Uh Oh…
Did you know that according to Small Business Administration (SBA) around 90% of small businesses fail within the first two years of their start up?
If you want to make it into the other 10% that go forward and succeed beyond their wildest dreams, you need to solve that problem you’ve been having. You know what I’m talking about don’t you? Your website conversions – or lack of conversions as I should say.
The Good and the Bad
The Good news is that you’ve invested a lot of time and effort into creating a website that you love and it’s getting lots of visitors. Congratulations!
The bad news is that those visitors aren’t staying and they’re not buying your product.
Thankfully, there is a ridiculously simple way of getting your readers to convert into paying customers. All you have to do is follow my easy five step process.
Ready…?
Step 1 – Know your target audience in depth
Some salespeople will tell you that they can sell beef steak to a vegetarian. They might be able to. You might be able to. But really, what’s the point? It wouldn’t be a quick sale and you would have wasted a lot of your valuable time trying to make one sale.
Or you could spend the same amount of time making five sales to people who actually wanted to buy steak.
You need to know exactly who your audience is. Then you will know exactly what they’ll be looking for on your website and exactly what will make them buy your product.
Finding your ideal customer
Most businesses will have a good idea of who their target audience is in a broad sense. They’ll know things like:
- Age
- Gender
- Geographic location
- General interests
This is a great start. But if you really want to run a successful business, you’re going to have to delve a lot deeper into your customer’s psyche than that. You need to create a customer avatar.
Customer avatar
The customer avatar or customer persona, details all the details behind your customer that will bring them to life for you.
You need to think about everything about them. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Do they have a family or are they single?
- Do they have a lot of disposable income?
- What do they like to do in their spare time?
- What would be their dream holiday?
- What do they do for a living?
- What do they want to do for a living?
- How would they describe themselves to others?
As you sit down and think about your customer persona, you’ll instantly learn more about their hopes and fears. This is the information you really need. Now you can show them exactly how you can help them.
And that’s what people pay for. Your help.
Now that you have your ideal customer persona (or more than one – that’s OK), you will have been able to adjust your website copy so that every word speaks directly to the needs of your customer.
Step 2 - Use tracking systems to find out where your customer loves to linger on your website
The truth is that when you’re designing your own website, a lot of the time you might think something looks great but your ideal client or customer doesn’t agree. Don’t be offended, it happens to the best of us!
You need to find out which parts of your site appeal to your readers and which parts they’re not so hot about. A fantastic way of doing this is to use heatmaps and user testing systems.
Heatmaps
Heatmaps or eye tracking systems as they’re also known, give you a crucial insight to where your readers linger on your page. They do this by tracking the users mouse movement. You can find out if the video that you embedded is getting the attention it deserves or if it needs to be moved somewhere else for example.
User testing systems
Market research is a must for anyone who wants to promote their business. Now though, there are a number of tools that businesses (large and small) can use to see if their website is being well received.
For example; User Testing is a tool that you could use to see if different aspects of your website work properly or are user friendly. To use this particular tool, all you have to do is:
- Fill out the details of what you would like to be tested e.g. navigation bar, shopping cart etc.
- Choose who you want to test your site. You can use your own existing customers or select a group from the UT user panel (there are literally thousands of people who participate and you can narrow down the groups according to your own specifications for your customer persona).
- Get the results via a questionnaire, watch videos of users actually testing your sites to see exactly how they interacted with the site or even talk to the users themselves and ask follow up questions.
By testing your website and receiving feedback about where readers are looking, you can move on to step 3…
Step 3 – Place strategic opt-in boxes all over your page
You can use the information from the user testing stage to think about the best place to put your opt in boxes. Now the more detailed your testing was in step 2, the better results you will have with step 3. This is the really exciting stuff!
You can now think about which group of your customers spent more time looking at the top right corner of your page. What will that group be most interested in? Create a box for it and slide it over to the top right corner of your page. Do this with the rest of your opt-in boxes and… Voila!
You will have already improved your website conversion rate by a huge amount!
But we don’t stop there….
Step 4 – Test EVERYTHING
You probably know yourself how frustrating it is to be reading a great article on a website and then when you want to do something, the link or the button doesn’t work. Do you continue to use that website? I don’t think so!
It’s ESSENTIAL that you test everything on your site. Go through everything bit by bit, button by button and then when you’ve finished – do it all again. I cannot stress to you how important it is to have everything working on your site. You wouldn’t ask a customer to sit on a broken chair now would you?!
Step 5 – Visitor retargeting
If you get 3,000 visitors a day and only 30 of them convert, does that mean you should ignore those other 2970 visitors? That doesn’t even make sense!
Companies like Adroll and Retargeter try to convert those other 2970 visitors even after they’ve left your website.
When your visitors leave your site, retargeting tools will follow their activity around the web and place adverts in front of them for your products. That way you can keep your brand in front of your ideal customer’s eyes so that when they are ready to take that leap and make a purchase – you’ll be the first company they think of and they’ll come straight back to you!
Get Ready for the Action
If you follow these 5 steps you WILL see a huge difference in your website conversions. The most important factor to take aways from all of this is that you need to understand your customer and what they need from you. It all boils down to that one simple thing.
These five steps will help you do just that.
Back to You
I always appreciate it when you take the time out of your busy schedule to listen to my advice. and I always look forward to hearing what you have to say about it too!
Do you use any user tracking systems at the moment? Can you tell me and my other readers about the results? We’d love to hear about your success!
Comment below. I can’t wait to read about it!
Thank you so much for reading, I hope to see you back here again soon. Until then…
via:http://florentinaistrati.com/tips-to-increase-website-conversions/
No comments:
Post a Comment