If you want to increase sales on your e-commerce site, you should not only focus on how much traffic is arriving at your website, but also on your conversion rate.  Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that actually go ahead and buy from it too, and the higher this is, the more money you can make with the same number of visitors.

Here are five tactics to help you increase your conversion rate:

Test

Testing is an important part of improving your conversion rate. Split testing, which is where you create two different versions of your page, can help you determine what aspects of your content influence conversion, since you are able to monitor each page and see which version earsn more sales.

Another great test for any business website is  GTmetrix; this easy tool allows you to analyse every page of your website and monitor the opening speed. The tool also highlights what areas are making the page slower and how you can resolve this.

Testing competitors websites is a way of finding out not only what your target audience are looking for, but what Google analytics are looking for. There are certain criteria to make your website sit higher in their rankings. A great tool that you can use is SEO Minion; this tool gives you an insight as to what your competitors are doing on their website, allowing you to find the differences and implement these to build your SEO.

Use clear language

It is important to use clear language on your site and avoid jargon, so that customers are able to easily understand the products and services that you sell when they visit your website. You should provide as much detail as possible, in a concise format, about your offering to encourage customers to decide on the spot. If they need to visit other sites to get more information, the chances are that they will not come back to your site to complete the purchase.

Gain trust

Trust is important if you want a customer to purchase from you. Visitors are more likely to make purchases from a site that appears professional and clean, so make sure that you have a proper privacy policy, terms and conditions page and shipping information on your website. Make your contact details easily accessible, as people like to know that they can contact you via a phone number or email. Having all this information available makes your company appear professional and helps you increase your conversion rate.

Latest news – Blogs

Providing your customers/clients with vital and relevant information frequently, in the form of a blog, is vital. It’s a great way of gaining trust. If you are constantly providing new information that is important to the customer, they customer will in turn trust that you know what you’re talking about and are the right person to purchase from.

An example of this is Apple, who is the leader of phone technology; they are constantly providing new and updated phones and technology. By providing you with all this information, you associate this service as reliable, from a company who can provide you with any help you may require.

Offer payment options

You should make sure that you have different payment options available to cater for a wider target market. Many customers will abandon their purchase if they find that your site does not accept their desired payment method.

Allow returns

People feel more comfortable completing a purchase when they know that they can return the product if necessary. The more favourable your return policy is for customers, the higher your conversion rate will be. Take some time to consider reasonable return policies for your site and make sure you display the information prominently.

Testimonials and Case studies

When someone is purchasing a product or service, the first thing they will do is look at the reviews of other customers/clients to determine if the company and/or the product/service is reliable and worth purchasing. Having a page dedicated to reviews that you have received, allows new leads to see clearly how good you are and how your current customers/client feel about you and your offering.

In Summary 

Maintaining your website is a great way of keeping front of mind for your current and new leads. You need to make sure that you are updating and editing your website content every week to increase your Google search rankings. If you don’t post on your website regularly, then Google notes this and then doesn’t analyse your pages as frequently. When updating your website content, it’s important to constantly keep your customers updated with the changes you’ve made through social media. This could be a Facebook post linking you to the website page where you have made the changes, or directly to the blog post.

Overall if you don’t put as much time into your website then now’s a perfect time to start – watch your leads grow as your website grows!

And lastly, monitor your online success! Knowing what your conversion rate is, and continually striving to improve it, is an important aspect of online business. Implementing some of the strategies discussed here should help you boost your conversion rate and then the profitability of your business.