Make your marketing efforts more effective by improving your conversion rate. What’s the point of having a beautiful website, spending thousands of dollars on SEM and social ads, stocking fees, and business overhead if you can’t actually get a customer to convert? That might go without saying, but it’s easier said than done. Here’s seven hacks that will improve your conversion rate.
Table of Contents
Focus on Benefits
It’s an age old sales adage – but it is often overlooked and bears repeating. Sometimes we get into the thick of things, especially when we’re knee deep in our own business vertical, but we can’t lose track of simple selling psychology. People buy from benefits. They need something to connect with, something to latch on to. Simply listing a bunch of boilerplate features does nothing to convince a customer – so translate those features of your products or services into benefits.
A key element of properly phrasing benefits is to custom tailor them to your customer base. This requires a specific knowledge of what issues your customers have, and what solutions your product provides.
Highlight Your Unique Selling Point
Customers, especially e-commerce customers, and the most informed and competitively sensitive they’ve ever been in history. That means that you have to grab their attention, highlight what makes your product or service unique, and put that front and center for them to quickly digest and comprehend. Coming out and saying that you’re the best in the business is generally a bad idea – simply highlight some (or at least one) key differences that put you apart from the average of your competition (or one of your main competitors.) Apple and Samsung do this excellently – study their smartphone marketing for some tips.
Call to Action
This is another one of those conversion basics – but many sites’ call to action blends in to the remainder of the aesthetic, or isn’t properly highlighted to really reflect conversion rate optimization. Having a big bright box with capital letters and exclamation points isn’t conducive to convincing a customer – your site should be built around getting that click and that call to action in order to convert. Sites with multiple opportunities during the shopping experience for CTAs also perform better than those with a single medium or location for their CTA.
Clear and Visible Contact Info
It isn’t realistic to expect every customer to be satisfied with the content on your site, or have all of their questions or comments answered by your site’s copy. Instead, make your contact information highly
Visible and easy to find on every page of your website. Contact forms are fine, and a great way for you to acquire customer emails, but many prefer to directly contact an email (even if it simply a psychological difference) as they feel more personally connected. Provide both to the customer, and a phone number if applicable, on a dedicated contact page and as an extension of your normal site widgets.
More and more often, customers anticipate the ability to contact a company through social media. Be sure to have easily locatable social media handles and subpages, even if the customer is searching on Twitter or Facebook itself.
Site Conversion Optimization
This one is admittedly a bit of a cheat on this list – but you need to ensure that every aspect of your site builds up toward an easy and encouraging conversion. There’s an enormous amount of CRO resources out there, it is highly recommended that you invest a large portion of your budget and time toward optimizing your site for conversions. A few quick pointers: landing page AB testing, an aesthetic and functional site, promotion testing, and conversion-optimized language are a must.
Focus on Repeat Customers
A majority of customers abandon their cart – setting up a cart abandoner remarketing program through AdWords or Bing Ads is easy and very cost efficient. There are other programs and marketing strategies (many of which are free or simple promotion changes) that can help focus on building those repeat customers. Utilizing loyalty programs, cookie tracking, and customer analytics all assist with making that repeat conversion easier. In addition, focus on brands and specific products that provide for a longer repeat value (or Lifetime Customer Value, LCV) rather than a single big ticket item.
For example, a website that focuses on high end beauty and cosmetic items should focus on a skin cream (consumable) rather than a skincare brush (a one time purchase tool.)
Functionality over esthetics
A modern and clean website is important – but most important of all is a perfectly functional and intuitive website. If customers find it difficult navigating your site, finding the products that they’re looking for, or common mistakes such as a poor mobile experience, slow loading times, or copy/HTML issues, they are incredibly unlikely to convert. You need to ensure that your site is optimized for functionality rather than looks. For example, take any successful ecommerce site, like Amazon: highly intuitive SKU and department organization, an intelligent search bar, product reviews, recommendations, and so on. The site looks okay, but it really isn’t all that much to look at. Does anyone really care? No. So while there are plenty of beautiful website templates and themes out there, focus on ones that are highly functional over those that are pleasing to the eye (and may load slowly on the page.).If you are a non-tech guy, Outsource all parts of this process to get best results. Go to Odesk.com, Freelancer.com, Elance.com, and Warrior Forum for Hire.
In the end
The bottom line is that we’re all in business to get converting customers. If you go through all of the processes of making a beautiful website, but don’t optimize it for conversions, your business is going to suffer (and very likely fail.) Stay consistent, observe each of these known conversion hacks, and you’ll be seeing an increase in revenue and ROI.
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About Me:
Raphael Ricardo is a blogger, he loves talking about internet marketing, copywriting, and is also a member of the Warrior Forum Community. He’s excited to share this article and give you instant access to a $97 Free Gift. Click here to download it Now
