In the difficult financial situation currently, it has been noticed across industries that whilst consumers are still interested in spending and are buying, they are simply able to spend less. This is the case across all different types of businesses, whether you’re an e-commerce website or a lead generation website experiencing a decrease in enquiries. So, you may have experienced a drop in your conversion rate, like many businesses have, and you want to know how to increase it. We’re here to make sure that you are maximising the potential of the traffic coming through to your website, as it is really valuable traffic to utilise and there are some quite simple things you can do to convince them to convert, as long as you have useful and engaging content on your website. So, here are our simple ways to help you do just that!
Assess Your Conversion Funnel and Reduce Where Possible
The first thing that you should look at is your current conversion funnel. Go onto your website as if you were a user, preferably from the homepage, and see how many clicks or steps it takes you to get to checkout and then make a purchase. The same goes for lead gen, how easy is it to find a contact form and submit and enquiry.
Note all of this data down and ask other members of your team to go through the process and note down anything that you notice as an issue. Then, do the same for competitors and see how easy it is to get to checkout. From here, you should be able to identify where there are weaknesses and make improvements.
For example, on an e-commerce website like someone selling jewellery, once a user is on the homepage they should be able to access a clear navigation menu to find the page they’re looking for. From there, it should be one click to see all of the products. They should then be able to click a product they like, then add to cart. So, it should be 3 clicks from the homepage and someone should be able to have something in their cart. Then, make sure that your checkout is as straightforward as possible.
For lead generation websites like one that helps people apply for an IVA, again, they should land on the homepage, be able to clearly access more information if they want it through a mega menu, but they should really only have to click and scroll once as a maximum before they see a contact form. The contact form could even be at the top of the homepage.
This is all about making sure that when a consumer is ready to purchase or enquire, they immediately have the option to, without the conversion funnel holding them back.
Pull Reviews Into Your Website
Modern consumers are all about trust, so if they’re landing on your website for the first time and have doubts about the quality of the product or whether you are legitimate, they are very likely to leave. A great way to counteract this is to pull genuine reviews onto your website, such as from Trustpilot. There are apps that you can download on most CMS’s and you can easily pull the reviews from the platform onto your website into a designated space. This is an immediate sign of trust for a consumer, and particularly if someone is new to the brand, it could encourage them to make the purchase.
Offer Lots of Payment Options
Something else that can make a significant difference to your conversion rate is the variety of payment options that you offer. As an e-commerce website, offering just card payments where people have to manually input their details isn’t good enough and it can significantly decrease your conversion rate. You should have as many options as possible, with the classic card payments, alongside Apple Pay, Klarna, ClearPay and PayPal as a minimum. Everyone trusts different providers, for example someone might not want to make a payment unless it’s through PayPal, so offering variety is key. This won’t usually cost you anything, but can make a huge difference.
Reduce Number of Form Fields
The equivalent to offering lots of payment options for lead generation is reducing the number of form fields in your contact form. For every additional form field that a user has to fill in, they are 20% less likely to complete the form. So, strip the form back as much as possible, ideally just to someone’s Full Name, Email Address and Phone Number. Once you have this information you can contact them and utilise your fantastic customer service to encourage them to become a customer. You should notice your conversion rate increase quite significantly as long as the traffic you’re directing to your site is relevant and qualified.
Offer Time Sensitive Incentives For Discounts
Lastly, a good way to increase your conversion rate short term is to offer time sensitive incentives for discounts. This might be “Free Shipping Until 10pm” for an ecom site, or “Enquire By 10pm For 10% Off Your Service”. This will drive people to commit to the purchase or enquiry, then hopefully they will become repeat customers in the future. It’s important that you only do these few and far between, perhaps on particularly quiet days once or twice a month, to keep the sense of urgency there!
Make Your Website Faster
Today’s world is very much dominated by ecommerce, so users have so much choice when it comes to where they shop and the experience they have. As a result, if your website isn’t offering them the experience they’re looking for, they’ll simply leave, let alone browse for long enough to commit to a purchase. So, making your website work effectively and being easy to navigate are an absolute necessity and have been for a while.
The key thing that is increasingly important to your users is that your website is fast, which is also vital for your SEO in Manchester strategy! Products should load quickly, all pages should load quickly, it should be quick and easy to check out and there should be no glitches.
There are a few different ways that you can do this depending on your website. If your website is very image heavy, make sure you’re compressing. A quick and simple method is to utilise Smush, which automatically compresses images across your website. This is effective, but depending on your business, a more custom solution may be required.
Another thing you can do is minify CSS, HTML and JavaScript across your website. Reducing the amount of unused code is a really great way to speed up your website. Working with a remote developer on this would be advised!
