Are you sick and tired of seeing your web visitors leave your website without buying a single thing? Have you been getting thousands of monthly visitors, yet all they do is click away after reading your articles or after they browsed through your product catalog?
I know. It’s frustrating. That’s a problem that plagues a good number of marketers and business owners nowadays.
If you’re about to call it quits because you couldn’t figure out why your visitors weren’t buying, then I suggest that you give your website a closer look, and see if you committed any of the mistakes that I’ll be sharing with you below.
These are some of the most damaging mistakes that the webmasters and marketers could do to hurt their conversion rate:
1. Bombarding your visitors with too many call-to-actions.
What kind of actions are you telling your visitors to do? Is your landing page optimized to compel them to buy? Or is it optimized for other things like sharing your products, commenting, or having your visitors sign up using their email addresses?
It’s critical that you determine the kind of action that you want your visitors to do even before you design your website, and write your website’s copy.
If your main call to action isn’t clearly defined, the chances are good that your landing page’s purpose would end up becoming diluted, which could then lead to you having a poor conversion rate.
Instead of adding different sorts of calls-to-action on your landing page, I urge you try using only 1 type of call-to-action and sprinkle it all over the page.
This means that if the action that you would want to elicit from your visitors is for them to buy your product, then don’t ask them to share, register, or contact you.
You can suggest these other actions after they’ve bought your product so you can at least ascertain (at some level) that they wouldn’t be distracted by the other CTAs.
Bonus tip – when your customers are done with the checkout process, I strongly suggest that you take the time to capture their email addresses (if you aren’t doing that yet). When you have them on your email list, you can nurture your relationship with them which would put you in a better position to sell them your services again in the future.
2. Poor quality copy and web design.
Newbies in web designing and copywriting aren’t usually aware that there is more to creating a copy and designing a website that meets the eye.
For the designers, it isn’t just about making the website look good, they also need to incorporate psychological elements that would help compel the visitors to buy the products on the website. Kissmetrics wrote something really comprehensive about this topic.
For writers, they need to realize that creating a compelling copy isn’t just about making sure that it is void of typos, grammatical errors, or spelling mistakes. The write up needs to be able to invoke the reader’s emotions compelling them to buy becomes a lot easier. A proven and tested way of doing this is to talk about the the readers’ problems and rubbing it on their faces.
Doing this would tend to make the readers remember how frustrating the situation was when they were facing those problems, and how they’ll never want to experience the same problem again. Of course, since that’s what your product is meant to do – solve their problem – then the chances are good that they’ll buy your product.
3. Your visitors’ questions aren’t addressed.
You’ve probably experienced this yourself. You are interested in buying something online, yet you have question about the product that you want answered first before you can make the decision to buy.
Your customers’ questions can come from different angles so it’s crucial that you have a feature in your website that will allow them to reach out to you the soonest time possible.
There are several things that you can add to your landing page to make this happen. Bookcab added a floating “Send us a message” box on the lower right portion of their page, and their phone number on the upper right part of the page.
This enabled their prospective customers to reach out to them, should they have any questions or clarifications that they want addressed.
Another advantage that others fail to see is how these elements could be used not just to address your prospective customer’s questions, but also use them to upsell some of your other products.
4. Requiring your customers to register first before they can buy.
Your customers (just like you and I) don’t want to be forced into doing something that they don’t like.
So why force them to register first so they could buy any of your products?
This is a terrible mistake that a lot of marketers and business owners make.
While having your visitors in your list is without a doubt advantageous for you, you still need to realize that requiring them to sign up first (even if they don’t want to) could really hurt your conversion rate.
Here’s what you can do instead. Since you want to capture their email so you can build your list (which I strongly suggest that you do), why not follow the bonus tip that I shared in point number 1 where you would ask for their email after the checkout process?
That way, should they decide not to give you their credentials, it shouldn’t hurt your conversion since they’ve already bought your product.
5. Your visitors are doubting your credibility.
First impressions last. That’s why it’s critical for you to have a website that not only looks professional, but it should also have all the bells and whistles that it needs to convey to your audience that you are a legitimate company, and are a credible business to deal with.
In addition to your website’s looks, there are other elements that you can add that would help make your website look more credible.
These are some of the elements that I am talking about:
- Add your customer’s testimonials.
- Add the logos of reputable and renowned websites that your business has been mentioned in. You just have to add a section that says, “as seen in”, then show all the logos of the brands or websites that mentioned you.
- Add a picture of your office (if you have one) in your “About Us” page.
- Add your address and phone number.
- Add a portfolio section on your website showcasing the previous projects that you did for your previous or existing clients – if they’ll allow it.
While there are other elements that you can add to make your business look more legit, starting with the points that I shared above should be good enough for starters.
6. Slow load time.
Most people have no time for slow loading webpages. In fact, according to an article published at CrazyEgg.com, for every 1 second delay in page load time, it will yield to 11% fewer page views, 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions (source: Aberdeen Group).
Now that’s disturbing.
Depending on the kind of product you’re selling, or the many number of sales you make, 1% can translate to hundreds, if not thousands of dollars lost.
At this point, I hope you realize how having a website that loads fast isn’t just a luxury, it’s a necessity. That is, if you want to increase your sales online.
There are several resources on the web that can walk you through how to improve your website’s loading page. In some cases, it is just a matter of you installing a plugin, minimizing your HTTP requests or enabling browser caching.
If you’ll use this advanced Google search query, “intitle:Improve my websites load time”, you’ll come across several results that will help you improve your site’s loading time.
What’s next?
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