Mastering Digital Strategies – Part 3
When it comes to online marketing, boosting your conversion rate is one of the most important things to do well. Although it’s great to have abundant inbound traffic to your site or page, if you don’t have the ability to convert this into more valuable interactions, your traffic is likely to remain as such – traffic. So how can we encourage people to convert?
User Experience – make it as easy as possible
Whenever someone interacts with your website, they are effectively experiencing your brand. This experience has the potential to largely shape their opinion of you, including whether or not they will refer you as well as their willingness to convert a sale. Although aesthetics do matter, they are just one cog in the wheel and if the usability is poor and navigation isn’t instinctive or certain forms don’t work, chances are they will report the experience as a bad one. Being such a large topic, implementing good UX design requires a whole blog of its own, but in summary, should focus on:
- Usefulness
- Usability
- Desirability
- Findability
- Accessibility
- Credibility
- Value
Multiple payment options – credit card, debit card, paypal, afterpay
Aside from convenience factors, having multiple payment options available is a must-have for sites dealing with sales and e-commerce. A study conducted by independent survey group YouGov discovered that 40% of customers (online) felt more comfortable making a purchase if there were multiple options available to do so. More interesting than this, however, was the whopping 50% who said they would abandon their cart if they couldn’t pay through their preferred avenue. Tip: by having multiple payment options that are relevant and popular among your audience, you can greatly increase conversion rates so find out how they like to pay and make sure you offer it!
Cart abandonment workflow
Getting people to visit your website can be a little tricky but getting them to actually purchase from you is where it starts to get really difficult. According to the Baymard Institute, approximately 68.63% of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts at some point. So how can we avoid this?
- Avoid things that prolong the check-out process
- Include images of what they’re purchasing at check-out
- Make navigation between your store and the cart super simple
- Have a strong call to action (at checkout)
- Have cart saving capabilities
- Don’t force customers to create an account
- Be clear about shipping costs
- Target abandoners through remarketing emails
Promotions to up-sell and cross-sell
When trying to increase conversions, it is often more effective to target existing shoppers rather than trying to acquire new ones. Upselling and cross-selling are sales and marketing techniques used to persuade customers to either buy a more expensive product or to buy an additional product that is related to the original purchase. When working with an online store, there are a number of ways you can approach these techniques – through your homepage, your product pages and finally, your cart page.
Homepage
As the customer has just landed on your site and are yet to specify their reason for being there, your homepage is where you should showcase the current promotions, deals and special offers of your entire range
.
Product Pages
As the customer has purposefully clicked through to this page and are inherently more engaged with the content, this is where it can be effective to display other similar or relevant items with the intent of upselling.
Cart Page
The cart is your last chance to boost the transaction before they either purchase or abandon so this is where you want to offer supplementary products that relate to the products in their cart, without bombarding them or prolonging the check-out process.
If you need some assistance increasing conversions, get in touch with us today on 07 5576 7841 or email us at hello@lemontreemarketing.com.au