You may be using Google Adsense, Google Adwords and SEO techniques to drive traffic to your website, but if no one wants to buy what you are selling, your online business isn’t going to get anywhere.
Conversion optimization is the process of converting visitors into paying customers.
Ways to convert visitors to customers:
1. Keep it simple:
- if your visitors are unclear about how to proceed, or about what you want them to do, they are going to go elsewhere
- take a look at your site, it is user-friendly, straightforward and easy to navigate?
- use bullets whenever possible to describe your products and offers
- make your Add to Cart buttons stand out
- put the price in the visitor’s currency
2. Payment options – make checkout and payment an easy and relatively painless process by:
- offering multiple payment options if you can.
- making the most of 3rd party services, such as PayPal, Google Checkout
- make the checkout process simple with as few clicks a possible (*remember, the more pages you add in between the sales page and checkout, the more dangerous your sales process becomes)
3. Use visual aids to illustrate anything you say/claim. In additional to product descriptions,
- use photos, videos and demos to showcase your product
- show charts, facts, samples, reviews and endorsement to back up your claims
4. Customer Service – in order to boost your sales, you’ll need to project a big company image as much as you can possibly afford to:
- offer live assistance, such as live chat, to give visitors a way to reach out to you in real-time
- offer a toll-free number and make it visible
5. Security – establish trust:
- is there a “padlock” in the browser representing an SSL certificate?
- display save shopping logos such as Hackersafe and Better Business Bureau
- increase the trust factor by including phone number and address along with other company information
6. Communicate with your customers – they can tell you what you need to know
- make it easy for customers to send feedback
- you should also welcome feedback from visitors who are leaving your site without making a purchase – to find out why
7. Incentives – offer special discounts and promote them heavily:
- sometimes a 5 or 10% discount may be just the encouragement first-time buyers need to make a purchase
- curb shopping cart abandonment and purchase delay by restating discounts and offer on the order forms
- make discounts and sales known the moment your visitors enter your website; you can even include information about special offers in your website’s META description tags – the text that most search engines use to describe your site in search results