If you’re wondering how to increase online sales conversion rate, you’re not alone. Affiliates, e-commerce business and small business owners all want to know how they can improve their sales. So here’s a few ideas you can implement into your collection of online marketing strategies to increase your e-commerce conversion rates.
How To Increase Online Sales Conversion Rate – Get More Traffic
Of course more traffic is always the “go-to” answer if you want more sales. But not all traffic is equal. You can spend years crafting content which attracts the wrong type of person to your website, or spend heaps on paid marketing platforms without having a massive uptick in your sales.
To avoid this waste of time and effort you need to make sure you’re attracting the right kind of traffic to your website. Most online users are only looking for information. So knowing the type of search used for buyer traffic is going to save you a whole lot of time and wasted energy.
Buyer traffic has a different search intent to standard search traffic. For example, someone looking for a review is much more likely to buy from your product review than someone looking for a “How to” guide. So if you’re busy creating how to guides, you might be wasting a lot of time.
Back to this topic later for some practical steps to attract more traffic but this brings us nicely onto a very important topic; your customer avatar. If you don’t know who you want to attract to your website, it’s going to be much harder attracting the right kind of people.
How To Increase Online Sales Conversion Rate – Get Clear On Your “Customer Avatar”
The customer avatar is your “perfect” customer. They find your website and immediately (or very quickly) buy from you – and keep buying! To target the right kind of person is paramount to your online business. So get clear on who it is you want to attract. Just this step alone will save you a heap of wasted time, budget and effort.
A “hot” customer will buy quickly or shortly after joining your email list (more on this later). Not all customers are like this and some will need some “warming” up through your email marketing efforts. Get clear on the difference between hot buyers, luke-warm traffic and cold traffic. A hot buyer is ready to buy when they land on your website. They have their credit card out at the ready. What kind of search keywords might they be typing into Google? Probably they are already looking for your products/service and want a small piece of information or “hand holding” while they pay for the goods.
A “luke-warm” customer might not be solution aware and perhaps they are looking for a product similar to what you might be offering. They take some more persuasion and you’ll need to get them on your email marketing list. Cold traffic will take a lot longer to buy because you’ll need to build trust and so it may be months after they join your email list that they actually make a purchase.
How To Increase Online Sales Conversion Rate -Blogging/SEO/PPC/Email Marketing
There’s lot of ways to get more traffic to your website. You can pay for it, build content for it, work on your SEO, build backlinks, upload videos and reach out to other website owners offering to guest post and so on. But content creation takes time, SEO takes time and building back links is a labour intensive pursuit. It’s all rather slow and tiresome. PPC (pay per click) marketing is the fastest way you can get instant traffic to your website.
But without a proven advert you can waste a tonne of marketing budget and make no more sales! So there’s going to be a learning period where you spend budget but don’t see any sales drop in. This can be tough, especially on a shoe string budget. But it’s worth doing none the less.
Eventually you want your advert to bring in sales and a good return on investment and once you reach this point, you’ve got a scalable strategy. SEO, blogging and link building is much slower and less scalable. See also SEO vs PPC
Email Marketing – Same Traffic More Conversions
It’s not just traffic which leads to sales. It’s also your email list which can give you dramatic results for your online business. With an email list you can convert cold traffic into hot buyers over time. You can “nurture” your list. Luke-warm and cold traffic, once on your list, can be turned into hot buyers. This isn’t possible on a website where they only hang around for a few minutes. So getting them on your email list should be a priority.
With an email list, for the same amount of traffic you can dramatically increase conversion rates for your e-commerce or affiliate website. So, focusing your efforts on creating a solid, benefit driven lead magnet can do wonders for your bottom line. This means placing your opt-in offer on every page of your website. Use multiple options to give visitors more choice to sign up to your email list. Test and measure different headings, images and titles to find the one which gives you the most conversions per 1000 visitors.
A good way to do this is through building landing pages which can be optimised through testing and measuring. A landing page is better at turning traffic into leads because there’s less choice for a visitor. On a website someone can browse around and click through your content. On a landing page they can only sign up or leave. See why use landing pages.
Use Subscription Products = Recurring Sales
With one-off affiliate products and online sales you only get paid once for each sale you make. This means you continually need to find more customers to sell to. But if you choose to sell subscription products from your website, you can earn a regular passive income from each of your customers.
Membership subscriptions, software and business tools are some examples of affiliate marketing programs which pay you a recurring commission. Even with fewer sales of subscription products you can earn more regularly.
Checkout this post on subscription affiliate programs for more on this topic.
Blogging For Free Traffic
One cheap method of building up your website to attract free traffic from the search engines is through blogging. Bloggers build content and place it on their website. Once you identify the type of person you want to attract to your site, look on Google’s keyword planner for the type of keywords which are suitable for your customer avatar.
Find long tail keywords which have low SEO difficulty. These keywords are easier to rank for. If you succeed in ranking, you can attain free traffic through the SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages. By creating a lot of content over time, you’ll eventually increase your domain authority with Google (and others). This gives you more opportunity for ranking your content and attracting free traffic.
Blogging is definitely playing the “long game”. But putting the work in regularly will pay off over time. There’s nothing like seeing sales drop in from organic traffic!
Push Engage – Web Push Notifications
Push engage is a tool for website owners which allows visitors to opt in and receive updates on your newly published content.
It’s a little like email marketing and it can give you a tonne of repeat visitors to your site if you use it. It’s especially useful if you’re a blogger. You only need to place it on your website and activate it. Once visitors opt in, they receive popup notices on their computers when you publish new content. I’ve made several sales through this software so it’s highly recommended!
Building Trust Through Email Marketing
Once on your email list, your subscribers will want to get some value out of your email marketing messages. If they don’t they won’t be subscribers for very long, and they certainly won’t become a customer! So make sure you’re putting value before trying to sell!
I’ve joined many email lists and unsubscribed from most of them. The ones which stand out are genuine messages from people, not businesses. People buy from people, not from websites. So if you can offer value, show you’re human and help people through your email messages, you can build trust – a very valuable commodity in the online world!
Not all your subscribers are going to like you, or your messaging. But if you are focused with your marketing, attract the right people and are genuinely trying to help them with your messages and your products, this alignment will help the right people find your products.
Add Marketing “Strings” To Your “Bow”
You’ll need to spend some time with a single marketing method, before you can see sales dropping in. Whether you choose SEO, PPC, content marketing or social media, your results will vary. Over time you should see some sales dropping in. Once you do, you can track those sales back to their source (providing you’ve set up tracking correctly). This information lets you know what’s working – so you can do more of that!
So often, once you reach a certain level with one marketing method, it’s easy to rinse and repeat that success. But even so, you can venture into new territory and try out new marketing methods to add “strings to your bow”!
Using only one marketing strategy can leave you vulnerable. For instance, what if Google banned your Adwords account, and you had built your entire business on it. Or worse, all your sales come from SEO and Google updates their algorithm and you lose 90% of your traffic in one go!
Using multiple traffic methods means you’re less vulnerable if something goes wrong so it’s worth learning some new skills and new marketing strategies even if you’re made progress on one strategy.
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