Insight

3 ways to improve conversion

3 easy ways to improve conversion

When potential customers arrive at your website you know you have just a few seconds to hook their interest and encourage them along their journey to buy your products or services.

So you’ve spent time making sure your website looks good and is easy to navigate, and you’ve done everything you can to tell the world you’re open for business.

But have you?

As consumers, we can’t always pinpoint what it is that makes us feel we can trust a company enough to buy from its website, it’s just a feeling we get.

As marketers, we can’t afford to be vague, we have to know exactly what we need to communicate.

As always, the devil is in the detail; there are a number of key, subtle factors which send buying signals – or warning signals – to your prospects.

It’s easy to overlook these, but they are invaluable to achieving higher conversion rates.

In this article, we focus on 3 fundamental things you must put in place to maximise your chances of converting your prospects into customers.

1. Has your site got an SSL certificate?

An SSL certificate is installed on your server to ensure a secure connection between the server and the browser. You’ll know if you’ve got one because your URL will have a nicely reassuring padlock next to it and begin https:// rather than http://.

If you haven’t got an SSL certificate, chances are you’ll see a prominent ‘site not secure’ message next to your URL – and so will your customers. Not a great message if you’re asking someone to part with their credit card details, or hoping they’ll pick up the phone to enquire about a service!

Not only is SSL important to conversion, it’s important to SEO too. Google favours secure sites so will rank sites with an SSL certificate more highly than those without.

2. How good is your About Us page?

You may not think that people care about the story behind your company, but they do. Your About Us page is one of the most important on your site – it’s the place where people will go to get reassurance before they place an order or pick up the phone to get a sense about whether they can trust your organisation.

The best but most difficult approach is to stand in your customers’ shoes when you look at this page. Do you look established? Do you look like experts in your field? Do you look like you care about the products/services you sell? Be honest! Get a second opinion if that helps!

Don’t pay lip service to this page, a bland 2-line statement isn’t going to cut it.

Instead, invest in putting together the information your customers need to feel reassured, even inspired.

Many companies use this page to outline their company story and to highlight what it is that makes them special.

If you’ve defined your company values, let the world know what they are. If you’ve got an interesting back story to why your company exists, explain it.

And remember that people relate to people, so if you can, get some good photos of your premises and key members of staff.

3. Can you de-risk the sale?

Whether a prospect is buying a product from your website or thinking of getting in touch to enquire about your services, you’re asking them to take a risk.

We’re not talking about life-and-death risk, of course, but certainly a risk that the product might not be right or the service not up-to-scratch.

This is where it pays to put in place those little safeguards that make feel prospects feel happier about going ahead with a purchase or an enquiry.

If you sell a service, do you offer a free, no obligation consultation over the phone or in person? Do you have some additional information which you could email to the prospect? Can they undertake a free or low-cost trial? Can they read case studies and testimonials from other clients?

If you sell a product online, what’s your delivery and returns policy and how does this compare with competitors? Can you promote reviews so that people feel reassured by other customers’ experiences? Do you have clear contact details including a landline telephone number, a physical address and an email address? Do you make clear your opening times?

Hopefully your customers won’t want or need to go back once they’ve made the next step in the sales process, but you’ll encourage more conversions if you give people a clear and easy escape route and reduce their feeling of risk.

Got a question?

We’re here to help with all aspects of digital marketing.

If you want to improve conversions to your website in particular, we would be happy to take a look at your site and let you know if we feel we can help.

The usual starting point would be a conversation with you or your marketing manager followed by an audit which would illuminate how people behave on your site and how it performs on Google. Please get in touch for more information on 01606 610808.