Gone are the days of opening a little mom-and-pop shop on the corner of a busy street and expecting business to go well. In modern business, you must have an online presence. At a minimum, this means having a website with information about your products or service, but for maximum success, it also means having social media, ecommerce business, online advertisements, and more.
Fortunately, there is a myriad of tools at your disposal to run a successful website. But unfortunately, running an ecommerce store is not as simple as setting up a website and making sales. There are many methods run by science, data, analytics, assumptions, and trial and error to employ for a successful sales strategy.
So how do you go from simply having a website to converting potential customers into buyers? Do you know how to improve conversion rate for your ecommerce business? Continue reading to learn some website conversion best practices.
Assess Traffic
Before rebranding, changing your logo, deleting and adding landing pages, tweaking copy, or editing product pages, you need to know how your current system works. Therefore, before making any changes to your website at all, it is best to assess your current situation. Analyze your data. What pages see the most traffic? What links get the most clicks? Which products are most popular? Where do you lose the most traffic? Are there pages that don’t get any traffic at all? Luckily with the proper data analysis tools, you can get an answer to each of these questions. Making a thorough inspection of how your website currently works for your website conversion rate will give you the best idea of what is working well and what changes need to be made.
Create a Map
Conversion rates don’t increase when you simply post products or information and hope for the best. They work best when you guide your potential customers through a carefully laid path you have laid out for them. Before this can happen, though, you must decide what that path is. For instance, you don’t want visitors to come to your page, take a look around, and then leave. Do you want to collect their email information? Do you want them to sign up for a newsletter? Do you want them to purchase a product or sign up for a service? The best way to increase your ecommerce conversion rate is to create a plan for how you want users to interact with your website and then give them promptings to do so using pop-up deals, clickable links, standout buttons, and more.
Know Your Buyer
Your product is probably not for everyone. There are very few things that speak to anyone, everywhere, at any time; therefore, you need to ensure that you are spending marketing dollars advertising to the people who will potentially buy your products, not to people who have no need for them and never will. How do you do this? By creating buyer personas and then tailoring your website and content to these specific identities. Having a clearly identified idea of who you are trying to sell to will help you make decisions along the way when designing your website to increase your conversion rate.
Display Social Proof
Your best advertisement will never be a fancy billboard, perfect pop-up ad, or trendy social media post. It will always be a previous customer. Words and recommendations of buyers who love your product go a long way with potential buyers and can help you to make convincing sales. You can spend time, effort, and money creating the perfect scientifically-backed advertisements, but if potential buyers find customer reviews stating how awful your product is or how your customer service is lacking, your marketing advertisements are a waste of energy. So, it is wise to use social proof on your website to display that your product is worthwhile. And best of all, the cost of obtaining a customer review doesn’t cost much!
Perfect Content
When doing business online, your potential customers cannot physically hold and touch your product up-front, and most of the time, you’re not speaking directly to them with a smiling face, therefore, your written words, descriptions, and sales language really matter. Perfecting and tweaking the copy and content on your website can truly make a difference in how many sales you make. Are your blog posts wordy, long, and confusing? Or are they concise and easy to understand? How many pages do buyers have to dig through before finding relevant information? Is your language grammatically correct, or is it broken and pieced together? What you say about your products or services can either draw in a buyer or turn someone away completely.
Simplify User Experience
Research shows that 92% of website visitors do not buy something on their first website visit. Additionally, almost 70% of users who put something in their shopping cart will abandon those items and never purchase. Why? Most often, it is due to a complicated user experience or a lengthy checkout process. Customers of this day and age are used to speedy exchanges, immediate responses, and one-tap card purchases. If your website is hard to navigate, or your checkout process requires a lot of typing, clicking, and reading, you are most likely to lose them to the nuisance or reconsideration. Ensuring your user experience is simple and flows easily is a sure way to boost conversion.
Consider Tech
Sometimes conversion rates can be low, not due to poor quality products or services, and not due to unpersuasive advertisements, but due to the website itself. How fast does your website load? Are there certain links or buttons that do not work? Are your customers finding error messages or glitches when trying to add to cart? These types of issues may seem like obvious conversion stoppers, but unless you’re scouring your site frequently or have a place for people to report errors, you may not catch them. Investing in having an expert test your tech and set up systems to catch glitches and errors in real-time will save you from losing tons of sales in the long run.
Analyze Competitors
Is your business in a niche category, or do you have a lot of competition? Do you find that other competitors have less of a conversion issue than you do? Why might that be? Are they doing something better than you are? These are all questions you should be asking and researching answers to? Is your competitor’s site easier to navigate or using better advertising strategies? Researching your competitor’s efforts is a great way to find and fix gaps in your strategy. Learn from their mistakes and wins, and allow them to work for you.
Test, Test, Test
One tried and true way to know how well your efforts to boost conversion rates are working is by employing A/B or Split Testing. Launching two different versions of a page at once and analyzing the results of conversions that develop from each will give you a great idea of what type of advertisements, copy, and layouts work best to convert buyers. You can do this on a large scale with entirely different landing pages or on a smaller scale with a different copy or calls to action. Setting measurable goals and analyzing the results will help you to know where to make lasting changes that create a steady increase in conversion rates.
Need a New Website Design?
After reading these conversion practices, are you thinking that you definitely need to make some changes but aren’t quite sure where to begin? Or perhaps you need to scrap your current site and restructure your site in a way that is better tailored to conversion? In either case, it can be a full-time job making sure that your website is doing its job and working for you, not against you. But you already have a full-time job running your business. That is where Sting comes in.
Our expert team at Sting is equipped to ensure that your website is the best it can be. We do everything from website design, perfected copy, backlinking, blog writing, and all the other pieces you need to launch a conversion-friendly website.
Now that you know how to improve conversion rate, are you ready to boost your conversion rate and increase sales conversion? Schedule a call with our team at Sting.
