The conversion rate is one of the most important metrics businesses closely monitor, especially in the world of eCommerce where this rate is often synonymous with the sales a business will make.
The average conversion rate across the board is at 2.27%, not counting the differences that could exist between different industries. No matter if your conversion rate is below or above average, there is always room for improvement.
But how can you improve your conversion rate and increase online sales? As a leading CRO agency in Australia, we have 6 great tips for you to follow.
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First, What Is a Conversion Rate?
A conversion rate doesn’t automatically refer to your number of sales. Depending on the type of digital marketing campaign you’re running, it can also involve leads, social media follows, phone calls to your business, and more.
A conversion is essentially the action a user takes when it comes to your business. And the conversion rate gives you an idea of how likely a user is to take that action you’re looking for.
For example, if you’re running a Google Ad because you want to increase the sales of one of your products, the conversion rate is a telling metric of your success. If the rate is high, then it means your ad is doing its job. If it’s not, then you might need to tweak your ad, work on the copy, improve target, or even change the landing page to boost your conversions.
If the conversion rate you want to improve concerns sales, there are plenty of great marketing strategies that can help you achieve your goals:
1. Boost Traffic
The first thing you need to worry about is the total number of people coming to your online store, AKA the site traffic.
The more people visit your site to view your product or service, the more opportunities to convert you can create. The conversion rate usually won’t easily reach double digits, but even a single-digit rate and translate into a lot of sales if you manage to boost your online traffic:
2% conversion rate with 1000 site visitors = 20 conversions, meaning 20 sales
2% conversion rate with 10.000 site visitors = 200 conversions, meaning 200 sales
Because, well, that’s just how Maths work.
Increasing your online sales often means putting in the effort to ensure more and more people get to see what your brand has to offer. Luckily, there are several types of digital marketing efforts that can help you achieve this goal, such as:
- Search engine optimisation
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Google Ads and other PPC advertising efforts
- Off-site promotion such as guest posting and PR campaigns, etc.
Essentially, you want to make sure your product or service reaches the eyes of all your potential customers. By doing that, you are increasing the visibility to the point where you don’t simply reach those with an interest or affinity in what you have to offer, but also the people ready to make a purchase and convert.
Once you get them to your site, it’s all a matter of how you convince them to convert and shop from you.
2. Work on Your User Experience
For the moment, let’s stay on your website and talk about the user experience.
It’s essentially a statement of the quality of your website, and how intuitive and easy to use it is. User experience is a big priority for modern websites because internet users have certain expectations when it comes to the websites they visit, especially sites where they want to buy something.
These expectations can be:
- Fully functional mobile sites, as about half of internet traffic comes from mobile devices
- Fast loading pages
- Relevant content
- Please website design
- Easy navigation, etc.
Simply put, if a potential customer doesn’t like how your site looks or feel, not only will they probably not buy something from you, but chances are high they won’t give you a second chance later on.
And this can be a problem especially for businesses with a longer sales funnel, where you need to keep bringing potential customers to your site a few times before they are likely to convert. If your web design and quality aren’t up to expectations, no marketing strategy can make up for that, and you’ll literally be losing sales as a result.
3. Create Your Buyer Persona
You might already know plenty of information about your target audience in terms of where they live, the age groups they fit into, and something about their interests and likes, but have you created a buyer persona for them?
A buyer persona is essentially a life-like profile of your target audience. Instead of looking at your target from the perspective of a bunch of numbers and data, you personify the data and humanize the numbers.
Creating a buyer persona is a powerful way for brands to improve their digital marketing strategies in a bunch of different ways:
- Creating more relevant content
- Streamlining automation
- Identifying areas to focus on during campaigns
- Tailoring your messages to speak directly to the consumer’s pain points, etc.
And, a buyer persona can also help you sell more. Once you have this buyer persona, you can ‘take them’ through your sales funnel, and see how a potential customer would act. This way, you can identify certain kinks in the process that may deter your potential buyers from converting, such as:
- An overly complicated checkout process
- Mismatches between your advertising and the product or service
- Technical issues such as website speed that turn people away
- An unclear or lacklustre call to action, etc.
Depending on your target audience and how you can segment them, you may need to create multiple buyer personas to make sure you’re always speaking to the individual expectations and pain points of your customers.
4. Create a Pricing Page
If you are offering a type of service and want people to book online, it’s worth having a special pricing page that explains exactly what the potential customer will pay for.
A pricing page is a type of landing page that presents users with the different service packages you offer. For instance, Netflix has a pricing page with its 3 different plans: Basic, Standard, and Premium.
Apart from the actual price of each plan, Netflix also offers you information about each perk included, such as the number of supported devices for each plan, HD and Ultra HD availability, and assures you that no matter which plan you choose you will have unlimited access to its catalogue.
Pricing pages are a way for you to be transparent with your potential customers, and easily answer their questions about how much your services cost. Without these pages, you can pretty much guarantee Netflix would constantly get phone calls from people wondering how much their service costs.
5. Offer Free Shipping
Pricing pages work for businesses with services to offer, but what if you don’t have them, and instead are trying to sell products?
Well, in this case, you should consider adding an extremely powerful perk that’s almost guaranteed to boost sales: free shipping.
Free shipping is an incredibly effective way to increase your conversions, even as much as 40% at times. Most people are willing to buy more products to meet the free shipping minimum, as opposed to buying less and paying for shipping. And they do it even though the final bill is a lot bigger!
That’s because, as a lot of people see it, when they buy more to qualify for free shipping, at least they are getting more products. The process of shipping, though necessary to get their products, doesn’t bring the same gratification as a physical product would, so people tend to avoid it.
So no, you don’t even have to offer free shipping for all orders. Simply establish a minimum order for people to qualify for free shipping, and the consumers will handle the rest.
6. Give Them a Money-Back Guarantee
Another perk that can increase your conversion rate is the money-back guarantee. It’s the ‘if you’re not happy, we’ll give you your money back’ type of offer that is genuinely reassuring to people who might still be on the fence.
This perk essentially tells people that shopping from you comes with no risk for them. If they buy something and turn out not to enjoy the product, they can return the product and get their money back. For some products, it might be just what a potential customer needs to convert.
Money-back guarantees work best for more expensive products or even services. You’ll usually not find this perk in retail online stores, for instance, especially if you offer really affordable clothing. But for costly items that might require the potential customer to weigh their decision more carefully, it can really make a difference.
7. Build Trust
Lastly, there is the issue of trust. Even if you make your product or service descriptions compelling and offer loads of perks to potential customers, the fact of the matter is that if they never shopped from you before, they will still be hesitant.
It’s why the matter of social proof is so important in any digital marketing strategy. Social proof is a psychological principle that basically states that people will copy the actions of others in order to undertake specific behaviours in certain contexts.
In marketing, there is a much easier explanation for social proof: the more people say they used and enjoyed your product service, the more likely a new customer will be to convert. When someone has little to no knowledge of a particular brand, seeing reviews of other people can really help them get over this uncertainty and take the plunge.
But, if you build your social proof on your site alone, you won’t see a major impact on trust levels. Consumers know that everything on your site is carefully selected to put your product or service in the best possible light, so make sure to offer them access to reviews outside the platform:
- Social media reviews
- Google My Business reviews
- Online directories
- Articles about your product or service from bloggers and other influencers, etc.
Boost Your Conversion Rate Now with Australian Internet Advertising
Australian Internet Advertising’s conversion optimisation services are exactly what your business needs to increase your online sales. We’re happy to assist Australian businesses with all their digital marketing efforts and make sure they achieve genuine growth through effective and personalised strategies.
Reach out online or call us at 1300 304 640 to find out more.
