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Adam
Ways to Increase your Conversion Rate
August 8, 2011 AdamGetting people to visit your ecommerce website is only one half of the battle: increasing your ecommerce conversion rate is vital for all businesses, no matter how large or small they are. Read on for some useful ways you can help to increase your conversion rate.
Calls to Action
It’s amazing what a difference it makes to have some well-placed calls to action on your website and it can often make all the difference in whether or not someone buys something. You should be given them encouragement to take action and then guiding them through the process that follows.
You can split calls to action into primary and secondary focuses. Your primary focus should, of course, be to get the customer to buy the product. Your secondary focus could be something like giving them more product information. This secondary aspect of calls to action can be useful for those people who have not yet made up their minds about buying the products, and can be used to persuade them to take the next step. Make sure any such information is clearly labelled and so easily accessible, but also make sure it is clear and distinct from your primary focus.
Search Options
If you’ve got lots of products on your website, it’s vital that you take steps to ensure they’re easy to for your customers to find. Therefore it makes sense to include a search facility on your site.
Not only does this add another way that customers can get access to your products, but it can also provide them with other useful information, such as related products, prices and any special offers you might be running. You’ll also be able to find out the key search terms and phrases your customers use on your ecommerce site – something that could be very useful for your wider SEO strategy.
Clear Information
Customers appreciate it when ecommerce sites are upfront: don’t try and hide any information from them. Everything should be very clear and easy to understand, especially when that information relates to pricing.
For instance, if you add sales tax to your products, make sure this is made very clear as soon as possible or else your customers might feel as though you’ve cheated them later on. Also make sure terms and conditions are made clear alongside any offers or promotions you are running, and if you have a Unique Selling Point – let your customers know about it!
Payment
The payment options and processes can be a make or break area for ecommerce sites. Customers may abandon their shopping carts for any number of reasons, but you need to make sure that if they do, it isn’t because of you.
Try out different processes to see which you have the most success with. You should also make the process as easy and streamlined as you possibly can, although there should always be a way for your customers to opt out at any point if they wish. Try and keep forms minimal so they don’t appear daunting, and support as many payment options as possible to maximise your chances of a successful sale.
Customer Reviews
Positive customer feedback can be a fantastic marketing tool for ecommerce sites, so it’s a great idea to collect reviews wherever possible. Be proactive about asking them for feedback (such as in a follow-up email following their purchase) and be as respectful of any negative reviews you might receive as you are of positive ones – all reviews help to get more information about your products more widely known, and it is always better when the feedback is genuine, even if it’s not entirely perfect. A good service and top of the line products will help keep negativity to a minimum, at any rate.
Test your Site
No ecommerce site can ever be entirely ‘finished’. There will always be things to improve, updates to make, new product lines to add… There are various things that you should test regularly to make sure you are getting all the ecommerce site conversions you possibly can. For instance, test your navigation, special offers, transaction processes, product displays, company information and anything else you can think of to make sure your site is always in top working order.
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