Whether you’re new to online sales and marketing, or just need to increase your website funnel conversions or Shopify sales, this article will help. Optimizing conversions for Shopify or sites that sell can be very challenging, especially when all the other sites around you seem to be selling like crazy and you’re not. Â What you will learn here can help boost your conversions and sales online. Here are 5Â Conversion Rate Optimization tips to increase online sales.
Even if your website is already as successful as it is, these tips are going to boost your website to the next level!
Conversion Rate Optimization
In this article, we’re going to uncover 5 conversion rate optimization tips that you should be actively implementing on your E-commerce, Shopify, or other sites that sell either products or services.
1. User engagement and analytics
We’ve all heard this before I’m sure, and if you’re like me, you probably obsess over your analytics, but taking a good hard look at your analytics data can help turn an unprofitable landing or sales page into a highly profitable one. It’s all about the analytics:
- Time on site – Your user’s average visit duration seen in Google Analytics can tell you a lot about what’s going on. Â In fact, we believe that this may be one of the most important things to look at when deciding how to increase conversions. Â A smart online marketer will look at the visitors time on site for each page and determine if there are any issues. For example, if someone is bouncing early, it could mean that the page is not loading fast enough for them. Â Site speed or loading time is one of the LARGEST reasons for visitors leaving your site. Improving this can lead to huge gains in visitor time on site which leads to increased online sales.
- Visitor behavior – If you notice in your analytics data that visitors aren’t following through with a step in the purchase process you can identify problems. Â For example, if you can see someone viewing their cart and checking out, but then doesn’t check out, this can tell you a lot about what’s going wrong and how to fix it. Â Creating a friction-less experience that solidifies trust in your brand can help increase the probability that someone will purchase. Using trust badges or seals, testimonials, and money back guarantee promises are just a few ways to help increase sales when it comes to visitor behavior on a checkout page.
- Tracking conversions – It’s very important to track your conversions on your Shopify store or website. Â If you don’t know what people are clicking and how they are interacting with your page, how can you ever take notes to change or alter your design or layout? Â Using Google tags on buttons or elements can help you track the conversion of each aspect of your site, even down to the micro level of which elements of the page a user clicks. The first step to conversion rate optimization is to know your conversions in analytics.
When you have all the data and analytics from a significant number of users it can help formulate your plan to increase conversions and sales. Â After you know what’s preventing sales and conversions on your site you can work on the design or layout.
2. Start with trust and authority
Visitors who feel like they can trust a website or sales will end up opting into or purchasing the product. Â One thing that you can do to improve your visitor’s trust in your website is by adding Trust Seals. Â As many as 61% of participants in a recent trust seal survey said they decided not to purchase a product because it was missing trust seals. When you add trust seals or badges to your website that involve being approved by a third party, it gives you more authority. There are many types of trust seals and companies who offer verification badges:
- Trust seals – TrustLock recently did an internal research study on trust seals and their effectiveness and came to the conclusion that sales and conversions can be increased by 62% if implemented on sales pages or checkouts. TrustLock offers a Business Verification seal/badge at a very low price and can help increase your authority and legitimacy. TrustLock also offers an SSL secure verification and Privacy Safe seal which can be great if placed in locations where users are entering in sensitive information. Including an SSL verification seal or privacy, the seal can greatly reduce your cart abandonment and traffic bounces. Â See example below – (Learn More: TrustLock.co)
- All of these can help eliminate people ’s doubts about your legitimacy and help increase your sales greatly. Other more expensive trust seals include the BBB, Symantec, and TRUSTe. (You can also read our recent post about trust seals and their effectiveness)
- Authority building logos – It’s a great idea to use the perfect combination of trust seals along with authority building logos. Â For example, if you accept Visa and MasterCard or PayPal, it’s a great idea to put the respective logos next to your other trust seals like TrustLock (Example is seen in the previous image above) if you do this, you end up doubling your visitor’s reasons to trust you. When visitors see logos like PayPal and Visa it helps them feel comfortable since these are often seen on checkouts and sales pages. Â If they see this and also see other reasons to trust you, it gives them enough reasons NOT to doubt you and you’ll have a greater chance of making the sale on your website, Shopify store or sales funnel.
- Tell visitors why they should buy – This is often overlooked, but it’s a great way to remind customers of what you promise them and why they should buy from you. Â For example creating a custom text that says “100% money back guarantee” in combination with other third-party seals like TrustLock, or Business, SSL or Privacy Verification can give people even more reasons to put their trust in you. Â Stating everything that makes you the best in a non-obtrusive way near points of pressure like entering credit card info, filling out the form with personal details etc, can make the difference of someone purchasing, or leaving your site, never to return.
Showing your visitors that you can be trusted with verification seals in the form of a trust badge in combination with key reasons why they should buy, is a great way to increase your sales in a massive way. When visitors trust you, they’ll be more likely to tell their friends also, which can equate to even more sales.
3. Page design & content matters more than you think.
It’s easy for us to get excited about our own design, but if we don’t ask others for the feedback we can be making a huge mistake. Design can be a huge reason for a visitor leaving if the page layout or checkout page makes them feel uncomfortable. People don’t want to feel uncomfortable and they often shy away from sites they don’t trust. Â If your site makes anyone question your legitimacy or your professionalism, it will lead to a direct drop in conversions and sales – you don’t what that.
Design tips to help you optimize your conversions and increase sales:
- What does the user see when they first see your site? – It’s important to really think hard about this and determine if your design is giving users the best experience at the moment they first see your site. First impressions are important in every walk of life and your landing page, sales page, or checkout page should be thoughtful when it comes to the user’s point of view.
- Be clear and concise – It’s easy to go on and on about what makes you the best, but it’s important to dig deeper into what your visitor wants. If you can put yourself in their shoes it can make a world of difference when you design your pages.
- Create different versions of landing pages – If you create different landing pages that target different groups it can help you win sales and boost conversions. It’s important to realize that what might work for one group of people may not convert so well to another demographic. You can also use A/B split testing to find the best design or page layout that is converting the best.
- Colors and psychology – It’s also important to look at the colors being used on your website. Â Are the colors you are using creating the actions you want? You can help increase your sales and conversions by taking note to color psychology and adapting your design to it.
- Orange – Orange works best for purchase buttons, or buy buttons.
- Yellow – The color works best at grabbing people’s attention.
- Red – Red colors used in your design gives urgency, use this for sales or timed deals
- Blue – If you notice many banks use the color blue; this is the ‘trust’ color
- Black – Â This color denotes wealth or opulence and helps convey status
- Purple – Purple is a calming color and is known for its soothing aspects
It’s important to remember and follow the 70-30 rule which states that 30% of your design elements could reduce over 90% of your conversions or sales. If you can work on improving that 30%, miracles can happen!
4. Listen to your customers
When you’ve already done everything you can to increase your conversions by optimizing the design, inserting reasons for customers to trust you, sometimes it helps to get peoples opinion. Â You can do this in a number of ways:
- Solicit feedback – After someone has purchased, ask them questions regarding their experience on your site.
- Give incentives for filling out a survey – You can give your visitors a deal, or a discount if they give you feedback. This can help you get in contact with people and at the same time receive valuable information that can be used to increase your sales or conversions.
- Icon/button feedback – If visitors don’t want to fill out a form, try a different kind of survey by using buttons or emoticons that make it simple and easy for visitors to give their opinions.
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By using the feedback you receive from your visitors and customers you can begin to plan how you will adapt to better meet their needs and future sales will follow.
4. Pricing strategies
If you’ve ever overlooked your pricing, it’s a good idea to take another look. Â Pricing can give your visitors a reason to either leave or stay. Since most buyers are interested in the bottom line, the price of whatever you’re selling is very important and in many cases will either make or break the sale.
- “cheaper” isn’t the best idea sometimes – It’s important not to think that just because something is cheap, it will sell faster. Often times, the lowest priced item is not what ends up selling and online marketers are discovering that people are not as interested in the cheapest price, but they want the most value. Value is what people seek and sometimes a cheap price tag can indicate that your product is not “high quality” or doesn’t have the “value” that a visitor might want.
- Discounts for multiple items – If you have tiered pricing, or an online e-commerce store, giving people incentives to buy more won’t just increase your sales, but it can also give your shoppers more ratification with their purchase because they feel they got better “value.”
- Reference pricing at your bottom tier – When you have tiered pricing for a service, always refer to the lowest price on the plan in your header text or marketing material. “Starts at $9/mo” is much more attractive than “Get all our bonus options for $29.99/mo)
- Monthly pricing, not yearly pricing – People are scared of commitment and love flexibility when it comes to monthly/yearly plans. Paying attention to this can cause less friction and end up increasing your conversions and sales.
- Become the most attractive price – The last and most important part of perfecting your pricing strategy really boils down to one question — “Do you have the most attractive price?”. When you have the most attractive price (not always the cheapest) it gives you a leg up over your competition which will result in increased sales and conversions.
Don’t let your pricing be a reason for people not to buy when you polish your pricing strategy it can help you win when it comes to conversion rate optimization to increase sales.
Now is your chance to shine
Now it’s your turn. Review your analytics, choose a trust seal for your site, build your authority and credibility, and design/edit your website to optimize your conversions. Remember, customers, want value and quality from reliable and trustworthy websites.