Do you like dealing with a poorly designed website? Neither does anyone else, judging by the feedback collected from consumers at a number of top online retailers. Any number of potential buyers may be leaving your site for the competition simply because they find it difficult to place orders.
If that’s the case, then there’s a few simple things that you can do to drastically improve conversions. While marketing and reaching certain price points are still the most important things when it comes to converting leads into sales, offering a quality user experience is a very close third.
In fact, you might be surprised to learn that some consumers are more interested in making an easy transaction than saving money.
Sites that Load Slowly
If you’re the kind of person who does your own development, then you’re probably coding on a relatively powerful desktop computer. Testing your site on this platform doesn’t make much sense, because there’s a good chance that people will access your site from anemic mobile devices. Those who don’t do their own development might instead trust the word of their designers.
Don’t take anyone else’s word for it. You can test and monitor website speed online with a simple browser-based tool. Enter the URL for your site and see how long it takes to resolve. If you have a ton of unessential content, then you’ll probably want to remove it.
Make sure that things like videos and high-resolution photos are optional downloads. Users who can’t afford to waste bandwidth will pass on your site if they’re forced to load them. At the same time, these are very important marketing tools for people who don’t have the opportunity to see the items they’re buying in person. As a result, there’s a good number of consumers out there who consider these fairly essential.
This is especially true if you’re selling big ticket items that might represent a considerable investment on the part of your shoppers. Once you have these basic technical issues under control, you can start to make changes needed to the underlying user interface.
UI Changes to Improve Conversion Rates
Clear calls to action always seem to be a hot topic among marketers, but few people actually take the time to create them. If you don’t have a clear CTA buttons that offer users an obvious function, then you might never be able to convert your leads. Consider all of the following chores that your customers could automate with a single button push:
- Book a consultation
- Download your e-book
- Install an app
- Start a free trial
- Sign up for your email campaigns
Make sure you have clearly labeled buttons for any of these tasks that are relevant to your business operation. One thing you shouldn’t forget is a button designed for one-click ordering.
All of these other CTAs are highly important. However, without a simple way to place regular orders they really don’t mean all that much. Once you have this kind of system in place, make sure that it actually works. A large pizza chain once deployed a one-click ordering system that didn’t work as intended.
The outcome was exactly what you’d expect it to be. As soon as you have all of this sorted out, though, you might still end up running into some problems related to pages that are no longer available.
Resolve 404 Errors & Delete Bad Links
Imagine you go to visit a hot new e-Commerce site, only to find that you sometimes run into a 404 error. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the company had gone out of business. While it might be a pain to go through every page on your site, it’s a bigger one to deal with poor conversion rates. There are a few automated tools that can scan your site and automatically spot errors, so this job doesn’t have to be as hard as it sounds.
Bad links are another main problem, and they might even be somewhat beyond your control. If you’ve made any kind of social media marketing efforts, then you probably have people all across the web linking to your site. However, in some cases people may be linking to content that isn’t there any longer. Keep a close eye on any requests that come into your site and immediately bounce off.
Bad links can be dealt with by making certain URLs point directly toward your page. You might even consider creating a page that explains certain items may now be out of stock but you have many other products that might interest your potential customer. Marketing experts agree that if this is done correctly it doesn’t constitute a bait and switch sales tactics.
Anticipating Problems Users may Have
It’s not possible for most people to predict the kind of problems their customers might run into. Your business may not experience the conversion rates you want even after making these changes, though, so this is a task you might have to get used to. One simple rule of thumb to follow is to make everything as easy for the customer as ordering food. If every workflow on your site is this easy, then things should start looking up quickly.
