So, you’ve not only done a lot of hard work getting people to visit your site, but you’ve also honed your targeting to get the right type of person to visit your site – one who will convert into a sale.
Unfortunately, there are many reasons why potential customers, however motivated, will not make a purchase. Read on to find out if you’re committing any of these 5 ‘conversion killers’, and how to fix them if you are!
1) Confusing landing pages and/or a complicated conversion process
Visitors to your site will only take a few seconds to decide whether they’re going to stay or leave. During these crucial few seconds, you have to ensure that you retain them by clearly offering what they’re looking for, and providing an easy way for them to obtain it.
For example, if you sell satchels and a user is looking for a blue satchel, ensure that your user lands on a page showing only blue satchels (keep the red ones on a separate page!) and include a “buy now” or “add to cart” call to action under each product. If your landing page does not match the expectations of the visitor who lands on it, you risk confusing or annoying them, and having them leave your site.
If you’ve done these things right, you’ve hopefully captured the attention of your visitor, given them the blue satchel they were looking for, and made it easy for them to add it to their cart. Great!
However, once a visitor makes it further through your buying process, you’re still not safe from losing them if you make the mistake of including conversion killing buttons or escape routes. Examples of these types of buttons would be a ‘clear cart’ button, or a ‘reset form’ button.
A tip to identify these “nuke buttons” is to go through your buying process as if you were a new visitor on the site, and highlight anything which you think may distract them from purchasing. If it isn’t necessary, or risks losing that user, get rid of it. Another common example of this would be having social media icons on your checkout page – don’t distract your user with your Facebook profile at the time of trying to make a purchase!
Actions:
· Ensure landing pages are tightly themed, to match a user’s search intent
· Ensure calls to action or conversion buttons are clearly labelled, and easily found
· Remove any distractions that could hinder completion of the buying process
2) Slow site speed
People aren’t going to hang around if your site is slow to load, or generally feels slow. It may be that your site is bogged down with unnecessary code, has images that are not efficiently compressed to reduce file size, or is hosted on a poor quality server.
The latter issue can be expensive to rectify, as you’ll need to upgrade your hosting package to make your site speedier. However, there are a number of things you can control on your own site which will help to improve the load speed.
Two tools which will help with this are Pingdom and the Google PageSpeed Insights Tool. Pingdom will tell you how your site speed compares to other sites on the web, as well as giving suggestions on specific actions you can take to improve page speed. The Google tool is similar, giving clear page speed improvement insights, but also splits these into separate mobile and desktop recommendations.
If you have a web developer looking after your site, send them the list of recommendations to implement, and check your Pingdom page speed score again after the changes have been implemented.
Actions:
· Check your page speed score with Pingdom
· Check recommendations made by Pingdom and Google PageSpeed Insights Tool
· Implement recommendations or forward them on to your developer
3) Lack of mobile site/responsive offering
Many businesses generate traffic through mobile devices, as we all know. If you have Google Analytics installed on your site, you’ll be able to see exactly what percentage of traffic comes from mobile, and how this has grown over time.
If you’re simply serving your desktop site to mobile users, and it’s not a responsive design, you risk driving them away from your site immediately. They’ll either see a tiny, zoomed-out version of your site, or the top left section of your site zoomed right in!
You can choose either to create a dedicated mobile site, or switch your website to a responsive design. The latter can be expensive, as it requires new development work to be done, but is a better option in the long run, especially when considering search engine optimisation.
Responsive sites are the same on mobile and desktop – they scale accordingly to fit the screen size. Therefore the URL stays the same, which avoids issues with redirects and duplicate content, as well as preserving the full value of links pointing to your site. A responsive design is also better future-proofed, as new versions do not need to be made to accommodate new phones and other tech.
If cost is an issue, there are cheap ways to deliver a mobile site to your customers – either dedicated or responsive. Dudamobile offer a really simple product to create a mobile version of your site in minutes, or the ability to create a new responsive site.
Actions:
· Serve a mobile-friendly version of your site to mobile users – either a dedicated mobile site, or use responsive design
· Use a service like Dudamobile to easily convert your current site into a mobile site, or to create a new responsive site
4) Lack of trust from your potential customers
If your visitors don’t feel comfortable giving their information to you, they won’t make a purchase. Their lack of comfort may come in the form of not trusting the security of their details (in which case, ensure you have a secure transaction process), or not knowing enough about the quality of your service to feel comfortable using it. Below are three common problems related to lack of trust along with solutions.
Problem: Lack of online reviews and recommendations
Why is this a problem? Many people want to know that other people have had a good experience purchasing from you before they commit to doing the same. Having a good online review profile helps build trust, and allows you to display customer reviews on your site.
Solution: Use a service like reviews.co.uk to gather publicly-displayed reviews from your past customers. If you happen to be running any pay-per-click advertising with Google, gain 30 reviews in a year (with an average score of 3/5 or greater) and you’ll get ‘star ratings’ appearing in your ads. This gives you the dual benefit of a good review profile, and a higher click through rate for your adverts.
Problem: Requesting too many details from your users
Why is this a problem? Do you really need to know a potential customer’s job title, salary or other such information to complete a purchase on your site? If the answer is no, don’t include these fields as they can act as a barrier to the buying process.
Solution: Remove any fields from your form which aren’t necessary to complete the transaction, or those which don’t help you retain that customer later on.
Problem: Overuse of generic, stock imagery
Why is this a problem? Stock imagery can make a website feel ‘cheap’, too ‘off the shelf’, or untrustworthy, as it lacks a sense of human connection. Websites which have invested in shooting their own high quality imagery, which makes the product or service relatable to the user, will be trusted much more.
Solution: Avoid stock imagery, and invest in good quality photography.
5) Lack of market and competitor research
So far we’ve covered a number of landing page optimisation specifics, but what if the problem with your conversion rate is merely down to the fact that your prices or offerings are not competitive? Are your competitors offering a cheaper rate for a similar product or service? It could be that they are providing more benefit or incentives for the consumer.
Online consumers are savvy and will know if your product is overpriced. Ensure you perform regular price and competitive reviews to ensure you don’t fall behind your competitors. You can also generally keep in-the-know about what your competitors are doing online by using some simple, free tools such as SimilarWeb and Google Alerts.
Actions:
· Regularly research your market and ensure your prices are competitive
· Keep an eye on competitor actions with resources like SimilarWeb and Google Alerts
· Keep up with new changes that are happening within your industry
By Marketing Quotes.
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