22 Mar 2013 How to Improve Your Online Web Sales Businesses Online
The success of a website is generally measured by its conversion rate. That is the percentage of visitors to the site that go on to purchase a product, sign up to a mailing list or performs whatever action it is that the website owner wants them to do.
Many e-commerce website owners focus on the bottom line – the number of sales that they’re getting and how much each customer is spending. If that number isn’t high enough, they may assume that they need to spend more time and money promoting their website. After all, more visitors mean more sales. However, this isn’t always the best way to do things.
Turning More of Your Visitors into Customers
To ensure that your business achieves its true potential, you should try to get out of the endless cycle of “promote or die”. Instead, work on increasing your conversion rate. If you have thousands of people visiting your website already, why throw away that traffic? You have paid for the kind of professional web design Manchester digital agencies can offer, but how can you increase the popularity of your brand with people who don’t know much about you?
There are several ways to increase the number of sales you are getting. Start with page-loading times. If your site takes a long time to load, you will be losing traffic. Try to keep your pages as small as possible (less than 60Kb in total is ideal) and avoid using unusual browser plug-ins or add-ons to display your main page content. If a user is asked to install a plug-in to view an unknown website, they will more than likely hit the back button.
Study usability. Familiarise yourself with basic usability rules. Make sure that clicking on the logo at the top of your website takes users to the home page of the site. Style your page so that links in the body are easy to spot and make your navigation consistent and clear.
Display prominent calls to action. Add a call to action above the fold on each of your landing pages and repeat it further down the page. Make it obvious to your users what you are promoting, what problems it solves and why they should care.
Test and track everything. Use Google Analytics to set up goals for each of your pages. Track your conversion rate. Consider running tests where a small percentage of your users see a page with a different design. Compare the paths that the users follow and the end result.
Never stop testing. Once you have found something that converts well, don’t become complacent. Keep testing and refining your designs and looking for other ways to increase your conversion rate and customer retention. The tastes and habits of your users are always changing, so you cannot afford to stop learning.