How to increase your conversion rates
Posted By : mattyb 29th Apr 2007How to increase your conversion rates
Increasing conversion rates can be a daunting task that requires a delicate touch and some expertise, not to mention some trial and error. Don’t be afraid to fail at it - just remember to keep trying until you succeed. If you work hard at optimizing your site, you really can double or triple your conversions. That said, we have put together this quick list to give you a few changes you can make to get started optimizing your e-commerce site for better usability and more conversions.
Tip 1 - Remove Clutter
Cluttered web pages are one of the most common mistakes on the Web. For some reason people like to jam all their information on one page. Clean things up by removing distracting, useless images, charts, or text. Provide users with information as they request it. You don’t need to put it all in front of their face at one time. The path you want the user to take should be clear from the homepage. When you stack up text and images, it dilutes the goal message, and can confuse users. Less is more!
Tip 2 - Remove Advertisements
If you’re trying to get people to buy a product or a service and you’re running Adsense or another ad system on your site you may be making a big mistake. These ads provide exit points for your traffic (and potential customers). Keep your customers focused on the task at hand. If they leave the site through an ad, “Great you made $.25,” but just don’t assume that person will hit the back button or ever return to your site. You may have just lost yourself a sale.
Not to mention, ads look extremely unprofessional on e-commerce sites. They are fine for blogs with no other means of monetization, but if you’re selling something do yourself a favor and leave the ads off.
Tip 3 - Offer more payment options
I generally recommend offering 3 forms of payment for e-commerce sites. Taking credit card is obviously the first choice. I think a few good alternatives to offer are PayPal, Google Checkout and BillMeLater. Google checkout are currently offering their service for free until 2008.
Tip 4 - Show shipping costs upfront
How many times have you been ready to purchase an item online only to get to the last step of the process and find out shipping was too expensive? Shipping charges are already a huge deterrent to buying online. Why make it a bigger problem by hiding them?
Be honest and upfront with people about extra charges. When hidden fees are applied, it can anger the customer, and, worse, cause them not to trust you. ( Loss of trust is a loss of sale, and most likely a loss of any future sale.) Put the shipping charges on the shopping cart page before the customer clicks checkout.
Tip 5 - Sales, Promotions and Free
Many practices from traditional retail simply don’t apply online. Running sales, however, is one that does. Incenting customers to buy is a pretty broad and well documented topic. But the basic principle still applies: everybody loves a sale. Experiment with different promotions to up your orders. Also experiment with different wording and calls to action. I recently tested a category on an e-commerce site called “specials”. We renamed the category “sales” and click-throughs and orders went up noticeably.
Tip 6 - Measure your success
When you start really applying your different SEO strategies to your website, then you will need some way of measuring your successes and lack thereof. Do not obsess over the search terms that did or did not land in the top 10. Instead, look at your traffic growth and your conversions over time. This is the true indicator of your efforts.
Tip 7 - Stronger calls to action
Evaluate your calls to action on a site-wide level. I just bet you find some great content or images that really pop, but lack a call to action. You may have come up with some outstanding copy about how special your service is and then left the reader hanging by not telling them to take the next step. You’re wasting your efforts if you aren’t telling your customers what they should be doing. I’m a fan of putting the word “now” on many calls to action because it implies a sense of urgency: “Order your money saving guide now!” This is just one example. There are many ways to form excellent calls to action. Find one that works well for you and stick with it.
Tip 8 - Add reliability indicators
This is another small step that can gain a customers trust. Consider adding brand recognized logos “above the fold” on your site there are many websites out there offering these schemes for you to sign up to.
Security concerns such as using SSL to encrypt data are huge for web shoppers. Calm their fears by adding a security logo (maybe “Secured by Verisign”?), and a security policy to your policies page.
Tip 9 - Offer expert reviews
Another way to drum up sales is by adding “expert” reviews / analysis of products. Sometimes a product description just isn’t enough. Customers want to know if this product is right for them. Offering fit and feel analysis, care tips, information about what the product should be used for, how it performs under certain conditions, etc. can really help sell. Just be honest, most customers can see right through the B.S. if you tell them how great everything is. Don’t be afraid to list some cons too. Customer’s will appreciate your advice and your company’s willingness to share information (transparency). Also remember if you do write your own reviews to make them beleivable, in many cases a visitor can tell a fake review and that will put them off buying anything from your company.
Tip 10 - Add multiple navigation paths
Adding several navigational paths to a desired goal is usually a good idea. Of course, you should have some logical categories that products or services fall under. You may also want to consider adding a search field. Some people don’t like to browse if they know exactly what they’re looking for. If you can also figure out a way to monitor customer searches and search results to keep track of what people are actually looking for on your site, you can get clued into your customers behavior and buying patterns. From there you can fill in holes in your product offerings if there is a pattern of searches for something that you don’t offer.
Tip 11 - Test, measure and repeat
Okay, so this one isn’t quite exactly quick but trial and error is one of the foundations of usability testing. Try out different elements, such as different headings, one at a time. Then measure the effect through an analytics program. You should test one variable at a time so you know what change caused which effect. If you have some kind of multivariate testing program that can tell you what the effect of each change was, then by all means use it - its much faster that way. Keep whittling away at different page elements (”add to cart” buttons, headlines, page copy, image placement, etc.) until you are satisfied with the results.
An effective way to split-test is to point the same pay-per-click ad at 2 different pages, one with your changed page and one with the current page to see if your changes were effective.
Remember any changes you make on your site can both pull in new customers and remove existing customers, that is why its best to constantly monitor your visitors to see what impact your changes are making.
About the Author:
Matthew Bagley is the owner of Paramiliar Design Studios(http://www.paramiliar.com)
Working with many companies their aim is to give your business the online potential it deserves.
Visit http://www.paramiliar.com/articles.html to find more articles written by Paramiliar Design Studios
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