Make More Money Online: 7 Tips for Increasing Your Conversion Rate

You want to increase sales, don’t you? Forget about search engine optimization and social media marketing and start focusing on your conversion rate.

It has always shocked me how some companies will spend tens of thousands of dollars per month on search engine optimization, but fail at converting sales. To me, it’s a no-brainer. It’s so difficult to get potential clients to your website. Once they’re there, why not make it easy for them.

If you have a website that gets 500 visitors per day and converts at a rate of 2%, your website earns 10 sales per day – not bad. Now, if you want to increase your revenue you have two choices:

1. Increase Traffic
2. Increase Conversion Rate

Option 1: Increase Traffic

In order to increase sales by 50% you will have to increase your daily visitors to 750 per day. This is obtainable, but will almost certainly cost quite a bit of money and time.

750 visitors @ 2% conversion = 15 sales

Option 2: Increase Conversion Rate

The same results can be achieved quickly by increasing your conversion rate by only 1% to a total conversion rate of 3%.

500 visitors @ 3% conversion = 15 sales

Which do you think is easier?

The typical conversion rate for websites selling products or services is generally between 0.5% and 8.0%, depending on the sector. Some sectors and destination websites can be much higher. For example, the flower delivery industry generally converts in the double digits whereas high-end merchants are at the lower end of the scale. Below are 7 great tips that will help you increase your conversion rates today!

7 Tips for Increasing Conversion Rates

1. Keep It Simple

Do your visitors know what to do when they visit your website? Do you have clear “calls to action” on how they should sign-up or order your products or service?

Don’t over crowd your pages with jargon that distract customers. List your core features and benefits and ensure your “Order Now” or Sign Up Now” buttons are large enough for people to see. These buttons should be above the fold and highly visible.

2. Pricing

This sounds simple, but we constantly consult with merchants who have never tested different pricing models. Often they have had the same prices in place for years.

One merchant we worked with was selling a service at $100.00 per year. It was a good service and received numerous sign-ups each month. We suggested lowering the price by .05 to $99.95 and their sales nearly doubled with the same amount of traffic.

The .95 cent ending is an easy one, but isn’t the only pricing strategy. Try different price points and incentives.

3. Guarantee / Return Policy

Most people are still a little skeptical about shopping online and want reassurances about their purchases. What type of guarantee or return policy do you have? You may want to try different policies and see how this affects your conversion rate.

4. Don’t Worry About Lowering Conversion

Some companies are happy with their conversion rates, but have never tested or implemented anything to see the difference. They are creatures of habit. They’re afraid if they change something their sales will go down and are often part of the “if it’s not broken why fix it” mentality.

Little do they know they could be making more money if they were willing to analyze and test new designs and ad copies. The best part is, if the new design and testing does not work, you can always go back to your old design.

5. Remove Excess Links

Once you get a visitor to your website, keep them there! Don’t give them the opportunity to click on other links that are unnecessary. Preferably there shouldn’t be links to anything unrelated to you making a sale.

6. Evaluate your Shopping Cart

Some shopping carts, for lack of a better word, suck! They ask for too much information and aren’t clear about how to proceed to the next step. Most of these carts can and should be modified to make it easier for your potential clients to purchase.

7. Test, Test and More Testing

Make changes and measure the success and/or failure of your testing. You don’t have to make a complete design change to test. Changes can be simple from just making a button a different color or changing a font. We have seen conversions rates go up more than 1% just by changing the color of a “Buy Now” button.

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Topic Tags:

Getting Traffic, call to action, conversion, conversion rate, ecommerce store, pricing model, shopping cart