There’s several ways you can improve ecommerce conversion rate. The most common thought is to increase website traffic, which of course is a factor. But you can also do other things such as improve the rate at which your visitors subscribe to your email list, for example.
By testing different offers on your website, you can determine whether one form is more appealing to your audience than another. You can also test and measure your landing pages. Cross testing is one of the best ways to improve your conversion rate; whether it is for a website opt in offer, a landing page or a sales page.
What conversion are you measuring? Are you converting website visitors to subscribers, or email subscribers to customers? Or are you trying to convert your website visitors directly into customers straight from your website? If it’s the latter, it may be worth building an email list if you haven’t already. See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing if you don’t already have an email marketing service provider.
Improve Ecommerce Conversion Rate – Email Marketing
Converting website visitors into customers is much more difficult than converting email subscribers into customers – depending on the service you provide of course. On a website, a visitor only has a few minutes to make a purchase. After they leave your website, they are potentially gone forever!
A good method to increase your conversion rate therefore is to offer something of high value for free to your website visitors in exchange for their email address. Once you have their email address, you can continue to follow up with them for weeks, months and even years! This can have a huge effect of your bottom line because you are able to maintain contact with potential customers long after they leave your website.
To get them on your email list, offer something hugely valuable to them. This can be discounts, offers, freebies and information. Test and measure different offers and try out a number of different benefits and options. Over time you should find your cross testing shows a particular offer will convert more visitors into subscribers.
If you get 100 visitors to your website a day, you can easily increase the rate at which they opt in to your email list through testing different campaigns. This is often far easier than simply increasing your website traffic.
Cross testing can also be done across the board depending on the marketing you’re using:
- Landing pages
- Email follow ups
- Websites
- Opt in offers
- Pop ups
- etc.
Improve Ecommerce Conversion Rate – Retargeting
Retargeting is a method of advertising where you show targeted advertising directly to those people who have already interacted with your business online. You can (very cheaply) show an advert to people who have left your website, for instance, or interacted with your channel.
This is not only a cheap but also very effective form of advertising because the audience has already showed an interest in your business. Therefore it’s a very targeted approach to increasing your website traffic and conversions.
You can also send them to a page on your website which is most appropriate to their previous actions. For example, if someone has left the checkout page of your website (without making a purchase), you can send them to a reengagement page/campaign.
Creating specific retargeting campaigns for individuals is a great way to automate a more relevant experience for people who have already been to your website, or taken some action.
Improve Ecommerce Conversion Rate – Benefits Not Features
Many ecommerce websites get their opt in offers wrong and focus on what their offer is, rather than what it can do for the customer! For example, an offer can list all the features of their amazing products but neglect to focus on the benefits.
In the online business niche for example, a marketer might focus on all their amazing features:
- Push and play business systems (feature)
- Step by step training (feature)
- Done for your systems and websites (feature)
But this kind of messaging often neglects to focus on the one thing the customer cares about: WIIFM – What’s In It For Me?!
A more benefit driven message might be:
- Earn an income from your laptop (outcome)
- Create more time and freedom in your life (outcome)
- Escape your 9 to 5 job! (outcome)
This kind of message is more focused on the benefit of purchasing an online business, rather than the features which they offer. Customers don’t care about the features so it pays to focus on the benefits in your marketing methods: opt in offers, email marketing messages and advertising.
This one simple shift can dramatically increase your conversion rates in terms of traffic, leads and sales; even without more traffic.
Increase Advertising Spend
Of course more traffic should equal more sales, all things being equal. But if you’re not already converting website traffic into sales, more of the same won’t make a difference. It will only cost you more! So make sure your website is converting visitors into leads, and leads into sales before you increase your marketing budget.
You can increase your daily budget, or turn up your campaign and bid more for clicks. If you’re not already marketing with PPC (pay per click), this is a very fast and simple way to increase your website traffic. Google Adwords is a good place to start. Bing also have a similar advertising platform where you can show adverts based on your defined search criteria.
If you’re a blogger, you can also set a campaign for a dynamic advert. Dynamic adverts allow you to show your content based on search criteria which matches it. The advertising platform crawls your website and shows adverts suitable for your content to those people who are looking for it.
Targeted Content – Blogging
Blogging is a great way to increase your organic reach and attract a targeted audience. The content you create on your website can attract traffic for years to come, so it’s well worth doing if you have the time. Your particular content should be well thought out before creating it. Create content which is well targeted towards the kinds of people who are looking for your services/products.
That way, you will attract the people who are actively looking for what you offer. How to know your target market? The better you get to know who your target audience is, the more you can create the right content which will attract them to your website. See also customer avatar worksheet pdf.
A simple blogging strategy is to find long tail keywords which offer low competition. That way, your content is more likely to show in the search engines. You should also make an effort to back link to your posts and share them as much as possible. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress for some free tools.
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
You might also be leaving money on the table if you’re not focusing on your search engine optimisation. SEO is a useful tactic to raise the interest in your online content through organic methods.
When your site is easily found on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines, you’ll attract visitors to your website for free. It does help to have a lot of content on your site and many backlinks too. But you should also be aware of the keywords on your content and target specific searches according to the customers you want to attract.
Depending on your content, niche and the relative competition, SEO might be worth working on for more free traffic.