The traffic your business website receives is not a metric that can objectively display whether you are successfully engaging your customers. Surely, it is great to receive a lot of traffic, but that doesn’t guarantee you that a sufficient number of those visitors will be converted into paying customers.
Conversion rates are a metric that gives you a far clearer insight into the user engagement. And in order to achieve high enough conversion rates, you have to approach your audience smartly and use a well thought-out sales conversion optimization strategy. This may sound intimidating at first, but conversion optimization really need not be a hard process. It does not necessarily have to be time consuming either. With just a few hours a month spent in testing, a few simple steps and the right tools at hand you will soon notice a significant improvement in your conversion rates.
Some companies have reported that after applying a conversion optimization strategy, their sales have been increased by as much as 69%! So, if you too would like to optimize your sales process and fuel your business’s growth, just follow these simple steps.
1. Monitor how your visitors use your site
Visitor tracking can help you get a clear idea about how your visitors interact with your business website. This includes recording the pages they view, the products they click on, and their entire experience on your site. There are even web-sales automation tools that can track and monitor each individual visitor of your website.
Smart lead tracking can help you not only learn more about your visitors, but also detect possible problems with your website that may cause the users to leave without making a purchase. It can help you sort out a number of issues, from errors in the category pages or terms and conditions all the way to excessive filtering options and other elements that may be hampering your conversions.
In some of the cases, there has been an increase in conversion rates of up to 36% recorded just as a result of fixing such issues discovered in the visitor tracking and monitoring process. So, even this step alone can assist you a great deal in weeding out the problems which may possibly be preventing your visitors from becoming your customers.
In case you want to confirm with hard data that the measures you have taken are bringing results and it is not just your perception that your strategy works, you might want to conduct A/B testing in order to attain proof about the improvement in your website’s conversions.
2. Understand the hesitations of your potential customers
This step holds a direct relation with the above point. By analyzing the data you have received from tracking your visitors, you will be able to notice the areas where they face problems and hesitations. It is not an uncommon case that visitors decide to purchase a certain product or service from a website but they have some hesitation that needs to be clarified. In such cases, the visitors decide not to purchase the product until their doubts have been cleared. However, a large part of those visitors will not search for information that would clear their hesitations nor will they write an email with their inquiry to the customer support.
If you are able to detect the areas where customers hesitate, you will be able to address those areas and make the necessary corrections in order to improve the user experience. A simple thing such as a clearly visible link to the “Terms and Conditions” page can prevent a large number of hesitant visitors from abandoning your site. An e-commerce site that noticed such issues through their tracking tools and addressed them registered close to a 14% increase in their conversion rates. Again, it is good to test and measure the results of the steps you have taken.
This second step also leads us to the third point in our conversion optimization guide.
3. Address your visitors with smart and easy-to-use customer support solutions
Addressing hesitant visitors at the right moment is a move that can prevent a large number of potential customers from abandoning your website. A visitor may have reached all the way to the checkout page yet they may not complete the order because they might need help or clarification.
Luckily, today there are smart web-sales automation tools that offer advanced customer support solutions, such as responsive help desk and even live chat options. When the tool detects that a visitor is hesitating before finishing the purchase, it can prompt a live chat window to offer support to the user and answer their questions. This can increase the number of successful sales transactions significantly, while at the same time improving the user experience and increasing the customer satisfaction as well. This not only helps you get more conversions, but also assists you in building a positive brand image.
In conclusion
Conversion optimization can be a hassle-free process with incredible results, as long as you choose and employ the suitable tools and you test and measure the results of each one of the steps you take. Superior web-sales automation tools also come equipped with comprehensive analytics options that take sales intelligence to a new level of proficiency. In case you haven’t yet thought of employing conversion optimization tools, it is high time you did, as this would definitely help boost your business.
About the Author: Daniel Hristov is CEO of Deskgod Inc.- a company that offers a web-based marketing automation solution for medium and small business owners. He really enjoys travelling and sharing tips on marketing automation, conversion optimization and leads management. Twitter:@daniel_hristov