This article is going to share a few ways you can increase your website conversions. If you are selling online I cannot stress how important conversion rates are and you should always be testing new ways of increasing your numbers. A small change that gets you 9 % here or 10 % there can have a dramatic impact on your income.

When you’ve finished with this post be sure to check-out 43 Sneaky Little Tricks To Instantly Increase Your Sales. I’ve just worked my way through the training and was blown away by the content.

Right, back to the article: You can drive hundreds of visitors to your website every single day but if they leave without ever joining your email subscriber list or by making a purchase then you need to take a look at some website fundamentals.

The obvious benefit to increasing conversions is that you will make more money without having to increase the amount of traffic you generate. For example, if your website gets 100 visitors a day and makes 4 sales at a total of £600, you then focus on doubling your coversions you will now have 8 customers from the same 100 visitors making you a cool £1,200; that’s an instant payrise and you haven’t had to go out and increase your online marketing campaigns.

If you work actively to increase traffic and your conversions then you are onto a winning formula.

So let’s get started:

Hosting

You need a hosting account that can handle a high-level of traffic to your website. You also need a hosting package that has all the features you’ll ever need under one roof. All of my websites are hosted with HostMonster because they are super reliable, their servers easily manage my high traffic days, they use the popular cPanel in the admin area allowing you to easily manage your sites, emails and use one-click installs of Wordpress blogs and other content management systems. More importantly, HostMonster also have amazing customer support in place (you’ll need this when you get into a pickle and need a quick response to remedy the problem).

If you have  a very popular site or you are a website design company that hosts a multitude of websites then it may be time to upgrade to a dedicated server. If you do then my recommendation for you comes by way of LayeredTech.

Website Usability

How easy is your website to navigate? How logical are your categories?

I want you to head on over to My Wedding Favors and spend some time navigating the site.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the website has grouped the categories together in a very logical way. Another clever site design is the use of bold coloured areas to group the categories (on the left). Without these a visitor’s eyes would have a lot of categories but nothing breaking them up. Breaking the categories into groups like this makes it easier for the eye to find what it is searching for. When you consider that you only have a few seconds to grab your visitors attention before they will hit the back button and searches for what they were looking for somewhere else.

Make sure your website is easy to navigate and that a customer can find a product and complete the checkout process in a maximum of only a few clicks.

Strip that Fat

No, this isn’t about weight loss but rather the fat of your website. Your website needs to load quickly or people will hit the back button and move on to somewhere else.

Firstly you can decrease the size of your images without losing much (if any at all) of the quality. Smaller images increase your websites loading speed. Also, minimise the number of pictures you have per page where ever possible. You can also host your images with a dedicated image hosting site, such as Flickr, and then embed your images into your site; this will reduce the hit on your server each time your site is required to load.

You may be using tracking services that rely on scripts. Double check with the applications to see if you can place the script codes anywhere on your website. Some will have to be placed in your header area but, if not, stick the script code into your footer so that it is the last thing to load.

If you are using Wordpress then you can learn how to trim the fat by reading an authorative article at Yoast. The tips, on the most part, may also benefit your website.

You can purchase the super fast Wordpress theme Thesis Theme, that is highly customisable to meet your needs.

I highly recommend you drop or minimise your use of flash and other affects as this can increase loading times. The argument I hear for having amazing flashy graphics is that “it looks good” but great looks and flashy graphics should come second to customer usability. Let’s take a look at a very popular website that ranks as one of the most visited websites in the world… Craigslist.

Not a very attractive website is it! Craigslist receives a lot of visitors every single day because it is functional and serves the needs of the users.

I’m not suggesting you have a website that is as basic looking as Craigslist, what I’m saying is that you don’t need to go as far as having the best designed website out there for it to work for you (and your customers).

Copywriting

Copywriting is the text that you have on your sales pages that encourages people to buy. The best sales copy will include a headline, identify a problem, reveal a solution and create an irresistible offer. To see an example of long copy sales at work you only have to look at most marketing websites: example, Maverick Money Makers.

When you visit the sales page above you will see all of the elements of good copywriting. Can you apply this to your product page?

You can outsource or out-task your copywriting jobs to freelance workers. You can use one of the following sites to find reputable freelancers:

HireMyMom

Project4Hire

GetAFreelancer

If you want to get your hands dirty and do the copywriting yourself (this will save you a lot of money) then I recommend you take a look at 5 Minute Copywriting.

Website Images and Graphics

Another feature of your website that you should take a look at is your images. Some graphics will increase click-through rates (navigation to pages beyond your homepage) such as having images of your products, or an image of a person representing your customer support page.

You can get images from as little a $1 a piece over at iStock Photo. I use the images I purchase from iStock to create graphics for my blog posts and articles to draw the readers into the page.

If you sell digital products or services such as e-books, reports, search engine optimisation, online consultation, etc, you can design graphics as a visual representation of what the product would look like on the shelf in a bookstore. Visit the SEM Business Blueprint website and take a look at the graphical representation of their product (image shown below).

As you can see, a good graphic gives your customers a visual representation of something that is not tangible.

You don’t need to spend out lots on a graphic designer to create your very own graphics as you can grab some very powerful scripts for Photoshop that will create them for you at a click of a button. Head on over to CoverActionPro to find out more! The scripts are what I use to design all of our report  and ebook graphics. Even if you don’t purchase the scripts you should take the time to watch them in action, it’s amazing to watch an e-book appear before your eyes piece-by-piece.

If this still seems a little intimidating and you want to outsource or out-task your graphic design (and other website needs) then you can hire someone very cheaply from one of the services below:

HireMyMom

Project4Hire

GetAFreelancer

Testimonials

Testimonials from users of your service or website can help boost your conversion rates because you are adding credibility to your service or product. Again, visit SEM Business Blueprint and scroll down. You’ll come across testimonials that users of SEM Business Blueprint have given.

You’ll be able to get testimonials from your customers by asking. People often like to be asked for their opinion about something and having it up for everyone to see may be incentive enough.

The best testimonials are those that include video or audio. Make sure the people who leave you testimonials also send you a photo as this also adds that extra something.

Lastly, changing the name of your testimonials to user feedback or customer review may have a greater impact on your conversions.

Please make sure you are FTC compliant. Click here to listen to a great interview by Jim Edwards with an FTC representative.

Ironclad Guarantees

Another cool way to increase your conversion rates is to slap a guarentee on your website. If you have a money back guarentee then stick it on your site for people to clearly see.

Even if you do not use a graphic, make sure you let people know that they have a money back guarantee. The SEM Business Blueprint have the following guarantee on their website:

“In fact, we are so confident in this program and believe that it really is one of the fastest ways to earn a six figure income working from home, if you notify us within the next 60 days and say that you are not TOTALLY convinced by the income pulling power of this revolutionary business, we’ll speedily refund every penny of your small investment.”

A good guarantee increases a customer’s confidence as they know they can get their money back within the specified time frame. You can gain access to a wealth of copy and paste graphics, including guarantee images for a very low price at CopyAndPasteGraphics2. This package will not only save you a lot of money but also heaps of time.

You will have to make sure that your guarantee is approved by your payment processor as some services require a maximum / minimum number of days.

Video and Audio

YouTube is one of the most popular websites and with good reason, people love to watch videos. Did you know that a good video can increase your conversions? Could you make a quick video that introduces your product or service, giving an overview of the features and benefits.

You can embed a video onto your homepage and/or product pages that introduces your business, services and products to your visitors. You can make personalised videos where you or your staff are the star. If you choose this route then I highly recommend the FlipMono.

Alternatively you can create screencasts that record your movements on the screen. With just a click of a button you can record your mouse movements on the screen, this is ideal for creating Power Point presentations, how to videos, etc. The tool of choice for this is Camtasia. Camtasia is not the cheapest tool around but it is one that can help make your company to be more productive and make more money. A good example of this is I have created videos that show people how to use our FTP client and how to make updates to my websites, this saves me showing people over and over again, and when I outsource jobs I can just record one video and share it with as many freelance workers as I need to get the job done.

If you do not have the budget for Camtasia you can get a free screencast application over at Jing (although a great tool, it does lack the features found in Camtasia).

Again, visit the SEM Business Blueprint website to see a video in action.

Audio is not as effective as video but it is still very powerful. You can use a very cheap USB Microphone to record your messages and then upload them to your server (you’ll also need a microphone for creating your screencasts).

You can see an example of the power of audio and also discover a very cool resource over at Audio Generator.

Positive Words

Has someone reviewed your product? Has an influential website, company or person written about you on their website or in the press? If they have why not stake that claim and link out to it or contact the author and ask if you can post it onto your site. This all goes towards increasing your conversions.

High Conversion Tools

Moving beyond website design and features, there are other ways that you can easily increase your conversions.

Virtual Smart Agent

Virtual Smart Agent is the world’s first stand-alone non-human Virtual Sales Agent that enables you to put an automated chat solution on your website without having to pay someone else for the service. Not only that, Virtual Smart Agent is designed to learn from your customers and as they ask questions that are not in the database of responses you’ll be able to add the answers at will.

Below you will see what VSA will look like as it opens on your website, triggered by a prospect moving their mouse cursor towards the back button or close button.

VSA is totally customisable to fit your website’s colour and you can choose from a whole range of Agent images (above you will see an image of a gentleman named Greg). Visit the VSA website and then enter your details to view a video demonstration of Virtual Smart Agent in action. Some VSA users have seen a 40% increase in their conversion rates.

Live Chat

Website Alive is a live chat agent that you can embed into your website. This is what HostMonster use to provide their customer support but you can take it one step further and WebsiteAlive as a sales tool. If you keep office hours why not be available to your website visitors (or outsource this) and help them solve any problems they encounter on your website. Let’s say you own a website that sells lawnmowers. A prospect may be looking for a particular model and not be able to find it, they see you are online and ask you whether you have it in stock. You can now point them to the correct location for that mower or, if you don’t sell it, you can suggest a better alternative. Without WebsiteAlive the prospect would more than likely leave your website.

I recommend you use VSA for one product webpages and use Website Alive for web stores. You simply put a piece of code on your website that will show your customers that Live Chat is offline or online and, at one click of a button, they can initiate a live chat session.

You can get a 10 day free trial to Website Alive right now!

Exit Splash

Exit Splash is another conversion increasing product that works. I would stress that I would only use the following on a single sales page (not a web store). Let’s say you are selling a product for £27 and a prospect isn’t quite ready to become a customer at this point, you can use Exit Splash to redirect the customer to your opt-in page (or any other page you wish) so you can capture their name and email address so you can follow up with them in the future using your autoresponder (more on this further down).

Below you will see Exit Splash in action. You can visit Daves Online Videos for yourself to see a live demo.

When you go to leave Daves Online Videos without becoming a member you will be redirected to the page you can see below. Here Dave Guindon is giving away something of value (known as an ethical bribe) in exchange for the prospects name and email address. This way his autoresponder can be put to work to follow-up with the prospect and turn them into a customer.

Clever I think you’ll agree!

Lead Capture

Now, here is the most powerful form of increasing visitor conversion rates, the lead capture form. You’ll need an account with a dedicated email service provider to make this work for you and I highly recommend AWeber. A suitable alternative is iContact.

You will see that we have a newsletter form at the top right of this page that asks for name and email in exchange for an ethical bribe, our newsletter (and blog posts) delivered straight to your inbox. What can you give away as an ethical bribe to your visitors.

With a lead capture web form on your site you will be able to follow-up with your prospects using your autoresponder. AWeber allows you to set up your autoresponder to send out emails on autopilot. What this means is that your prospect will continue to receive your message without being on your website. It take around 5 – 7 contacts with a prospect (on average) before they will purchase from you and this is the perfect solution that allows you to do just that.

You can gain free access to a very powerful training course all about email marketing over at Email Promos Exposed. The course will walk you through the steps necessary to create high-converting sales emails.

Visitor Tracking

Another important element that you will want to include to help you increase your website visitor conversions is to understand exactly how your visitors are using your website. Being able to track where you visitors come in and where they leave from is very important.

You should have Google Analytics installed on your site and I also recommend Clixpy. Clixpy will allow you to record visitor sessions on your website so you can see exactly what they do when they are navigating your website. Clixpy will give you some free visitor tracking credits just for signing up. You can read a whole article about installation of Clixpy here.

What Makes You Purchase From A Website?

Finally, when you make a purchase online take the time to analyse your decision. Why did you choose that website? What emotions did the website and sales copy elicit in you? What made the website and product different from their competitors? Was it a headline or graphic that caught your eye? Take the time to make notes and see what you can use (in your own style) on your very own website.

Conclusion

I have shared quite a few ways that will help you to increase your website conversions and I hope you start doing this today. Increasing your existing visitor conversions saves you from having to double your traffic to double your conversions.

It’s also very important that your website is optimised for the search engines. If you are interested in one of our SEO packages then give us a call on 0798 802 6719 or use our Contact Us page.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this article.

Warning: No matter what conversion increasing strategy you adopt please be sure to test and measure its effectiveness. This will allow you to make any changes if a particular strategy does not fit your site or customer base.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. Go and grab your copy of 43 Sneaky Little Tricks To Instantly Increase Your Sales

Suggested resources:

Article – Increase Web Site Conversions with the Scientific Method

How To – Learn Photo Shop Videos

Site Optimization Tools – Google Site Optimizer

Copywriting Blogs – Copy Blogger and Michel Fortin