Are you using all the website tools you can to increase conversions and sales? Are you leveraging and optimizing colors, offers, promotions, trigger events, landing pages, payment options, and more? Also, are you doing everything you can to decrease consumers’ increased anxiety about Internet shopping?
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Increasing your online conversions and sales is not an easy task. But we feel the following nine tips put together by the Multichannel Merchant editorial team will help get you on the right track.
Understand How Color & Design Effect Your Sales
What do your customers respond to? What colors and design treatments create more engagement? Which don’t? Make your most important calls-to-action, and buy buttons, stand out. This is an important element to test.
The color of your buy button is big. Several tests have shown, for example, that red is a much better color for a buy button than green. While green seems to make sense, since green on a traffic light means “go,” red communicates excitement and passion. Plus it’s a lot more visible to the human eye.
Use of Offers and Promotions
Special offers and promotions are very effective to get people to take action. Try discount offers, value add offers, length of offer, etc. Remember to test offers and promotions carefully — making sure to isolate and test each variable, so you can roll-out successfully.
Remember, you don’t need Christmas as an excuse to give your customer a deal. On Pi Day, March 14, the accessories retailer Beau Ties did a play on 3.14 with an offer of 31.4% off on its new collection of science ties. Retailers also saw April Fool’s Day as a chance to let their email subscribers know their offers were not a joke. And that ties us right into…
Timing is Everything
Create relevant promotions and merchandise offers based on season, temperature, holiday, or other trigger events.
This one seems pretty simple – like don’t create a deal for Halloween consumes on November 7. Of course, if you want to promote half-off Halloween candy, I’m all in!
But think about the weather. If you are an apparel seller, and there’s about to be a heat wave in Maine, you can target customers there with 2-day shipping with a swimwear purchase. Or if Florida is possibly going to get hit with a frost warning, a deal on fleece.
Improve Your Landing Page
It’s the most important page. It needs to be relevant and have appealing content to the user to make them stay. Also, make it clear what action/options they have for their next action. Make sure that it’s easy for them to go to get help — live chat, contact information, an easy-to-use search box/option.
You also need to make sure the landing page is ready for the smartphone user. I have honestly lost track of the number of times I’ve opened an email on my iPhone, clicked on the promotion, and was driven to a desktop page. Or for that matter, how many times I opened an email on my iPad, and and was driven to a page designed for an iPhone.
Increase Payment Options Offered
The more payment options you offer, the better chance you have of making a sale. Know what payment options you need, and are trusted, for doing business in other countries. Look at alternative payment options, in addition to credit and debit cards. Adding PayPal, Amazon Payments, ApplePay, etc. can help you to sell more.
Check Mobile Usability for Conversion & Checkout Ease
As mobile use increases from customers — make sure that all mobile usability factors that relate to conversion and sales are fine-tuned. Easy payment options, mobile-friendly email, trustmarks, and usability on mobile pages are key. Make sure to shop regularly on your own mobile site.
If you want your customers, you have to embrace the mobile customer. Mobile accounted for 45% of online traffic during the holiday season, and mobile sales accounted for nearly 23% of total ecommerce sales. And as more customer get comfortable browsing and shopping on their smartphones, those numbers will only rise.
Use of Ratings and Reviews
Ratings and reviews are always a great way to get customers comfortable with their decision, or to aid in helping customers to find just the right item. Ratings and reviews, coupled with trustmarks and well know payment options, create consumer trust in making a purchase.
Personally, I take more stock in the reviews than the ratings, although both are important. Someone could rate a product on your site 1 star when they meant to give it a 5. But with the reviews, the customers seem to tell it like it is. And that’s when you can tell if a reviewer is giving the shopper some helpful information, or just has some sort of an axe to grind.
Convert Abandoned Carts
There’s several ways to prevent customers from abandoning their shopping carts, and also ways to get people that have abandoned their shopping carts to come back and complete their transaction. About 65% of customers put at least one item in their cart but don’t complete checkout — that’s an enormous amount of revenue waiting to be converted. Use of pop-ups, email, discounts, and other re-engagement tools are very effective.
Show You Can Be Trusted
Trusted payment options and checkout go hand in hand in creating a secure environment for your customer. Get a familiar trustmark and your online sales increase considerably. That will translate to your site.