5 Killer Strategies to Boost Your Customer Conversion Rate Online

In order to increase your customer conversion rates, you need to optimize every channel and medium through which you interact with customers.

An increasing number of traditional enterprises start to include online marketing as an important part in their marketing mix. Some of them may not know there’s a popular ‘funnel’ theory in the e-commerce industry.

While you spend thousands or even millions of dollars on website building and marketing to attract potential customers to your website, 80% of them may leave on the first visit and never come back; 15% may come back and go without leaving any information; 4% may drop some information, but not reach out to you proactively; only the rest 1% actually finish a transaction. How terrible it is!

To gain more customers, you can try to improve the ‘funnel’ in two ways: attracting more high-quality traffic; converting more browsers to buyers in the boot phase. Here I will introduce several simple strategies to assist you in your way to website conversion optimization.

1. Aim your marketing activities at your target audience

Many websites may have built a high traffic by doing PPC, network advertising, email marketing, social networking and so on, but it doesn’t mean all the visitors are the target audience. If your website has a high bounce rate, that would probably be the case.

Give your marketing activities a review, identify areas that are wasting your money, invest more into targeted marketing, you will see a significant increase in the overall ROI of your marketing efforts. To do that, first of all, you need to have a clear understanding of your positioning and target audience.

2. Optimize your website layout based on customers’ mental models

There are websites that just pursue pretty appearance without providing useful content. It may sound unbelievable, but it truly happens.

When customers cannot find the information they really want, it’s hard for them to trust the website. Most company websites share similar sections such as company introduction, news, products, contact, etc. But actually, each industry has its own characteristics and you should definitely take that into account when designing your website.

For instance, a photographic company can introduce the stories behind the photos to make the website content more engaging; an agriculture business website can be more helpful by sharing some relevant experiences and skills on the subject. The bottom line is trying to provide some truly useful content for your website visitors rather than pushing them to a sale all the way through.

3. Keep it true and personal; shorten the distance with customers

Sometimes, when we land on a website, products information spread the full page in a mess. Sometimes, when we expect to find some details on the product page, it turns out there are only several words or a single picture on the page. The bounce rate of the website should be high in both cases.

It’s a typical best practice for e-commerce websites to introduce products in detail and in a neat order, with the following information provided: type, property, texture, how to use, qualification, matters needing attention, pictures, customer reviews and so on. Customer reviews, for example, can give your visitors more confidence in your products and have huge effects on their purchasing behavior.

4. Improve your credibility and authority with third-party references

For most small and medium sized businesses, gaining customers’ trust is the key to success. Third-party certification or reference can be a great help.

Try to get some recommendations from your industry authorities; participate in some large-scale events; generate some media coverage, especially on authoritative media outlets in your industry; go through some certifications and awards; join third-party industry unions. Having such information your website will greatly increase your brand credibility.

Customers may be skeptical about what you say; but it’s much easier for them believe the third-parties, especially authoritative ones.

5. Make it really easy for your customers to contact you

There are a lot of tools available today for you to have effective communications with your website visitors: traditional ones such as email and phone and relatively new ones such as forum, self-help and social media. One customer support tool worth mentioning is live chat software, which is used by many e-commerce websites as the most important customer communication channel.

Professional live chat software such as Comm100 Live Chat not only provides you with the ability to help your customers out in real-time, but also makes it possible for you to have a full understanding of your website visitors and identify those with greater purchasing potential, as it automatically records a wide range of visitor information such as where they come from, how they find you, what they are viewing now, how many times they have come, and many more.

To fully leverage the potential of your live chat program, you will need to continuously optimize your live chat scripts and train your sales and support staff on the best ways to engage your customers. Giving your customers every opportunity to engage with you on the communication channel of their choice will help you in increasing your customer conversion rates.

via Business 2 Community http://www.business2community.com/customer-experience/5-killer-strategies-boost-customer-conversion-rate-online-0734993?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=5-killer-strategies-boost-customer-conversion-rate-online