Website Conversions
6 Web Design Strategies That Turn Your Website Into a Sales Machine
There are a number of strategies you can use to turn your website into a sales machine. Let’s start at the top.
1. Where Is Your Phone Number?
We may be deep into the internet age but the age of the telephone has yet to go the way of the dinosaurs. So, where is your phone number positioned on your website? If you say anywhere other than top right and on every single page then your website is performing like a V-Dub rather than a Ferrari.
Let’s make it easy for people to contact you. Sounds simple doesn’t it? And hey, often a chat with a potential customer can make all the difference in the age of email… it’s been proven time and time again to be effective.
2. Navigation
How easy is it to navigate your website? At a glance does a potential customer know exactly what to do or what you do? How much thought is behind the words used in the navigation and how descriptive they are?
What Is A Good Conversion Rate?
As an online marketing agency that develops websites we often get asked the question ‘what is a good conversion rate?’. And while it may seem like a simple question, the answer is a little more complicated.
There are 6 factors that define what a good conversion rate is:
- Source of the traffic
- Cost of the traffic
- Type of conversion you are measuring
- Maximum amount you can afford to spend for a conversion
- Sales conversion rate
- Number of sales you want
Now let’s take a look at each of these factors in a little more detail…
1. Source of the Traffic
Different traffic sources produce different types of traffic. One source may produce higher quality traffic than another. And the higher the quality of the traffic, the higher the conversion rate. For example, running a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign on Google Adwords is one of the highest converting advertising channels because you can choose to only show your ad when somebody is actively searching for your product or service. Banner advertising, on the the other hand, is a much lower converting advertising channel because you are advertising to prospects that are not actively searching for your product or service.
10 Easy Ways To Improve The Performance of Your Website
Your website is the most important part of your online marketing strategy because it is responsible for converting as many of the people you send to it into leads or sales for your business. Whether you use search engine optimisation (SEO), pay per click (PPC) advertising, banner advertising or email marketing, your website holds the key to your profits – the better your website performs, the more profit you will make.
Over the years we have tested many different areas for improving the performance of a website – some of them easy to implement, some of them difficult. Here are 10 easy ways to improve the performance of your website…
1. Write better headlines - you would be surprised at how many websites still say ‘Welcome to XYZ company’. When a prospect visits your website for the first time they are looking for something specific so make sure to say what you offer in the headline of each page. Write in terms of the benefits to your prospects.
How Much Money Are You Really Making Online?
You probably know how much you make from one sale – but do you really know how much it costs you to make that sale?
The businesses that make the most money online know how much it costs them to make a sale and they are continually working to improve the performance of every part of their online marketing strategy to reduce this cost.
When performance goes up it costs less to drive sales, which means more money in your pocket and more sales from the same advertising budget.
Let’s walk through an example…
Say you have an e-commerce store that sell basketballs online. You buy a basketball for $30 from your supplier and sell it on your website for $55. This means you have $25 to play with to make the sale of the basketball, or a $25 margin.
Marketing the product to get targeted consumer traffic to the website will bring your costs up and reduce your margin, but so long as the cost to get one sale does not exceed your margin of $25, you’re making money.
How To Use Google Analytics To Increase Sales
Google Analytics is one of the best tracking and analytics software packages on the market. Most of the biggest sites on the Internet use Google Analytics to track their visitors. Look at the top ranked sites in Google and most of them have Google Analytics installed.
Don’t let the fact that the software is free to install and easy to use detract from the level of reporting that is available. Used correctly, Google Analytics can provide you with the information you need to take your website from ordinary to extraordinary.
While Google Analytics has an astonishing number of reports available, you can use the following reports to increase the performance of your website and, in turn, your sales and profits.
