Did you know that 81% of sales happen after 7 or more interactions?
You’ve put in hours, days, and weeks of effort communicating with potential clients. It’s clear you have answered all their questions and understand their needs.
And then the worst-case scenario happens: the potential customer decides they don’t want your product or service after all. That’s a lot of time lost.
Luckily, there are proven methods for increasing conversion rate. No matter what type of business you have, you can use these strategies and get paying customers who will stick around for a lifetime.
Keep reading for the best strategies to increase your website conversion rate.
What Is Conversion Rate?
Before we dive into conversion rate optimization, let’s talk about what conversion rate actually means. A conversion rate is the percentage of people who complete a desired action.
Conversion rate isn’t just measured by how many sales you make. It’s also measured by:
- How many people sign up for your email list
- How many people click on your ad
- How many people register for your webinar
- How many people install your app or complete an in-app action
- How many people download your free e-book
- How many people call your store to ask a question
This list isn’t exhaustive, and there are many more ways you can measure conversions. It all depends on the specific goals of your business and what you want your potential customers to do when they interact with you or your website.
Calculating Your Conversion Rate
You can calculate your conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions by the total number of visitors. This standard formula can also be represented this way:
Conversion rate = (number of conversions ÷ total number of visitors) x 100.
For example, if you have 1,000 visitors to your e-commerce website and 50 of them make a purchase, then your conversion rate is 5%.
Looking at specific conversion rates can be an important indicator of what’s working or not working on your site.
For example, do customers quickly navigate towards your sales page but don’t actually click the button to buy? This could indicate that there’s a problem with your page or credit card form.
When examining your conversion rate, don’t forget to take a look at your marketing metrics, as they influence your conversions. For example:
- Which traffic sources your website visitors are coming from
- How new website visitors are converting vs returning visitors
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Bounce rate (how many people leave your website without taking any action)
- Page load time
There are thousands of conversion rate metrics you could look at for your business. Take the time to clarify your business goals and decide on which conversion rate metrics to focus on.
Strategies for Increasing Conversion Rate
Now that we’ve covered the basics of what conversion rate means, let’s dive into increasing conversion rate. Remember to consider exactly which types of conversions you’re trying to achieve in your business.
You may have to stick with trial-and-error for the first while until you have enough data to see what’s working and what’s not. Keep experimenting with these tried-and-tested strategies to see what works best for your business.
Have Clear Business Goals
What are the goals of your business? Do you want your customers to buy a product or to sign up for your coaching program? Or are you focused on B2B lead generation?
If you are a furniture company, you probably won’t be too worried about how many people are registering for online webinars. Instead, you’ll probably be more focused on how many of your website visitors purchase your products and how many people sign up for your email list.
With any kind of product sales or e-commerce company, you’ll primarily be looking at how to increase your sales.
If you are a business coach or consultant, you’ll probably be thinking about getting potential clients to trust you and your expertise.
In this case, free webinars are a great way to showcase your skills, knowledge, and coaching philosophy to potential clients. You can then measure how many webinar registrants sign up for your coaching package.
Let’s say you offer potential clients a free discovery call to get to know you better and see how you can best serve them. In this case, you could take a look at how many of these discovery calls result in potential clients hiring you as a coach.
Knowing what kinds of actions you’d like your potential customers to take can simplify your marketing strategy. This way, you’ll see what you specifically need to focus on to create a sales conversion rate that works for your business.
Know Your Audience
It’s vital to know your product and the goals of your business, but you also need to know your audience. What are their pain points? How can your business address these pain points better than another business can?
Arguably the most fundamental (and free) tool to help you with knowing your audience is Google Analytics.
Google Analytics helps you track many aspects of your website activity. This includes session duration and the geographical location your users are coming from.
Google Analytics also allows you to segment your audience. This means that you can separate users into groups.
For example, you could separate those who have previously purchased a product from you and offer them a loyalty discount. You could also separate those who have never purchased from you and offer them 10% off their first purchase.
Aim for a Smooth User Experience
No matter how valuable your product is, you need to make it easy for your user to navigate your website, emails, and sales pages. If any of these are confusing, users may just quit and go somewhere else.
This is true especially if they’re new customers and you haven’t built up trust with them yet.
A smooth user experience lets your message or product speak for itself without distracting or irritating your potential customers.
Here is where you can use Google Analytics to see which of your pages perform the worst. You can check where your site visitors might be getting confused or abandoning their shopping cart. Then, you can focus on optimizing these for ease of use.
You also want to make sure you focus on clean visuals. You could do this by using contrasting fonts, varying font sizes, and eye-catching graphics.
If you’re using WordPress, it might help to use a page builder or get the help of a web designer to make sure your website is easy to navigate.
Create Visible Contact and Purchase Pages
There’s nothing worse than having a potential customer ready to buy your product or service, having a question about it, and then being unable to contact you.
If your “contact” section is difficult to find (or even worse, the link doesn’t work), then anyone who wants to ask you a question before purchasing your product is probably going to just go to a competitor’s website, which is the last thing you want.
Even after your customer clicks on the “purchase” button, if the checkout page is slow, difficult to navigate, or is full of seemingly unnecessary fields that need to be filled out, your customer is likely to get annoyed and go elsewhere.
Even worse, they could see you as suspicious because you might be asking for your customer’s address and postal code even though they’re just purchasing a downloadable e-book.
One good place to put your contact information is on your top menu and in your footer.
That way, your customer can easily click the button to contact you wherever they are on your website. You could also include a help chat in the bottom right-hand corner if you anticipate that your potential customers might need real-time help.
Perform A/B Testing
Much like its name, A/B testing involves showing two different versions (A or B) of a webpage to two different segments of your audience. Then, you compare which version gave you the most conversions and the best results.
A/B testing is perfect for increasing conversion rate because it lets you easily compare results.
A/B testing can help you with the following:
- Changing the pricing of your products or services
- Changing some of the features of your website
- Solving the pain points of your customers
- Avoiding unnecessary risks
- Keeping users engaged on your site for longer
There are many free and paid software options to help you conduct A/B testing, like Optimizely and HubSpot. Try them out to see which one works best for you, your business goals, and your budget.
Decide What You’re Going To Test
Just like with your business goals, be clear on what conversion rate means to you so you know which pages to test. Be careful not to test too many things at once so you don’t confuse long-time users of your site with tons of changes.
Let’s say your e-commerce site has been getting many visitors to your sales page, but no one is clicking on the “purchase” button.
You might decide to redesign your sales page with a simpler layout and use A/B testing to see which version of the sales page converts better. This can help you determine if the design of the sales page was the problem, or if you need to focus on something else, like your pricing plans.
As another example, let’s say you’re using a lot of industry jargon and complex language on your website. You initially thought that your users would like it better because they’re professionals who understand the jargon, but you notice in your analytics that your bounce rate is increasing.
You could try A/B testing to see if simplified language works better on your website, and even check to see if it works better only with certain demographics.
Up Your Call to Action
A huge marketing mistake that many beginner business owners make is not including a call to action on their website. Imagine wanting to buy a product on a sales page and not seeing a “purchase” button at the bottom.
That would be incredibly annoying as a customer, and you’d probably just go to another company, right?
The moment you’ve got your audience hooked is the moment to offer a call to action. A call to action can be as simple as including a link to your contact form. It could also be a link to your coaching packages for users to browse.
Of course, a call to action could also be a button to purchase your product. However, you want to make sure that you include a purchase option at the appropriate time.
New customers may not trust you enough to buy your product right away, so the important thing is to build trust first.
You might want to offer a free mini e-book, link the potential customer to your social media, or link them to additional blog posts on your website so you can demonstrate your expertise.
For emails, let’s say you are providing information of value. In this example, you’re telling your audience the top 5 things you wish you knew when you started your Amazon e-commerce business.
A good call to action in this email would be to invite your audience to check out your blog post that goes into a detailed, step-by-step tutorial (and to give them the link, of course).
At the same time, you don’t want to cover your website pages in “purchase” buttons or other calls to action because you could come off as pushy.
Instead, one clear, visible, and well-placed call to action at the end of your content is more than enough. Remember, you always want to build trust and show your expertise. Your goal is to entice potential customers to learn more about your product or service and eventually convert.
Send Follow-up Emails
When a customer purchases your product, it’s a good idea to send at least one follow-up email. Even something as simple as “I’m so glad you joined our course, and I’m excited to help you grow your business” builds trust with your reader and makes them feel like a human customer, not a number.
It’s also a good idea to offer an email address they can contact you at if they have any questions about your product.
It may be worthwhile to consider sending an email to your customers detailing how they can get the most of your online course. This could include scheduling tips or a link to a private Facebook group so that your customers can connect with like-minded people and discuss the course concepts.
Customers always want to feel appreciated, not like they are on a conveyor belt. Set up your emails so that they’re personalized with the person’s name, and send emails that can further support them while they use the product or service they’ve purchased from you.
Putting your customers first is key to increasing conversion rate, and making them feel valued and satisfied with your service should be a priority.
Optimize Your Sales Funnel
A sales funnel is composed of all the steps someone takes from browsing your website to making a purchase. The steps of the sales funnel are usually shown in this order: awareness→interest and evaluation→desire→action.
All of these steps should feel natural, and none of them should feel overly “salesy” or pushy.
Especially if you have new customers, you don’t want to drive them away because they feel forced to buy your product. If your product is expensive, your customers may need some time to decide whether they will invest in your product or service.
Consider offering a free trial of your product and asking customers to purchase the product at the end of the trial. You could even ask them to fill out an optional feedback form.
This way, even if the customer doesn’t end up purchasing your product, you now have valuable feedback to help you make your product even better.
Remember, most customers (especially new ones) aren’t likely to buy your product after only one contact with you, particularly if your product is expensive.
In these initial stages of the sales funnel, focus on building trust with your potential clients or customers, establish yourself as an authority, and show your customers why your product or service is the best choice.
Test All Links and Forms Before Your Site Goes Live
When you’ve spent months crafting the perfect website, you probably can’t wait to be done with the design and launch it already. However, with so many moving parts, it’s easy for something to get missed.
This could be a broken link, a signup page that doesn’t work, or a missing menu option.
You need to test all of these components before your site goes live. If you’re a new company, one of the worst things you can do is showcase yourself as untrustworthy. Broken links, misspellings, and missing elements show your audience that you’re unprofessional.
You don’t want your audience to think that you don’t care about your product, or even worse, your customers.
Instead, show your audience that you are professional and that your website was created with the customer in mind. This helps build trust with your users and will keep them coming back.
When your audience sees how much effort you’ve put into creating a smooth and functional website, it’ll be easier for them to trust that your products and services have been created with just as much care.
Add Testimonials
Another important factor for building trust with your audience is adding testimonials by happy customers. If you’re just starting out, you could offer your product or service free of charge or at a discount in exchange for an honest review or testimonial.
Otherwise called “social proof,” adding testimonials increases the chance that new customers will purchase your product or service.
Of course, it’s important to have testimonials that are honest and were written by your customers. If all of the testimonials look the same, then you could look suspicious and the testimonials might seem fake.
Any time you have a particularly happy customer, make sure to ask them for a testimonial. If they’ve emailed you to tell you how happy they are with your product, this is the prime moment to ask for one, as your product is fresh in their minds.
Provide Unbeatable Value
You might have heard the phrase “overdeliver” in business and marketing circles. While you should still get paid fairly for your product or service, you want to deliver more value than your customer is expecting.
Providing value means giving your customers a great product and service, but it can also be in the form of bonuses your customer wasn’t expecting to get.
You can include an e-book, printable, or template for free in your product package. You can also create a special PDF workbook to accompany your online course.
Providing unbeatable value shows that you are focused on making the customer happy and sets you apart from the competition.
And once you’re able to convert new customers into returning customers with your unbeatable value, there’s a high chance they’ll tell others and spread the word of your amazing products and services.
Let Bear Fox Marketing Help You Increase Your Conversions Today
Conversion rate optimization might look complicated at first, but it’s easier to start than you think. As long as you’re clear on your business goals and you keep the customer in mind, you’re well on your way to increasing your bottom line.
We hope this guide gives you some helpful tips for increasing conversion rate so you can turn potential customers into ones who will stick around for a lifetime.
Whether you’re a new business owner or an established business looking to increase sales, Bear Fox Marketing can help you with increasing your conversion rate. Contact us today and let us know how our dedicated team can help you reach your business goals.