You have an awesome product.
You are selling it online through your E-Commerce solution. You hired an E-Commerce Director to lead the charge. You integrated your company website into Magento, IBM Websphere or Miva Merchant E-Commerce platforms. You have uploaded SKU data, product info, video and graphics. You even have an agreement with some affiliate sites, like Amazon.com and other third party re-sellers.
You have traffic to your site. But…you now have to convert the visitors into sales.
How do I convert my visitors into buying customers?
Do not let them leave (give an incentive)
Online customers are fickle.
Online shoppers have short attention spans. Online customers expect a lot of engaging content.
Online consumers have money to spend. Knowing that your E-Commerce customers are fickle, you need to give them a reason to stay.
Do not let them leave. Consider a coupon code, or a pop-up that gives them an immediate discount in trade for an email address.
These two tactics work very well.
Allow your buyers the ability to use all payment types
Recently I tried to purchase a B2B service online. Tried being the key word here.
I did not end up purchasing it. Why?
The shopping cart didn’t accept America Express. Only Visa, Mastercard and Paypal.
The expectation should be that this company allows visitors and potential customers to use all forms of payment.
Make sure your E-Commerce solution takes all payment types. I know the fee’s may scare you, but on a $100 purchase, the fee’s to accepting a lesser-used card, like Amex, are very minimal.
The consequence is by not taking specific cards, you will lose sales.
Make it easy
According to Internet Retailer, one of the top reasons why visitors abandon your site when checking out is a complicated checkout process.
You need to give your consumers what they are demanding.
They are demanding a simple and easy check-out experience. Make it easy for your customers to buy.
Example: if you have a check-out process that is 10 steps, requires your buyers to sign-up for an account, and you only accept Visa as a payment type, then don’t expect a huge ROI from your E-Commerce site.
Consider your checkout and shopping cart process to be less than 5 steps, accept every payment type available, and don’t mandate an account. Guest checkout is a excellent way to increase conversions.
Quick and fast
How fast your site loads and the speed of the your checkout process is critical.
You need to consider offering different checkout options, like guest checkout for consumers who do not want another annoying account to remember.
The goal is fewer clicks and less data for your consumer to have to enter.
Even though it is awesome to be able to capture customer data, don’t sacrifice a paying customer for selfishly gathering consumer data.
Content, content, and more content.
Why are companies like Dollar Shave Club.com growing by leaps and bounds?
Because their content, to attract customers, is awesome.
Why did PetFlow grow so quickly? They exploded with growth because of the content they created.
Dollar Shave Club and Petflow both invested in pay-per-click advertising and they knew their persona.
Both Dollar Shave Club and Petflow also published engaging and creative content, with the goal of attracting visitors and converting them into paying customers.
Using PPC advertising, social media promotion and creative content brings visitors. Engaged visitors through great content equals conversions.
What’s next.
Follow these steps, make sure you have an internal person who understands how to champion the above and go be awesome.
To learn more about how my approach can increase your conversions, contact me on how I can help.