Are you having trouble getting conversions on your business site? A lot of businesses don’t feel they’re getting enough sales, so take comfort in the fact that you are not alone. The good news though, is that there are plenty of tactics for conversion rate optimization you can try. If you don’t know how to do this, then it’s a good thing you came across this article. Keep reading below for tactics to optimize your conversion rate.
Conversion rate optimization
Conversion rate optimization means you bring in more revenue to your business and who doesn’t want more revenue?
Above, you see the typical conversion process, which looks like a funnel. Note how you lose folks at every stage of the process, resulting in few conversions at the bottom of the funnel. By increasing conversion rate by as little as 1% results in increasing inquiries or conversions by 50%, in this example. While your results from conversion rate optimization might not show such a dramatic improvement, any improvement helps your bottom line.
The graphic suggests some of the problems involved at each stage of the funnel and we offer suggestions to fix these problems in our post today.
Not enough of the right visitors
The number of visitors to your website doesn’t mean anything. Nor does it mean anything to have lots of followers on social platforms. Instead, you need enough of the “RIGHT” visitors — visitors who comprise your target market.
Members of your target marketing share the following with respect to your product:
- Need
- Money
- Desire
- Authority
Without any one of these characteristics, they’re not part of your existing target market, although that might change in the future. For instance, they might get more money or you might offer financing to allow them to make a purchase.
You can create a profile or persona of a prototypical member of your target market (or each target market) that looks like the one below.
Armed with this persona, you can construct messages that drive your target consumer to your website (add suitable buyers to the top of the funnel), which is half the battle.
Poor product pages
We call these landing pages and, often, they’re the first page visited by a user. These visitors come from marketing efforts such as search engine optimization (SEO that displays your links near the top of search results), social content (such as ads and posts), search and display ads, affiliate links, or directly from users familiar with your brand (ie, we commonly enter Amazon.com directly into our browser).
Poorly constructed landing pages don’t encourage folks to continue toward a purchase. Examples of poor landing page elements include:
- Missing, unflattering, incorrect, or poor images on the product page
- Poor reviews
- Lack of a call to action, such as a buy now button, or one that doesn’t work correctly
- Inaccurate descriptions
- Wordiness
- Poor UX (user experience), such as navigation and filtering
- Requiring a login to view content
- Poor performance on mobile
Shopping cart abandonment
Once you have folks convinced to buy your product, many still abandon their shopping carts, unlike what we see in physical stores, where such actions are rare. For instance, in 2020, 88% of all shopping carts were abandoned. Think of all that wasted effort.
Why? You ask. Check out the graphic below for some of the top reasons folks abandon shopping carts.
Achieving conversion rate optimization
Know your customer
If you’re attracting the wrong folks to your website, get to know your existing customers at a deeper level. Knowing your prospective customers help you reach them, convince them, and generate satisfied customers. Social media is a great help in getting to know your customer as they share aspects of their personality, what’s important to them, and how they build their own world.
Follow Up
The first thing that we are going to say is that you need to follow up on people who put something in their cart but abandoned it. This is a common activity, as we stressed above but that doesn’t mean that’s the end of your conversion efforts. After all, it takes up to 9 touches (interactions) before a visitor converts.
Your task, therefore, is to stay in touch with visitors who abandoned their shopping carts or who didn’t even put something in their cart. There are several tools to help with conversion rate optimization. For example, you could send an abandoned cart email, which reminds people that they have items in the cart. Sometimes, people just forget to complete the purchase and the little reminder is enough to trigger a purchase. Offering a discount in that email further entices folks to complete their order.
Remarketing is another tool for reaching out to visitors. Although it’s not specific to abandonment visits, remarketing does help increase the number of touches needed to spur conversion. Remarketing works by directing your advertising message directly to users on social platforms or in search who visited your site previously.
In either case, ensure your message matches the visitor’s interests. For instance, if they abandoned a dress in their shopping cart, sending an email that the dress is now on sale or offering similar dresses available on your site is much more effective than sending a generic email that doesn’t mention the product they liked.
Gain repeat business
Your existing customers are your best option for new sales. Of course, you can’t sell to customers who are unhappy. Hence, you need a way for customers to ask questions or get support for problems they encounter. Even using staff to listen on social media for complaints and addressing issues before they become major problems helps gain repeat business. The more staff you have, the more queries you can take on, and you can look at an author like Dave Conklin if you’re interested in reading some literature around growing your online business.
High-Quality Leads
Ensure you get high-quality leads on your site. The higher the quality, the more likely they are to convert. As we mentioned above, sometimes you get people on your website when they weren’t actually looking for anything related to the products you offer. You can estimate whether you’re attracting the right people to your site by looking at your bounce rate. A high bounce rate likely means you don’t have the right traffic on your site and that you should change up your marketing message.
Conclusion
We hope you have found this article helpful, and now see some of the things that you can do to achieve conversion rate optimization. The more conversions you have, the better, as your profits go up. The thing that you must remember is that you are responsible for your conversion rate nine times out of ten, so we hope that you will take this advice sooner rather than later.
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