Traffic doesn’t do your bottom-line any good unless it converts. You want visitors to your website to take action, not just land and leave. Whether it is signing up to a service or subscription, booking a session, making a purchase or placing an order – these are actual goals where your site’s visitors become customers.
Tips to Get More Conversions & Sales from Your Website
- Define your value proposition
What’s in it for your customers? Why should they pick you instead of your competition?
Just listing your products on your homepage doesn’t cut it. Tweaking images, fonts and sizes, while good for aesthetics, doesn’t answer the question. Once the visitors land on your websites, they should clearly see your value proposition. It’s a critical conversion factor, and is two-fold:
- How the client stands to benefit from your company. This should be clear right from the homepage
- How the specific product/service gives them value. This should be seen on the landing pages or the products or services being sold
Extra tip: Skip the jargon and K.I.S.S. – Keep it simple, stupid
Unnecessary complexities are a turn-off. Short and clear sells.
Remember that you’re writing for people. Wording your value proposition in a short, clear phrase that delivers the message quickly is recommended, compared to lengthy paragraphs that try to persuade the reader.
- Build trust
Sure, you provide a professional service and/or high-quality products, but bookings or sales from your website are still low. Why? Trust is one of the common problems. Do your website’s visitors trust it? Does your online presence build confidence in your brand? Here are some of the aspects that come into focus:
- Prove you’re a real business
At the bare minimum, the visitors should be able to ascertain that there is a legitimate business or organisation behind the site. Listing the physical address, including imagery of the offices, membership numbers with industry bodies – these help in increasing trust. Posting relevant employee photos and their accompanying bios is also beneficial.
- Information provided should be easy to authenticate.
Whether it is testimonials from previous clients, data in your blogs needing citations and links to the source material – readers should be able to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.
- Flaunt your experts
Highlight the experts in the business, including providing their credentials. Include affiliations that your business has with already-existing and respected bodies.
Extra tip: Be careful with the external links directing from your site. Links to other sites that are less credible will negatively affect your business by association.
- Tone down on promotional material
Flooding your homepage with popups and blinking banners will be a disservice to your business. Just like other modes of advertising, when pop-ups are presented to the website’s user in the wrong way and at the wrong time, they will be intrusive and an outright turn-off. In fact, they tend to be associated with spam and scams. If there must be ads on your website, then the sponsored content hold be clearly distinguished from your content, and positioned with a minimalist touch – not crowding them all over the landing pages.
- Make navigation a breeze
Booking that appointment or making a purchase from the website should be a walk in the park. Users should not have to keep looking for which buttons to click or how to proceed to the next step. Here:
- Be clear and concise when directing the users, telling them what to do next.
- Avoid having too many options. The more choices there are, the higher the chances that the visitor will choose not to do anything at all. Do you have lots of products? Having a filter function that allows users to indicate the features they are looking for will enable them to get to their desired options without taking lots of time.
Unnecessary form fields should also be removed. With people having a shorter attention span than goldfish, too many form fields will be a hurdle to the user, reducing the chances of them completing the sign-up/purchase/booking process. You don’t want to test their patience. An email and two or three more fields that are critical will do.
