Are you failing to turn visitors into customers? Is your PPC budget largely wasted? Has your conversion rate reached the lowest of the lows?
The biggest mistake marketers are guilty of is forgetting a company’s biggest marketing asset - it's website. In today’s business environment, marketers are tasked with driving more traffic to their company’s site. Whilst getting more traffic to a website is a great thing, it's an expensive and time consuming way to increase online sales.
The truth is, driving more traffic to your website probably is going to increase sales, but is it really the most cost effective way to increase sales? What if the website itself is the problem? Would you rather get your cheque book out and write Google another big fat cheque, or would you rather realise that there's an amazing opportunity ready and waiting for you right now?
Lets assume for a minute that you own a website that sells shoes. This website website gets 100,000 visitors a month and you have a conversion rate of 1%. This means that you sell 1,000 pairs of shoes every month. You decide you want to double your sales to 2,000 a month. At a basic level you have two options - double your traffic to 200,000 visitors a month or increase your conversion rate to 2%. Which is easier? Answer that in your head, read on, and in a few minutes decide whether you still feel the same.
Today, I'm going to introduce to 5 simple ways you can increase your conversion rate and reduce the amount of money you're spending on digital marketing.
1. Make sure your website is mobile friendly.
Across our clients, we're consistently seeing 50% of traffic originating from a mobile device. In 2014, this trend is set to continue and mobile internet traffic will overtake that from desktops and laptops. With that in mind, most companies are still designing their sites for larger screens, paying little attention to smartphones and tablets. Make sure you're not one of those companies! Mobile is revolutionising the web and you need to ensure your website is optimised for the devices your users are viewing it on. If you don’t, your visitors will have a poor experience and are unlikely to convert into paying customers.
2. Simplify your checkout/signup process.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve abandoned a basket or not signed up for a service because the process was just too long. Do you really need to know a person’s occupation, date of birth, cat’s name, and favourite type of cheese? I’m guessing not. Make the checkout/signup process as simple as possible to ensure you aren’t losing customers. Most checkout processes I've come across recently could be simplified to just a couple of fields.
Filling in all of these fields on a desktop is bad enough, but when you have to do this on a mobile... we'll that's when I switch off. Ensure the checkout/signup process is easy on a mobile. Services such as Paypal Express and Google Wallet make mobile payments quick and easy, so be sure to take advantage of them and maximise mobile conversions.
3. Create a custom landing page.
For every marketing campaign you run be sure to create, and link, to a custom landing page. It should be specifically designed to encourage a visitor to complete an action.
For example, if you’re selling Father’s Day gifts and you’re running a PPC campaign based on keywords related to ‘father’s day gifts’, you should create a landing page that displays the most popular gifts for dads. Make it clear to the visitor that they’re viewing the best gifts for Father’s Day. It sounds simple, but you'd be surprised (or maybe not) by the number of PPC ads that link to irrelevent landing pages, or pages that no longer exist.
Ensure your landing pages aim to achive a single goal, use the same or similar words as those in your marketing campaign, explain why the user should do what you're asking and how it will benefit them. Ensure your message is clear and remove any items on the page that might distract the user (even things like navigation can often go). Most importantly, be creative with your landing pages!
4. Include a strong call-to-action.
Make it clear what you want your visitors to do. Whether they're visiting a landing page or your homepage, make sure there's no doubt about what you want them to do. If you want them to fill in a contact form, tell them. If you want them to buy an item from your store, tell them. Don’t assume that every visitor will simply know what to do when they reach your site - make it obvious for them. If you don’t tell me what you want, how am I supposed to know?
5. Analyse your data.
Your website's data is a gold mine of opportunities. Analytics packages such as Google Analytics make capturing this information simple and incredibly cheap. You are provided with an amazing set of statistics on demographics, audience behaviour, live website usage, keywords, popular content - the list is endless. With this data at your fingertips, you can gain deep insights into how your audience uses your website, where problems lie, and improvements that can be made. By taking the time and effort to capture and understand your data, you’ll not only be able to build a better and more efficient website, you’ll also be able to build a better understanding of your user base.
Of course there are many more tips for improving your conversion rate and In my experience these are some of the most effective. Just implementing one or two of the tips for various clients has resulted in a doubling, tripling, even a quadrupling of the conversion rate. Remember, if you double your conversion rate, you also double your turnover. A higher conversion rate will also boost your marketing efforts as you’ll ROI will be greatly increased.
I would love to hear from you regarding my views on conversion rate optimisation. Do you have any tips you’d like to add? Or maybe you disagree with me completely. Either way, it’d be great to hear from you.
