If you own an online store, few thingxs are more frustrating than drawing in quite a lot of visitors, but noticing they don’t add up to conversions. After all, visits are nice, but conversions are what pay the bills! So many things can influence how a potential customer perceives your website, so there are a lot of things you can do to make your site as shopping friendly as possible. In this article we talk about five things you can do to better your percentage of conversions. Are you ready to start selling more?
Table of Contents
1. Start looking at behaviour analytics
It’s 2020 and data of your customers is everything for an online store. There’s so much you can learn from data on how your customers behave on your website. If you’re not connected to a ‘behaviour analytics’-tool like HotJar, Crazy Egg or FullStory, you’re missing out! Take for instance HotJar, undoubtedly the most well known behavior analytics and website optimization software. The tool collects all kinds of user feedback, for example through heatmaps which show you which parts of your product pages people hover over and which parts they ignore. HotJar also allows you to survey your visitor, get visitor recordings and more. All this is super important data that allows you to make changes to your website and checkout process. There are so many things these tools can help you with. For instance, if your customer service tells you customers keep asking the same question – something that’s mentioned on your product pages -, a heatmap can show whether or not people actually read that information. If they don’t, you have to put it more visible on the page!
2. Two words: email marketing
So, do you put effort into email marketing yet? Or do you only send emails with confirmations that someone bought something? Email marketing is so important for any online shop – but you have to do it right. Instead of sending emails with only promotions, make them look good and add blogs, tips and send birthday wishes. Sending good introduction email to your potential customers will raise the response rate and ever bring more sales. Empty basket emails also work, even though they’re often considered to be a bit annoying. Try to collect a big list of customers’ email addresses by asking them for it or offering a percentage off their first order if they subscribe to your mailing list.
3. A/B-test colors, fonts and more
Did you know there’s a whole psychology of colors? Red, for example, creates urgency for limited-time sales, while blue is considered a trustworthy color. Changing the color of your ‘add to bag’-button might already influence your conversion rate. Same goes with fonts and where you put certain things on your website. The best way to figure out what helps your conversions, is doing lots and lots of A/B-tests. And while you’re at it, don’t forget to A/B-test your checkout process. Nothing’s more annoying than seeing in Analytics people enter your checkout process, but don’t proceed to buy anything. It might have something to do with the fact that your delivery is too expensive or the fact that you don’t offer enough payment methods, but maybe your checkout process is just too long … with A/B-tests you can check if small tweaks have a positive effect!
4. Build an identity with unique selling points
Be honest – what makes you so different from your competitors? Some customers only look at prices, but many also look at other things, such as how fast they can get their item home, whether or not your company answers questions easily and more. What makes you different are your unique selling points or USP’s. Putting attention on these USP’s can influence the decision process of your potential customers. Take a look at FMTC Safety: they’re the online provider of safety courses that never cancel their courses – even if only one person books a course. So if someone’s looking for a Maritime training or STCW courses, this fact is mentioned time and time again on the website. If you allow your customers to send packages back for free or if you always answer your emails in less than a day, use that to build your identity!
5. Show your face
Do you have a blank, basic ‘about us’-page? Start designing a new one asap! People love reading the story of a brand and seeing the faces of the people running a website. Take a nice photo with your team and add some fun quotes that show who you are and why you do what you do. Don’t use a stock photo – people can recognize those from miles away!
We hope your conversions increase with our five tips!