improve ecommerce conversion rate Archives - Affiliate Marketing Mentors

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.

Website conversion optimisation is the process of optimising a website for greater numbers of leads or sales. Much of SEO – search engine optimisation is concerned with getting more traffic from the search engines. A greater part of this process involves building more content.

With more content you can attract more visitors to your website for free, through the SERPS – search engine results page. With more traffic you would expect to naturally get more leads and sales from a website. But there’s another factor in play: the rate at which your visitors convert into leads or customers.

This is dependant on more than simply traffic. Much of a website’s visitors are simply searching for information. They don’t expect to pay for that either! So over 95% of search engine traffic will be visitors searching for information. To convert this kind of traffic can be tough, or impossible. The other 5% or less may actually be searching with intent to purchase something.

This is buyer traffic. That’s the kind of traffic you want on your website. An example of buyer traffic is those visitors who are looking for reviews of a product. Reviews attract buyer traffic because a review is often the last piece of information which is searched for just before a purchasing decision is made.

So one way to increase your conversion rate on a website is to create more content which attracts buyer traffic.

Website Conversion Optimisation – “Buyer Content”

But it’s hard to get free traffic in the first place, let alone buyer traffic. How can this be done? When creating content, focus on the intention of the keyword you create it around. Ask yourself “is this keyword going to attract buyer traffic“? If so, create the content. If not, find another keyword!

Of course certain keywords are much more obviously going to attract buyers:

“Buy Pentax SLR Camera” – has the word buy in it!
“Pentax SLR Review” – has the word review in it – which often leads to sales
“How to fix a toilet seat” – has the intention of finding information, rather than buying. Although they may need to buy accessories to fix the seat!

If most of your information on your website is about “how to”, you may find it hard to convert visitors to buyers, especially if there isn’t a clear reason why someone should buy your product, or sign up to your offer!

Website Conversion Optimisation – Visitors To Leads

Whatever your amount of traffic to your website, you can increase conversion rate on your e-commerce website by creating an attractive opt in offer.

Most blogs and websites offer something of value to their visitors. Having your own subscriber benefit pop up is one way to do this. A pop-up offers a visitor an option to subscribe to your email newsletter, or list.

Pop-Ups

Your own pop up, or email opt in form should be highly benefit driven and highly visible from all pages of your website. It’s often easy to make the mistake of describing features rather than benefits when you come to do this. A “feature” of your offer might be “Access a step by step digital business system”. Although this might seem beneficial to some, for the lay person, this doesn’t look very attractive. What does that mean? Why do I need it? A host of questions arise and your visitors click away. A clear benefit driven message might read instead “Discover how to earn online in this step by step tutorial”.

The difference between your messaging can mean you convert 5% of your visitors to email subscribers rather than 3%. Out of 1000 visitors a month, that’s 50 subscribers on your email list compared with only 30 – an increase of 20 subscribers a month, just from changing your call to action on your opt in form!

The best way of knowing your best messaging is to test and measure 2 different opt in forms and compare the results over 1000 displays. Your best form will be the one with most opt ins. Then create another one and run it against the winner. Keep doing this to find your perfect opt in form which converts your visitors the most into subscribers.

Selling Through Email Marketing

Getting website visitors to opt in to your email offer is one of the best ways to make the most of your traffic. On a website, a visitor only has a short period of time (usually under 10 minutes) to make a buying decision. Most visitors will usually leave without having taken any buying action.

Online customers will in fact often need several points of content with a product or website before they decide to buy something. This is where email marketing comes in. If you’re trying to sell something directly from your website, you can increase your sales conversion rate simply by getting them to sign up to your email list. From your list you can continue to keep them informed of your products and even go into more depth about what you offer. You can also build trust and offer more value through your emails over a long period of time than you can from a website.

Often customers will purchase products from an email list, months or even years after signing up! This simply isn’t possible from a website. Most visitors will only land on a website once, and leave never to return.

There’s many ways to get visitors to convert into subscribers but you will need an email autoresponder to collect their details form your website. See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.

Tracking & Data Use

Another aspect of website conversion optimisation is tracking and use of your data. You should always set up tracking on your website so you can see which pages lead to the most sales or conversions. Often you can spend a heap of time unnecessarily looking for more and more traffic, when you only need to get more traffic to a certain page, for example.

Tracking and data collection is the ticket to a much simpler way to optimise your website for leads and sales. When you know where your leads and sales come from, you can focus your attention on the 20% of your activities which are already producing results, rather than the 80% of activities which don’t give you the outcome you desire (see Pareto rule in business).

Of course you need date in the first place to make any marketing decision. But setting up your tracking using Google Analytics is a good place to start. You can also tag certain actions on your website such as the thank you page and the checkout cart so you can track back these actions to the pages where your visitors arrived on your site. For more on this checkout how to set up and install tag manager.