons why shoppers move from micro-conversions to macro ones.
And this is why how easy you make it for shoppers to arrive at product pages they’d be really interested in, can make all the difference.
Old research already points out that 35% of all Amazon’s sales come from recommendations.
Good reason to make your product recommendations stand out and induce more visits to your product pages.
Everlane, for example, pulls attention to their recommendations by highlighting the in-context seasonal preferences:
You might like reading: eCommerce Product Recommendations: Strategies, Examples, Do's/Don'ts
Wedged between those who abandon carts and those who buy, are those who wishlist.
Wishlisting is a great micro-conversion when you’re trying to create a balance between a potential shopper’s non-readiness to buy and an eventual interest to do so.
The trick here is to ensure this micro conversion makes the shopper want to move towards checkout.
However, even before that, it needs to be easy for people to add to cart (and visualize the cart as well.)
One eCommerce brand that follows through with this rare but ideal practice on their homepage is Golde—here’s a look:
Currently over 70%, cart abandonment is a hot topic across eCommerce stores.
But while you may not be able to control who drops off entirely, you might be able to discern who may have a greater interest in completing the purchase.
This is where your cart abandonment discount pop-ups come in—and getting clicks on these is a kind of eCommerce micro conversion.
Throughout your conversion funnel, product content that’s valuable, matters.
So one way to increase awareness for the TOFu crowd and improve web traffic to your eCommerce store, is to maintain an active blog that receives regular engagement.
A well-highlighted search button and field with a relevant CTA can move visitors to go deeper into the underlying product pages of your website. This is especially relevant for mobile users.
Check out how Printerland prioritizes the search option on their website.
Look at how the drop-down menu helps segregate the categories with a clear indication of how many products fall under that category. It doesn’t get simpler than this!
We recommend you read: 30 Mobile Optimization Tips For eCommerce (+ Examples)
Form abandonment is real. However, you can counter that by keeping your forms simple and intuitive.
Depending on your goal, you can decide whether to go for short or long forms, single-step or multi-step forms. Research by Venture Harbour reveals that multi-step forms can increase conversions by 300%.
Surveys are also a great way to improve customer engagement with your brand and record visitor behavior for channeling macro conversions.
Don't forget to check out: 24 Scientific Strategies to Increase your eCommerce Conversion Rate
As per Littledata’s research, the average number of pages browsed per session was 2.8. Moreover, if the number was above 4.4, that would mean the website fell within the top 20% of sites.
So, you can imagine that if a visitor opens more than 3 of your website pages, it’s a good sign. That said, it is best to be wary of high engagement but low conversion pages. It often means there’s some problem with the site.
Let’s look at an example. Suppose a visitor lands on The Perfume Shop’s website. They browse multiple pages from the top bar. All of these will reflect valuable micro conversions.
We recommend you to check out: How to Scale Your eCommerce Business: 13 Proven Strategies (+ A Case Study)
If you head over to Camper’s site, you’ll see find an option for account creation on the right. Upon clicking, this is what you see. It’s short, simple and cuts out all the fluff that may put off shoppers.
A live chat is a wonderful feature to embed if you want visitors to act towards a bigger conversion. What a live chat with a representative does is that it takes away the hassle of a long wait over call to resolve an issue. It also removes the non-human element from automated chats.
However, be sure to keep the live chat feature non-invasive. You want it to be available for your customers in case they need help and not in their way at any point.
Customers are 64-85% more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it.
A study by Biteable revealed that 52% of marketers rely on videos to build trust among their customers.
By developing compelling video content, you already place your brand with one foot in the door.
But first, how do you get them to watch a video?
According to Hootsuite’s Social Media Barometer Report, 90% of brands use social media channels for brand awareness.
When people engage with your business on social media, they’ll be more likely to make a purchase from you down the road.
The annual increase in social commerce conversions is about 31%—in fact by 2030, social commerce revenue is expected to reach $6.2 trillion.
And this means it’s well worth your time to drive smaller conversions through these channels.
Women’s sleepwear brand EberJey takes their social commerce engagements seriously and are prompt at answering an array of questions on product drops and stock unavailability:
If a shopper begins the process of payment, then you already have a micro-conversion in hand.
But getting to do that can be tricky especially when a chunk of shoppers are comparison shopping and in the process, adding to cart & abandoning across several eCommerce stores.
For example, if a visitor is spending more time on your Blog page, then it’s evident that they aren’t looking for a sale immediately. On the other hand, if you find a visitor repeatedly going to a specific product page or browsing similar & related products, you can say they’re more likely to move towards a purchase.
Once you analyze drop-off rates in comparison with the total website traffic at each stage, you can optimize them to drive more conversions.
For example, if there’s an issue with form signup (and it’s an important part of your conversion funnel), then that’s a key area to focus on.
Do check out: Convert More Paid Traffic—9 Strategies That Always Work(eCommerce)
For example, Ashford does a great job of catching the shopper’s eye with an offer (with urgency) that’ll nudge them towards a purchase
When you’re assessing the micro conversion factor, there can be multiple markers of visitor interest: signing up for your monthly newsletter, subscribing to your RSS feed, frequently commenting on your YouTube channel, etc. Consistent customer engagement will reflect higher conversion rates.
For example, this chart shows the exact journey a customer makes on an eCommerce website before the final macro conversion of product purchase.
So, let’s say you have shoppers coming up to the product page, adding to cart but leaving items behind, you may have to look into what’s happening within the mini cart and the cart page.
Micro-conversions help eCommerce businesses learn more about their friction points and optimize based visitor behavior.
Want to know more? Here are 5 stages of an eCommerce conversion funnel (+ways to improve each step)
For this, tracking activities that happen right before a shopper adds to cart or clicks on an abandoned cart email, becomes crucial.
The reason behind this is: buyer intent & readiness is typically a spectrum. For example, someone who is clicking on an expandable product description to read and consider certainly has more intent than someone who is browsing through multiple product pages but not viewing shipping information or clicking on the gallery.
If you don’t already have a customer journey map, this may be difficult to do.
Once you’re able to map what the customer’s actions are saying about what they would prefer, you’ll be able to make tweaks to your micro conversions.
An example would be the offer and messaging you showcase on your exit intent pop-ups—what you show to a new customer would have to be different from what you show to someone who may have bought from you earlier. In this case, without personalization the chances of a macro conversion taking place goes down considerably.
Assessing your list of micro conversions will also help you look into what nudges shoppers towards a macro conversion. Do they convert right after they click on a link that features a special membership price? Or do they go ahead with a purchase after receiving a discount on a cart abandonment email?
At no point is it wise for an eCommerce business to try and maximize micro conversions across all channels.
Based on customer & behavioral segments, you’ll see patterns emerge—while newer buyers might be spending more time on your website, loyalists may be engaging more with your emails, newsletters and even more immediate channels like WhatsApp.
These distinctions can help you reduce friction across points that are more likely to bring you macro conversions.
The main difference that sets apart micro conversions from macro conversions is the fact that the former are steps to a larger goal—for example, a newsletter sign up is a step towards a shopper getting interested in purchasing a product recommended in the newsletter at a later date.
Macro conversions, on the other hand, represent the end goal that all micro conversions are meant to enable—a purchase, an upgrade or even a bulk buy.
Some of the common examples of micro-conversions are:
Macro conversions refer to the final product purchase or sale. For an eCommerce store, it’s when the customer finally orders the product.
The customer generally follows through with micro conversions before eventually moving onto a macro conversion.
a) Process milestones
Process milestones are the conversions that directly lead to a primary macro conversion. These help to identify the critical junctures where UX improvements are required.
Some examples for an eCommerce store are:
b) Secondary actions
Secondary actions are conversions that don’t lead to the primary macro conversion goal—they lead to potential macro conversions in the future. These conversions require a lot of engagement from the visitor and help build trust in their minds.
Some examples for an eCommerce store are:
Any micro-conversion—in order to be effective—has to enhance existing KPIs, improve leads, and contribute to the final macro conversion.
To create micro conversions that’ll readily help reach your set business goals, you need to consider 2 factors:
a) Efficiency
These key performance indicators (KPIs) usually measure how many visitors are lost between each step of the conversion funnel. This will help identify the micro conversions that have the greatest impact on your business goals.
b) Effectiveness
These KPIs focus on the key activities that can lead visitors to become paying shoppers. The idea is to compare various long-term strategies and identify the one that works the best for your business goals.
Here’s another bit of advice—you’ll know it’s an important micro-conversion to track when it meets any of these 3 criteria:
There are several ways to track smaller conversions on your eCommerce store:
Watch session recordings: Session replays can be crucial in revealing customer behavior—what they clicked after what, where they engaged more, where they dropped off and even differences in behavior between users.
Set up events in GA4 & track them: GA4 comes with pre-determined events that you can choose to track—alongside, you’ll have to pick the right parameters and triggers to get the process going, after you assign GA4 tags to each event.
Use A/B testing insights: Ensure there aren’t too many variations when you’re testing micro conversions—also, it’s best to track micro conversions that invariably lead to a purchase for a longer duration, if there’s a need. A/B testing multiple incentives for the same micro conversion stage can help you come away with sharper answers.
One of the key issues that low traffic eCommerce websites face is lack of data.
Since the virtual footfall they receive is low, they don’t get enough traffic to study for further improvements—so for such sites micro conversions can mean:
More data to consider
If high traffic websites count more conversions, the ones with lower traffic can consider smaller interactions along the customer journey. This can help them prepare for higher traffic & macro conversions as they scale through marketing and branding efforts.
Friction & pain points show up clearly
With data on micro conversions available, low traffic websites can then identify what’s not working and what can be instantly improved. Typically micro conversions in such cases can reveal which pages are most problematic and what about them shoppers are finding difficult to negotiate.
Do read: Convert Organic Traffic Into Customers: 16 Ideas for eCommerce Stores
That would be user experience, alright.
98% of visitors who visit an eCommerce site—drop off without buying anything.
Why: user experience issues that cause friction for visitors.
And this is the problem ConvertCart solves.
We've helped 500+ eCommerce stores (in the US) improve user experience—and 2X their conversions.
How we can help you:
Our conversion experts can audit your site—identify UX issues, and suggest changes to improve conversions.