If your marketing campaign is not yielding the conversion rate you’re expecting, then you may be investing your precious time, money, and other resources in an unsuccessful endeavour.
The conversion rate is a good indication of the success of your marketing efforts. It also helps you determine if you need to tweak your marketing strategy. If you have problems with this aspect of your business, here are proven steps that could help you convert site visitors into actual sales.
1 – Be Clear With Your Site Goals
Let’s start with something basic – define your site goals. There may be multiple goals that you want to achieve through your website. For eCommerce, the primary goal is to drive sales. Your primary goal is to generate leads for later conversion for lead generation. Meanwhile, the plan may be to drive more visitors and visitors spending more time on the site for content-based sites.
Imagine focusing on a goal that is not even relevant to your eCommerce store. For example, do you need to have a huge number of visitors on your site to generate sales? Not really; what you need is a certain amount of qualified traffic that can help you increase your conversion rate.
To make sure you are actually working on the right goal, answer these questions:
- How much time is enough to help me achieve my goal?
- What kind of traffic do I need to reach my goal?
- How much revenue do I need to target?
To answer these questions, you need to define your goals clearly, as well as your traffic and sales projections.
2 – Analyze Your Visitor Data
If you want to understand your visitors and their behaviour, you need to analyze your website traffic. Paid traffic (if any), generated by PPC campaigns, and organic traffic, generated by the website SEO, usually contribute the most. That will help you achieve your goals and help you understand the types of visitors you are getting. Are they looking to buy your product, or are they just window shopping? Are they from a specific area or different parts of the world?
Understanding the kinds of visitors you are getting will help you plan for the correct strategy.
3 – Do a Competitor Analysis
Now that you know what you want to achieve, you need to understand how your competitors are doing to devise a better strategy.
There are multiple ways to do this. For starters, you can look at their websites and figure out how they get traffic. You can install a tool like Google Analytics and use it to see where they are spending their money, how they are driving traffic, which kind of traffic they are getting, what the conversion rate is, where they are converting, and lots more.
You can also use a tool like Visual Website Optimizer to conduct a split test between your website and your competitor’s site. It will give you a good idea of how you can tweak your site to get more traffic and better conversion.
4 – Inspect Your Current Conversion Funnel
Next, you want to look at your current conversion funnel. There is no point in wasting your time aiming at the wrong goal. You need to make sure you are following a conversion funnel to help you achieve your goal. It is the process that enables you to convert website visitor traffic into actual sales.
How many of your visitors are going through the entire conversion funnel? Where is it leaking? You will want to analyze your website’s conversion funnel to find out.
In doing so, you can identify the points in the flow that you can improve to increase your overall conversion rate.
5 – Optimize the Layout of Your Site’s Critical Pages
As part of CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization), you want to identify the critical pages on your site that you need to focus on. These are the pages linked to your conversion funnel and help visitors convert into leads or sales. These include:
- Home page
- Pass-through page
- Category page
- Product detail page
- Checkout page
For each of these pages, you need to focus on three areas:
- Keyword visibility
- Click-through rate
- Average session duration
To optimize these three areas, you need to analyze your keywords, design attractive and clickable buttons, and ensure your website stays relevant to your visitor.
6 – Identify and Implement Necessary Changes
Once you have completed the steps above, you need to identify the changes you need to implement. Here is the point wherein you will tinker with your website to get the desired outcome.
These changes can range from changing the text on your buttons to the number of images on your product detail page. The specific changes you need to make will depend on your goal, the kind of traffic you are getting, and your website’s layout.
7 – Tweak Your Sales Copy
The purpose of your site is to sell products. So you must have a compelling sales copy. Even if you think that your current conversion rate is reasonably good, it does not hurt to tweak your sales copy and improve it.
Writing a good sales copy is tricky, primarily if your website targets a specific audience. It is good to conduct some market research to understand better the kind of sales copy your visitors can relate to.
If you are unsure how to do this, you can find a relevant forum where your target audience congregates and read what they say about their experiences with your competitors. You can also hire someone to do it for you. By tweaking your sales copy, you can potentially improve your conversion rates.
8 – Bombard Your Site With Positive Reviews
Customer reviews are a powerful way to increase page trust, increase your conversion rate and attract more traffic. Some websites use customer reviews to get additional lead generation. Those who earn more positive reviews are more likely to get more traffic.
In addition to those benefits, customer reviews increase your credibility, which helps you get more links. If you answer them well, this helps increase your conversion rate even more.
Except for some of the biggest websites in the world, inbound links are the number one most crucial SEO ranking factor. Once you get a positive review, it improves your SEO ranking and conversion rate.
If you don’t have customers yet, you need to ask your friends, family, and business associates to leave you some reviews.
9 – Improve Your Site Navigation
Your site’s navigation plays a huge role in your conversion rate. If your site visitors cannot find what they are looking for, they will leave and look somewhere else.
If your navigation is not user-friendly, it can actually be a deal-breaker. You need to make sure your navigation is easy to use and intuitive. You also need to make sure that it can be found on every page.
10 – Improve Your Page Load Time
Many studies have proven an inverse relationship between your website’s loading time and your conversion rate. People will just leave your website if it takes too long to load.
You can use a tool like Pingdom Website Speed Test to determine how much time it takes for your site to load. That will let you know if you actually have too many images, scripts, or too many plugins that are slowing your site down.
If you have a site that loads slowly, you can also improve it by using caching plugins. That will help you get more speed on your website.
11 – Make Sure Everything Works Perfectly
A dead link, a broken image, a missing title, or anything that does not work correctly can literally kill your sales. It’s imperative to make sure everything works properly on your site.
It is a good idea to test everything. Test your site’s loading time, sales copy, and conversion funnel. Test every page on your site and make sure everything is still working perfectly.
Conclusion
Improving your website’s conversion rate is not an easy task. It takes lots of planning, analysis, and improvements on your part. However, if you can follow the steps above, you will be able to increase your conversion rate.
New Digital Marketing Agency is a Google Ads agency in Toronto that can help you with your website conversion optimization. Allow us to turn that high traffic into actual clients. Allow us to help you expand your business reach and growth by contacting us today.
