Will 5G Improve Conversion Optimization for Small Businesses?

If you’re in the business of selling something online, then it’s only natural to aim to sell more of your service or product. With growing concerns caused by the pandemic, emerging markets have lost $83 billion worth of capital from the beginning of the year. Most companies online tend to concentrate on increasing the traffic to their site, when they want to sell more. While seemingly logical, given that more visitors should translate into more customers – however, this is not always the case. When your focus is solely on increasing traffic, your conversion rate drops. While there are billions of people online, there are only so many who will be interested in the niche, product, or service that your business represents. And depending on that niche, you could be talking to an endless supply of prospective customers – or to just a couple hundred thousand around the globe. When you solely concentrate on increasing visitor numbers, you end up reaching a ceiling. It is because you have reached the majority of prospective customers in your targeted niche, or are otherwise unable to meet them, due to your chosen niche being too large. When this happens, you need to concentrate on conversion optimization. And how exactly can 5G serve to influence conversion optimization?5G for small business

5G Explained

You can think of 5G as the next generation or 5th generation of mobile broadband. Its purpose is to replace previous generations by meeting the massive connectivity and data growth that today’s society offers. Upon release, it works in conjunction with already-existing 4G networks, before finally evolving into its standalone system. With 5G, users can utilize faster upload and download speeds – in addition to having the time it takes for devices to communicate with the network (also known as “latency”).

How 5G differs from its predecessors

Unlike 4G/LTE, 5G can operate on three different spectrum bands, enabling it to have faster speeds (with 5G topping out at 10 Gbps, in comparison to 4G’s significantly lower ceiling of 100 Mbps). Current networks use the small and medium band spectrum, which have wavelengths of less than a meter. These wavelengths can penetrate buildings and travel long distances – however; they cannot carry as much information as high-frequency waves are. 5G is the opposite, in this case, as it utilizes high-frequency waves that can take large amounts of data but cannot travel far. In essence, this means that numerous small cells will have to be placed close together by network builders, for the spectrum to be useful. 5G also promises to lower latency (4ms, compared to 4G’s 20ms), thus signaling improved responsiveness and quicker load times, when using the internet.

Conversion rate vs. traffic

The conversion rate differs from traffic or how many visitors a page gets.  When your conversion rate declines, then the actual number of converting users also reduces in kind – even though the site’s traffic can still be the same! Conversion rate is “the percentage of visitors that convert after viewing a site.” For instance, if 100 people visit a page, and three people purchase the service, then the conversion rate is 2%. With this in mind, conversion rate optimization is merely working to make this percentage as high as possible. Conversion rate optimization must be seen as an ongoing process, so long as a page’s conversion rate is not 100%. According to recent data, only 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates. And while enormous amounts of traffic are significant, that doesn’t always equal the same number of conversions. To accomplish this, you are going to need an optimized conversion funnel. A conversion funnel is a method for visualizing the flow and conversion path of transforming prospective customers into paying ones. To do this, you need traffic generated from a host of purposes, such as content marketing, SEO, paid ads, social media marketing, etc.

How speed affects conversion rates

If there’s one thing that has a significant influence on conversion rates, that thing is website performance. Numerous studies have shown that a faster page speed leads to an improved conversion rate. 79% of customers who are unhappy with a website’s performance are less likely to purchase anything from that site – thereby affecting conversion rates. Also clearly evident in the fact that 47% of respondents in a poll stated that they expected a webpage to load within the first 2 seconds.

How increased speeds from 5G influence conversion rates

Since 5G is theoretically supposed to provide 100 times the speed of 4G/LTE, it is easy to surmise, then, that pages will load much quicker, and aid page visitors in having a more pleasant user experience. Because nearly 88% of visitors are unlikely to return to a site after a single bad experience, it is essential to ensure the customer experience is a good one. Additionally, a Stanford University study showed that more than 46% of customers observed a website’s design and usability as a marker of credibility.

An increase in page speeds increases organic traffic by 20% and results in a 14% increase in page views. Improvements in latency by just 100ms reduce daily searches on Google by 0.2%, and when latency increases by 400ms, that number rises to 0.6%. Given that 5G hopes to minimize latency, businesses will quite potentially be able to attract more prospective customers. After all, just a 1-second delay can equal a 7% reduction in conversions.

Conclusion

Considering that nine out of every ten businesses fails, improving conversions is a necessity. When you are looking to increase your conversions, you must track your actions’ results.  More than merely having a look at the overall visitor and conversion numbers, you also need to understand where they originate. There are numerous upsides associated with 5G, such as faster data speeds, high connection density, decreased latency, and more, which are all bound to influence e-commerce significantly. 5G is bound to increase mobile commerce’s valuation to the tune of $12 billion!