How to Improve Sales in 30 Minutes
By Richard Parkin
Your website’s conversion rate is one of the most important, most changeable, and most overlooked factors for eCommerce success. Even a marginal improvement to your conversion rate can add up to a vast financial improvement every single year.
Despite that, most companies spend virtually no time directly working on their conversion rates, instead aiming to boost specific sales channels. A truly effective digital marketing strategy should cover all sides of eCommerce, with conversion rate being a particularly important focus, given the vast financial benefits even a minor improvement can deliver.
Because of how overlooked conversion rate improvements tend to be, many companies can make a real improvement for their financial performance in a shockingly small period of time. In this blog, I’m introducing 5 simple, tried and tested ways to boost your conversion rate, all of which can be implemented or begun in half an hour or less.
Implementing Exit Intent Popups
What happens when a user tries to leave your site?
Just letting them go means you’ve lost the sale: they’re not going to come back to your site. Instead, you should set up an exit intent popup, a message which appears as a user tries to leave.
Give the user a good reason to stay on your website. Try offering a small discount on their purchase. Offer them an eBook or a low-cost product for free. Persuade them to give you their email address, even if they don’t make a purchase.
While exit intent popups are incredibly effective, they’re only really feasible for desktop users, with mobile browsers not having any real way to detect that a user plans to leave. If your customer base is primarily mobile-based, try the other options from this page first.
Check Your Page Size
How long does it take to load a page on your website?
Every second counts, especially for mobile users. If your site takes 5 seconds to load a product page, that’s 5 seconds of inconvenience – and 5 seconds for the user to reconsider their purchase.
Speeding up your site almost always results in a higher conversion rate: it’s been estimated that a 0.1 second delay cuts conversion rates by around 7%. While speeding up your site takes a lot of technical knowledge and work, getting started is far easier than you may think.
Review your product pages: how much data do they take up? Each page likely contains several images – are these appropriately sized, or does the user have to download 20 MB of pictures before they can even buy your product?
Review your Current Conversion Rate
Do you know how well your site currently performs?
In your Google Analytics account (or any similar analytics platform), you can track overall conversion rates, while exploring in-depth analytics for various audience segments.
Segmentation is a crucial way to better understand what you can do to improve your conversion rate. Mobile and desktop users often have very different conversion rates, which may indicate a problem with mobile usability.
Similarly, different landing pages will always produce different results, while certain products may underperform for overall conversions. Explore your account, and you should discover opportunities for developing your conversion rate further.
Test New CTAs
Are you giving your users a strong enough reason to buy?
While your emails, product pages and landing pages all use some kind of Call To Action (CTA), certain messages and approaches perform better than others in certain contexts and for specific industries.
Don’t just say ‘Buy Now’ – test different copy options. Try using different design options – changing the CTA font, rounding the corners of our CTA buttons, even just changing the background color for your CTAs can have an impressive impact on conversion rate.
Test everything.
Add Urgency to Your Checkout
What message does your checkout currently send?
In most cases, the answer is quite basic: ‘buy now’. Checkout pages are typically designed with the understanding that the user has already made up their mind to buy, thanks to the rest of the site.
That’s not always the case, particularly if you charge for shipping. Users on the checkout page haven’t always decided to buy – some will be checking shipping costs, some will still be considering the purchase, some just want to be sure they’re buying from a legitimate website.
Given those possibilities, changing the tone of your checkout to add a sense of urgency can significantly benefit your conversion rate.
Tell the user that their order is only guaranteed for a certain amount of time, showing a clock ticking down on their purchase. Even if there’s no consequence when the timer expires, giving the impression of scarcity is always an effective sales tactic – especially when the user reaches the final hurdle at checkout.