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Posted in Adaptive Marketing by Ross Wheeler
You might have the strongest marketing presence possible, but that isn't all it takes to create a great, sustainable online business. A common problem amongst many eCommerce businesses is their inability to attract people to their site in the first place; the second most common issue is that they cannot convince visitors to convert into customers as a result of ineffective on-site marketing. This can often result in high bounce rates, which can not only hurt a platform's SEO, but it can drastically impact the business' profits.
The conversion action is the foundation of any successful online business, and if you're failing to progress your site's visitors into actually making a purchase, then your business is going to fail. You need to take advantage of the very best conversion rate optimisation services to ensure that your internet presence can really provide the most powerful benefits to your business.
Another version of this question might be “why aren't people buying my products?", and there are hundreds of reasons why this might be the case. Every business and customer is different, of course, but that doesn't mean that you aren't suffering from an issue that other businesses have.
Here are just some of the reasons why your online presence might not be driving the level of conversions that you require:
• Lack Of Trust – This is one of, if not the, most common reasons for somebody deciding not to buy your product over the internet. If they haven't dealt with you before, it can be difficult to get over that initial lack of trust. Potential customers will typically approach a website with distrust; it is up to you to make them trust you in order to convince them to convert.
There are dozens of reasons why your customer might not trust your business to start with; anything from a bad website design, lack of a social media presence or negative reviews can really hurt your online presence and your business' overall profitability. Most issues around conversion can be traced back to a site's apparent untrustworthiness to its customers.
• Poor Website Design – There's a difference between bad web design which makes your business untrustworthy to a customer, and the kind of site design that gets in your customers way. Without easy navigation and multi-device functionality, you could actually be making it harder for your customer to find the products and services that they're looking for.
If your website is designed to convert your visitors, then why would they go through all the extra effort in order to hand you money?
• Bad Content – Whatever digital marketing “specialists" across the world might say; your content is still an extremely important part of your website's optimisation strategies.
Not only does it need to be effectively optimised for SEO purposes, it also needs to be highly persuasive and ensure that your customers have access to the information that they require in order to make an informed decision. This could include product descriptions, specifications or associated press releases and other information.
• Inaccurate Marketing – One of the reasons that market research is so important is that it allows businesses to identify their target audience. If your content, web design or any other factor of your business is geared towards the wrong audience, then you are more than likely to turn interested parties away.
If you're offering professional, high-quality eCommerce development to business leaders, you aren't going to use the kind of language that you'd use to market a product to children. It might seem like an impossible mistake to make, but there are a lot of businesses out there who have tried to market to the wrong audience in the past.
• Bad Products – Unfortunately, if you're offering a bad product or service, then you're never going to reach the conversion rate that you'll need to make a success of online retail. Trying to push a bad product at people is a terrible decision for any business, and all the marketing in the world might only help for a short time.
If you're product or service is substandard, doesn't work as intended or isn't great value for money, then you're never going to make a real success of your eCommerce dreams. You can't replace quality with quality marketing, so you need to have complete faith in your products before offering them for sale.
Any of these problems can result in low-levels of engagement and high bounce rates. When it comes down to it, there are only three real options with regards to why your online presence isn't driving conversions, and it's often fairly easy to spot why if you're being critically honest with yourself. The three reasons you aren't converting your visitors are:
1. Rubbish Marketing Campaign;
2. Rubbish Website;
3. Rubbish Product/Service;
If your online presence is guilty of any of these problems, then you need to work fast to repair it before it causes lasting damage which your business, as a whole, might never be able to recover from.
The first place to check when trying to identify your website's conversion issues is your marketing campaign itself. This can include any PPC campaigns, or SEO marketing efforts, along with other forms of content marketing or social media advertising that you're currently engaged in. Just some of the factors that you might need to review in terms of relevance and benefits to your site include:
• Keyword Accuracy & Traffic Relevance;
• Social Media;
• Content Creation;
If you aren't targeting the right keywords throughout your marketing efforts, then you aren't going to be attracting interested parties to your website. If you sold footwear, for example, and you were trying to increase awareness around your range of red-coloured shoes, then it's obvious that targeting keywords and phrases like “red shoes", “buy red shoes online" and “where to buy red shoes" will attract relevant and interested traffic.
However, many businesses choose to ignore real relevance in favour of high search numbers. For example, a business without faith in its products or content might try and target phrases like “free red shoes", “purple shoes" or even “horseshoes" if the search term was popular enough. A lot of this is research that you should have done when creating your PPC campaigns in the first place.
Remember; relevant traffic is more important than high numbers of traffic and it's better to have a 1% conversion rate from a smaller number of people than it is to have a 0.01% conversion rate from a huge number of people. Once you've created a high-converting website design, and your on-site marketing is as strong as it can be, then you should focus on driving greater numbers to your eCommerce solution.
Ensuring that your social media marketing efforts truly represent your brand is massively important. We've gone on before about how social media is essential for businesses of all sizes, but if your strategy isn't designed from the ground up to reflect your brand identity, then it can result in a jarring, disjointed transfer between your two online presences.
Both your main eCommerce site and your social media need to be inexorably linked to provide the same high quality interaction to your customers and truly represent what makes your brand original, unique and worthy of your visitors time.
If your online presence is using the very best in modern content marketing to attract customers and improve your website's rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs), then it can often be a similar problem to that of your social media. Every piece of content that you create needs to be reflective of your brand identity, and work in tandem with your conversion-driven website design to provide a cohesive face to your customer.
When users arrive at your site from an external source, they can immediately begin to judge your business through your website. When surfing the web, the average human only has an attention span of 4 seconds, and you need to make a positive impression in order to hold their attention for longer.
In order to critically analyse your site, you need to get into your target audience's mindset. In fact, it can often be impossible to honestly appraise your own site – you're better off getting family, friends or strangers to appraise your site and discover if they can identify what you are offering within the first few seconds. It can be a great idea to look at your main competitors' site as well, in order to discover how yours stacks up to theirs.
• Navigation – As we previously mentioned, your site needs to be easy to navigate for users to browse your site and quickly find out what they are looking for. Make sure that your menu is arranged logically, with categories and sub categories, and that your most popular pages are extremely easy to find.
This focus on easy navigation needs to transfer to your URLs as well, which can greatly increase the likelihood of an interested visitor returning to your site after their initial visit.
• High-Quality Design – Often overlooked in favour of content, you need to ensure that your website looks professional and trustworthy. You need to offer a responsive solution which is suitable for both desktop and mobile devices, and which the user can enjoy their time on. Style and design plays a huge part in user perception of your business, so it is extremely critical that you get this step right.
• Targeted Landing Pages – One of the best ways to encourage a conversion is to ensure that your user feels like the entire transaction process has been created with them in mind. Going back to our previous example, if your user is searching for “red leather shoes", they want to arrive at a page on your site which focuses on “red leather shoes", not shoes which are red, or shoes which are made of leather.
It is often a good idea to undertake A/B split-testing for your landing pages, to ensure that you are offering the best solution for your visitors. This process involves offering two different versions of the same page, and tracking relevant data including conversions, click-through rates (CTR) and bounce rates.
• Engaging Calls-To-Action – CTAs are essential when it comes to encouraging interaction and engagement. Make sure that your conclusions for pieces of content are engaging and your “Buy Now" or “Get In Touch Today" buttons are clearly visible.
• Give Complete Contact Details – By providing your phone number, email address and even your physical address, you can make it much easier for customers to get in touch with you. Not only will this increase the likelihood of you receiving orders, but it can also help to increase the sense of trust that your customers have in your business.
Unfortunately, this is an area that the team of CRO service experts at Promote can't really help you with. We can offer advice on every aspect of eCommerce and digital marketing, but all we can do when it comes to your product is recommend lowered price points, deals and other offers to increase conversion rate.
Before you start to sell your product or service, you should be absolutely certain that your offerings are the best that they can be. Ask yourself if you would be satisfied with receiving the product that you are offering.
If you offer a low-quality, or over-priced, product, then your business can receive almost irreparable damage. The internet audience has a long memory, and any massive mistakes you make will result in negative reviews which you might never be able to get over.
Here at Promote, our team has worked alongside hundreds of businesses in the past. We have offered comprehensive internet marketing solutions, including conversion rate optimisation, which have helped companies and organisations of all kinds to overcome their problems online.
For more information on the diverse range of digital marketing services that we can provide, including CRO services, please don't hesitate to get in touch with our team today on 0118 380 1002. Alternatively, you can email any questions or concerns you might have to hi@promote.agency, and we'll get back to you as soon as we possibly can!
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