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Top tips for increasing website conversions

Here’s some helpful improvements for website conversions! The way to succeed in business is to stay ahead, continuously grow and develop. Areas of your business you want to grow include lead growth and new enquiries through your website if not sell products.

There is a lot to be considered if you would like your business to well online, turn SEO into traffic, visitors into customers, customers into regular buyers, referrals into reputations and more. In an area of advertising and marketing that is developing with the technology available, such as search engines (or Google to put in a different phrase of saying it), we need to adapt to change. It’s required to adapt to change or be left behind; consistent analysis for our websites’ performances and implementations of numerous quantities of small yet critical changes consist in the new developments. The web domains when targeted specifically at the right demographics and social groups to fit your products, will hit higher revenue payments. Flag down traffic to come into your domain and hit them with a visual environment that is made appealing, measured to the people you funnel in. A proportion of your website visitors will access the site from an organic search, PPC, offline advertisements, a referring website or marketing campaign etc. therefore it is important that when they arrive at your website, their overall experience and expectations are being fulfilled. Here are 30 cool tips to increase your website conversions, regardless of what your objectives are there is something for everyone:

1. A-B testing

Converting a user’s click shouldn’t cost a lot of money and an open-source platform ran by Google called Analytics is a joy; there are plenty of programs to assist you with testing your web pages and optimising though. A-B testing is also known as split testing and is where you vary one element at a time only, but this could be where you place your Buy Now button, or some other Call to Action. Ideas such as what day of the week gets you better results, conversion-dependent on items such as coupons, newsletter campaigns, hard sells, soft sells, is it better to use a company’s name rather than humans and so on are all A-B testing Gold dust. Products that provide this type of solution for your website includes:

• Visual Website Optimizer – A good website, best service, complete with case studies and a free trial!
• Adobe Test and Target – Optimise campaigns and design and test your offers.
• Google Analytics – Covers, with no strategy for email campaigns, creating web pages or self-hosting.

2. Multivariate Testing

If you can successfully run A-B testing, seen in the previous step, then the same principles apply to Multivariate Testing. However where A/B testing is simple gem to implement, you should be aware of the extra effort and time that is involved in Multivariate testing – but more results and flocks more money is the grade we work on. Variations on design and factors of a web page such as different configurations on the same are what makes Multivariate a complex but key component to converting.

3. Can’t complete the sale right now?

This is a top priority if you have an ecommerce business, because if you are seeing that clients are leaving – it could be that there is another offer elsewhere, or that they are just making that first-time look at the shops (a behaviour that clients are known to do); then have them at least fill out personal email details somewhere within the site. It is also critical if you are a restaurant for example, to obtain users’ data, and then start sending special offers. Start emailing but don’t merely offer them a newsletter as this is done-with! Spice up with something sizzling, like the hot and juicy offer of the week; ascertain the website visitors’ interest!

4. Design Stylish and Chic

From the seeded beginnings of your web domains objectivity, your visual masterpiece must be creative, modern and ahead of its competitors. You also would need to keep in line with your corporate brand identity, while being a little crafty and digitally intuitive for ideas. After all, refreshing your web design is a great way of modernising your company, even if your product has generally, remained the same. Banners and buttons all add to the buzz and heighten the expectations of your product.

5. F-Reading

Scientifically studies on user’s reading patterns have demonstrated the relationship between the natural eye movements of the web visitor and positioning on a page. Text copy is seen as less important because it is only scanned, so headlines and images gain the most attention and content lead proportionately. Creating an F-shaped grid, take primary positions in the top 2 rows of the page and left hand-side and fill it with branding, navigation, banners, headlines and calls to action.

6. Make the user stay alert!

Take it that every visitor will have 8 seconds to make a reaction or leave your website. That means in that 8 seconds they need to be blown away by your groovy visual impact. Keep up to scratch with the users demand, have the page load 100% in a nanosecond. Scrap any heavy loading Flash, jQuery or garbage banners that take too long to load, won’t need it. Make the time valuable with a fresh principal, strong vocabulary and headlines, say no more? Be clear and concise with what you are offering, it helps out with what you are trying to achieve.

7. Phone Sales-line Number

You need the call ringing off the hook with enquiries, so put your phone number on the landing page where everyone can see. There may be a Freephone number or whatever, but time is imperative so get the sign simple and effective and get them ringing now! Set a direct line to sales, customer services and xyz across the footer.

8. Use testimonials and references

Give a list of happy buyers, being gracious and thankful of their receipt from you. The fact you have a list of people who have reposted their satisfaction back, onto the website shows you deliver satisfaction, good value guaranteed and perfect harmony. Make sure testimonials and references include a date so customers can see that the website is continually being updated and has been selling online for a while.

9. CPA (Cost per acquisition)

Challenge your investment capital to improve margin and conversion. You will be looking to acquire new customers, each new buyer being a new acquisition. Manage your output of PPC, product price competitively, marketing and advertising. Ensure all of these elements to be highly targeted and/or uniquely designed.

10. Email Marketing

Thank god for email marketing, it is a lot cheaper and convenient then telesales and much better value for money. We all do email marketing to drive our sales leads forwards, but do you need to take a step back to have more purity with your design? Again F-Reading is a structural prerequisite for the campaign, along with coloured sections, repeat CTA (Banner Link placed lower down the page), large headed areas, large photo image (preferably with people looking at you) as it causes more of a connectivity to the viewer.

11. Mobile Friendly Campaigns

Email usage on mobile and tablet devices are on the up, so developing a campaign that is viewable on a mobile phone is growing ever more important to the mailer campaign then just targeting success on email client readers like Outlook Express. Once again using an optimised template that works well on any Google Android, Apple iOS or Blackberry OS operating system is a must.

12. PPC Google Adwords

PPC marketing is becoming more important with SEO, particularly as Google Penguin and Panda seem to have killed some of the traditional directory-based ways of building organic search. Review your investment in PPC ROI, and monitor Long-tail Keyword Optimisation, Landing Page and Text Optimisation, Quality Score, Text Ad Optimisation, Click through Rate and reduction in use of negative keywords as they are all requirements of PPC.

13. Retargeting

Clean white space banners and less jargon talking, do the best to upsell your product and be direct with the customer, tell them what to do and order them with might. People react when given strict short, concise orders, no wooly lines with half a page of garble. Design some good banners with less animation, as they don’t have much time to look at them, users are aware of banners and try to avoid them, so try and tone things down and keep it simple.

14. Industry Journals

Being a corporate firm who specialises in B2B or a B2C you have ample number of consumer content magazines to get your name published. With a range of local, national and international commerce magazines, industry journals offer an incredibly diverse breadth and depth of content. Seek out placements for guest articles and advertisements in the sectors that really apply to your product.

15. Newspaper Advertising

Once again you have the choice to choose from a very large or a small geographic location. National newspaper advertising can cover a huge amount of coverage for you. A class field in a national newspaper can cost from £30 per scc (single column centimetre) but it can be up to £80.

16. TV/Radio Advertising

Estimate your budget for broadcasting live on air, and focus on who your target audience will be so selecting the best time of day for your listeners is important. Contact sales managers at TV and radio stations in your area to arrange a salesperson to come and visit you. Talk to other local business people to find out their views and experiences with broadcast advertising.

17. Celebrity Endorsements

There are a number of benefits from choosing celebrity endorsements, such as reputation believability, likability etc. which forms a relationship between the endorser and the product in unit connection. Various studies on Celebrity Endorsers indicate a heightened activity in the brain associated with emotions of affection when consumers are presented with an endorsed product.

18. Segmenting customers

Splitting up the purchasers of women’s and men’s gift items is a great way to hunt down and attract the senses of 2 very different demographics. Grouping off your customers and leads in to segments enables better qualities in the economies of scale and budget. It will enable you to focus more on the positives within the groups and see where the strengths and weaknesses are with your branding and marketing.

19. Create some promotions

At Corporate Gifts we start up an email campaign retailing specific items such as executive silver computer items with a free sample order of silver promotional usb flash drives and run a few split tests for the product shots, headlines, and colour ways to coincide with our emailing, what would you do to your promotion to test its conversion success capabilities?

20. Watch out for Google updates

Spy on Google regularly and read up on the updates across the net. Google’s recent updates include replacing Google Website Optimizer with Google Analytics Content Experiments. Although it uses similar interfaces and shares numbers of Optimizer’s features, Content Experiments simply integrates with analytics, but with only A-B testing allowed, no multivariate testing.

21. Offer your clients rewards for referrals

A little gift card idea with some money inside could spread the positives about your products, and sign up a few friends and family members to add numbers. In the promotional image for this Visa, you can see there are bonus offers for setting up referrals. B2B may offer higher credit ratings in exchange for new business leads, whereas direct retailers may offer a discount, free gift or monetary incentive.

22. Purchase some referrals

When you and an associate tie up so many business deals with each other, you may as well go on to share each other’s client. You know what pays the bills and when you can’t get any more new business through your own trade fairs and sales people, speak to your trading partners as well. Alternatively there are agencies where you can buy these leads for targeting, just try Google!

23. Seasonal Development

Take a bit of inspiration from the sun, snow and the Easter bunny. “Give your heart a valentine” and “know what to give your mother on mother’s day”, target every plausible commercial trigger to send conversion signals to your customers. Marketing seasonal times, internationally or locally to your area bringing forth great fortunes. You should see on Google Analytics how your website visits are impartial to times of the year where you see a sharp increase in visits, enquiries, and sales, and better your marketing for this season!

24. Special Offers

As well as seasonal offers, denote some special offers where your best items have been reduced. Lower pricing can enhance your sales by over 200% so always demonstrate to your buyer that you offer incredible low deals on some (if not all) items in your product ranges. Plus pamper up any sales you have with all the marketing you can think of following the steps provided in this article.

25. Social Media

Pick the right kind of networking site to suit your business. Many SME’s choose to avoid Facebook because the profile of their brand is too small. Use Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter to get socialising with your clients and then try getting users from your client’s network too.

26. Targeted Suggestions

Cross sell items that target certain customers and increase shopping cart sizes. Hopefully you are using either Magento or your own highly developed in-house platform to sell anything over the net. Back up any product with a categorised cross sale and pay particular attention to cross-selling when the client has their item in the cart.

27. Basket Abandonment

Adapting the design of your website goes beyond just the visual aesthetics that please the eye; you need an easy to use and streamlined shopping cart to deliver the highest conversion rate. Software such as Sale Cycle can monitor your shopping basket, capturing the customer’s email address, name and abandoned items from their checkout. Keep payment methods simple.

28. CRM systems

An invaluable tool for efficient day-to-day tasks. CRM systems help you to build a complete understanding about your clients/customer which in turn helps you to determine your objectives. They can integrate everything in one place to monitor all of your conversions from retail to email responses and customer service.

29. Visitor Behaviour

Retailers can increase conversion rates and revenue by adapting product recommendations and other content based on valuable visitor behavioural data such as: The past and current behaviour of individual visitors, The behaviour of others (“crowd wisdom”), Visitor preferences such as sizes, colours, styles, etc.

30. Reach your audience

Once you have created a substantial multitude of user-groups, send those groups repeated messages to recapture their attention. When you understand what makes particular clients tick you can convince them to do what you want more vigorously. You may find for example male user groups need a more macho tone to female groups, older age groups are more family orientated then fiery young age groups, B2B is corporate B2C is more personal etc., the list could go on and on – quite literally!

Conclusion

Those are just a few easy examples that can and will increase the profitability and loyalty of your customers. Not only that, but these tips will set you apart from other providers who haven’t caught on. Written by Daniel Vince our Guest Blogger of Corporate Gifts Online, a business gifts Specialist Corporation.

Image Credit – Swen-Peter Ekkebus