Trying to increase online sales in your business can often be complicated. Quite a few factors play a role in it, and it’s natural not to know where to start with it.
If it’s an area you struggle with, it could be worth looking at conversion rate optimization. It’s the process of making changes with your online efforts to increase your sales. When you improve your conversion rates, you directly impact how many sales you’ll make in an average week.
As direct as this is, it’s often difficult to figure out and actually implement conversion rate optimization strategies that help your business. This isn’t something you should struggle with.
Instead, it’s just a matter of knowing how to improve your conversion rates, with some optimization strategies being great for this. No matter how well your sales are doing, it’s worth considering a few of these to see even more success. You could increase your online sales more than you’d think.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Before taking a look, it’s worth spending the time going through what conversion rate optimization actually is first. As you might expect, it’s the process of figuring out how to improve your conversion rates and improve your business. That’s a relatively basic explanation, though, and there’s often quite a bit to it.
It involves using customer data, user behaviour, website information, and a lot more to make the right decisions for your business. You’ll need the right approach with it.
Part of this involves using the right tools and strategies, as well as looking at the right areas. There are even more components involved in it than you could think. Some of these could be more important than you’d think, and they include:
- Calls-to-action
- Website design
- Landing pages
- Forms
- Navigation
- Page speed
- Website copy
By focusing on these elements, and a few others, you’ll improve your conversion rates much more than you’d think. While there’ll be obvious ways to work on more than a few of these, there are also a few not-so-obvious ways. It could be worth diving into these, as they could be more important than you’d think.
While they could take some time and effort, they’ll be more than worth it.
Benefits of Conversion Rates Optimization
With how much work you’ll need to put into many of these, you could wonder why you could try to improve your conversion rates. The fact you’ll increase your online sales is a start.
There are more than a few other benefits on offer, and these can make conversion rate optimization more and more appealing. They could end up being more than enough to convince you to actually spend some time and effort working on them. Some of the more notable of these include:
- Improve the user experience on your website
- Build more trust with your customers
- Lower your cost-per-sale long-term
- Make your business more profitable
On top of these are a few indirect benefits, each of which can be more than enough to persuade you to invest in conversion rate optimization. They include:
- Improve Your Marketing ROI – The higher your conversion rate, the more results you see because of your marketing spend. Even increasing this spend should mean you’ll see a better return on investment, as you’ll bring in more revenue because of it. It’ll make your marketing more cost-effective.
- Scaling Your Business Better – With the enhanced sales and return on investment, you can scale your business much better than you would’ve thought. You should have more funds to actually pay for this growth and overall scalability.
- Better SEO Performance – Search engine optimization (SEO) is affected by multiple factors, with click-through rates, conversion rates, and similar factors being notable. Conversion rate optimization addresses more than a few of these, helping you boost your SEO more and more.
With how appealing each of these are, you could be convinced to spend some time and effort on it. You’ll not only improve your conversion rates, but have a better-running business because of them. Seven strategies could help with this more than you’d think, making them worth diving into.
7 Important Tips To Improve Your Conversion Rates
1. Enhance Your Value Proposition
Your value proposition plays a vital role in whether someone will actually buy your products or services. You’ll need to make sure this is as high as possible.
The more value people see in your offerings, the more likely they’ll be to buy it. That doesn’t mean making your products or services really cheap, though. Making products better can also help, for example. The trick to this is making sure potential customers actually know what your value proposition is.
The clearer this is to them, the more likely they should be to actually buy your products or services.
2. Have Defined Goals
When you’re trying to increase your online sales, it’s always worth having a specific goal. It’ll give you something to work toward and measure against.
It also helps you figure out if the conversion rate optimization strategies you’re using are actually working. Focus on SMART goals when you’re doing this: Smart, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-based. It’ll make sure your conversion goals are actually ones you can work toward.
You’ll also need to have key performance indicators for this, with these being website visits, sales, and similar options. By measuring these, you can adjust your plans based on whether they achieve your goals.
3. Offer An Incentive
Everyone likes to feel like they’re getting a great deal. Even though your products or services could be great, they mightn’t be enough to close the sale.
That’s why it’s always worth offering an incentive. It’ll help you improve your conversion rates more than you’d think. 62% of people who buy online said they wouldn’t buy from a business that doesn’t offer free shipping, for example. Tying this to the value of a sale could be helpful at increasing your profits.
While this means you’ll have to pay for shipping, for example, the increased sales will be worth it.
4. Implement A Chatbot
Engaging with your customers is always a great way to improve your conversion rates. You don’t need to wait until they sign up for a newsletter for this.
If you make a chatbot for your website (or hire someone to do it for you), you could engage with your customers a lot more. It encourages them to get in touch if they have any questions or concerns. You can then use this to encourage a sale.
While this means having someone involved in the chatbot on your end, it could be more than worth it.
5. Send Abandoned Cart Emails
After people get through most of your sales funnel, you’ll want them to finish it. That doesn’t always happen, however.
There’ll be more than a few times when they abandon their cart. Many of these people will already be logged into your system to get this far. You’ll have their email and other information. Use that to your advantage. By sending abandoned cart emails, you could give potential customers that extra push they need to complete the purchase.
Since they’ve already shown an interest in your products or services, you’ve no reason not to put some effort into this.
6. Review Friction Points
Friction in the sales process is never a good thing. The more friction there is, the less likely it is someone will buy from you.
As part of your conversion rate optimization strategy, you’ll need to identify and address any friction points your potential customers are coming across. There could be more than a few of these, some of which will cause more friction than others. Reviewing purchase funnel drop-offs, checking heat map reports, and similar measures help with this.
Once you’ve figured out what your customers’ friction points are, addressing them will increase your online sales.
7. Add Social Proof
People need to trust your business if they’re going to buy from you. While people who’ve bought from you before should, it’s first-time buyers you need to worry about.
These are the ones you’ll need to convince, and it’s worth putting some time and effort into this. One of the best ways to do this is to highlight social proof on your website. Customer reviews and testimonials are great ways of helping with this.
Potential customers will be much more likely to buy from you if they see other people have been happy with their purchase.
Improve Your Conversion Rates: Wrapping Up
When you improve your conversion rates, you’ll have a direct impact on your sales. You should see these in time, and you might even see more than you’d think.
With some conversion rate optimization strategies, you shouldn’t have much of a problem with this. You’ll see more and more results in time, but you’ll need to be willing to put the time and effort into them. That’s where quite a few entrepreneurs struggle.
You’ll increase your online sales quite a bit once you’ve actually put the work into them.