Increase Conversion Rate On Your Ecommerce Website

Are you looking to increase conversion rate on your e-commerce website? Conversion rate, depends on two factors:

  1. Website Traffic
  2. Opt-in rate/sales page

Website owners think that just by increasing traffic they will gain more sales. However, it is both traffic and opt-in rate which will determine your conversions. If you don’t have an opt-in form on your website you should have one. Opt-in forms allow you to collect your website visitors email and continue to sell to them over the long term.

If you are simply selling from your website directly, the opt-in rate doesn’t apply. In this case it is your sales page which does the converting. Changing the format of this page then is what you need to experiment with. Test and measure different sales page formats to see which works best.

Website Traffic And Targeted Website Traffic

So let’s look at traffic first. There’s two basic kinds of traffic, targeted and random traffic. Random traffic can come to your site in masses and never convert. Targeted traffic should convert much more frequently because they want what you have.

So when you either create content for your website or paid adverts, you should keep this in mind. Write specific convent which will bring in the right people to your site. Similarly, paid advertising should be very specific. Eliminate potential time wasters by getting the most relevant people to your site. In the case of Google’s Adwords program this might mean being very specific with the keyword selection you use to bring people to your site. It’s also about knowing your target audience very well. See why is target market important.

You can read more about paid advertising in my ebook The Ultimate Guide To Online Marketing. And you can learn about targeting the right articles for your website in my ebook Niche Blogging For Profit.

increase conversion rate ecommerce

Opt-In Rate

The other metric in increasing conversions is your opt-in rate. Don’t focus too much on traffic and neglect your opt-in rate. Opt-in rate is a large factor in your sales generation. I’m assuming your website is geared to take your visitors email address at the earliest opportunity. If not, it is your sales page which you can alter to test your sales.

Like I mentioned earlier you should always have an email opt-in form on your main website landing page. That’s the page where people generally land. A landing page should be entirely that. It is specifically for getting your subscribers information, in exchange for some kind of ‘freebie’. Don’t give your visitors too many options. They will choose none of the them when faced with a multitude of possibilities. Instead, give them two choices: click away or opt-in. That’s a landing page. See below:

increase conversion rate ecommerce

Testing And Measuring

You might already have a lot of traffic coming to your website. But is that traffic converting into subscribers? Getting your website traffic into your sales funnel should be you main focus. Once they are in your sales funnel, you have many more opportunities to sell to them.

More people will buy if you email them regularly and deliver information and value. By building a relationship with your potential customers through email, you have a larger chance of selling to them than in the short time they are on your website. You can sell months, years or even decades later down the road, once you have someone’s email address.

The various elements of your landing page will determine your opt-in rate:

  • Your ‘giveaway’ offer
  • Your landing page video (if you have one)
  • Your text and colouring on your landing page
  • The pretext – how your visitors found you in the first place

Multiple Opt-in Offers

Pop-up/Drop-downs

You can also increase your opt-in rate by having a variety of ways for your subscribers to opt-in to your email newsletter/giveaway. Drop downs and pop-ups are two simple ways to gain subscribers to your email series. However, Google is cracking down on pop-ups because is spoils the user experience. A lot of people (me included) are getting very annoyed with popups!

They are especially annoying if you can’t close them down on your mobile device for instance. Drop downs are less annoying and less intrusive so are a good alternative to pop-ups. A drop down box at the top or bottom of your website can alert visitors to your website of your offer.

Links To Landing Pages

You can also link your content to landing pages where your visitors can opt-in to your offer. This is good if you have a variety of different landing pages which you can select according to the type of content you are creating.

Appointment Generators

You can also add appointment generating software to your website to arrange appointments with website visitors if appropriate.

Banner Adverts

Using simple banner adverts can also give your website visitors another opportunity to link through to a landing page and exchange their details for your freebie offer.

Landing Page Alterations

Small changes in your landing page can make a massive difference in your opt-in rate. Ask yourself a number of questions to help increase opt-in rate and build your opt-in page accordingly:

  • Is your offer clear and obvious for everyone visiting your website?
  • Is your offer compelling to most of your website visitors?
  • Is there a single, obvious call to action on every page of your website?

Too many options can confuse your visitors into inaction. Having a clear and compelling option which is the main focus of your landing page, directs visitors into your sales funnel. Changing a few small things about your landing page offer can have a massive impact. Change a small thing at a time and measure your results over 1000 visitors. By doing this for a variety of small changes, you will develop a better landing page experience, a more compelling offer and more opt-ins.

Increase Conversion Rate E-commerce Website

To increase conversions on your e-commerce website there are various details you need to get right:

  • Website traffic – Must be targeted to the right audience – Have you got this right?
  • Landing page – Must offer a compelling reason for your subscriber to opt-in.
  • Email series – Your follow up emails must give value a build trust.
  • Sales Pages – Your products must be a good fit for your target audience. 

Need an e-commerce website but don’t know where to start? Get a fully functional ready made sales funnel.

Ecommerce Conversion Funnel

What is an ecommerce conversion funnel?  Ecommerce is the sale of products conducted electrically over the internet. Conversion refers to sales or ‘op-ins’ to a funnel. A funnel is a system of email capture and series of emails sent out to subscribers, usually for the purpose of making online sales.

Ecommerce Conversion Funnel

Landing Page

A typical ecommerce conversion funnel will start with a landing page. A landing page is a page specifically built to ‘convert’ a website visitor into an email subscriber. Here’s an example of a landing page:

ecommerce conversion funnel

So why would you want to convert a visitor into a subscriber? For the sale of goods and services through email marketing. Email marketing allows you to build alist of subscribers and build a relationship with them for the purpose of selling goods and services over the internet.

Selling something directly from a website is much more difficult than selling over an email marketing campaign. A website visitor is typically only on a website for a matter of minutes. If you are selling on your ecommerce website you only have a few minutes to convert your visitor into a customer. Email marketing makes this process possible over a much longer time scale.

Once you have a subscribers email you can market your products to them over weeks, months and years. You can build a relationship by offering information and value. Once you build trust with your subscribers you have a much better chance of selling to them.

Email Follow Up

ecommerce conversion funnel

Once a subscriber opts in to your landing page, they are typically given a series of steps to confirm their interest in your subscription service. A landing page usually offers some ‘legitimate bribe’ to the visitor in order to incentivise them to hand over their email address in exchange for some piece of information, an information download or a some such material. Once into the funnel the subscriber will receive some regular automated information as per the offer.

An email series of follow ups can be as short or as long as you like. A series of 10 email follow ups is a normal amount before offering some kind of product or service. After that you can send out regular updates manually to your email list if you choose, or you can automate as many emails as you like. The main purpose of sending out more emails to your list of subscribers should be to build trust and offer value. If you do this your subscribers are much more likely to open your emails and keep opening them for the long term.

Products

A good ecommerce conversion funnel should have products to sell. Otherwise you won’t make any money! Ideally you should have a range of products which range in features and price. Products usually start from the ‘free’ giveaway item to a low valued product which is available to anyone. Further down the conversion funnel and to exisiting customers, you can offer higher valued items. See more about a ready made sales funnel. For most online marketers building a funnel of their own takes time and a lot of effort. In addition to this it is very difficult to replicate a sales funnel which have:

  • High Ticket Commissions
  • Memberships (Recurring Commissions)
  • Built in sales team
  • Multi-tier sales
  • Up-sells

So it’s far better to access a sales funnel which already has these features rather than trying to build your own. Access one here. 

Ecommerce Conversion Funnel

Even though an ecommerce conversion funnel starts for the subscriber at the landing page, for the marketer is starts even before then. If it’s your landing page you need to get people to it before you can send then down your sales funnel. This starts with traffic generation and you can either get people to your landing page from a paid advert or by creating content.

Content Creation
niche marketing examples

Article writing, video creation, podcasts or webinars are all methods which can bring people to your sales funnel. Blogging is a popluar low cost method of generating leads to your sales funnel. Creating the right content is key since getting the wrong type of visitors to your landing page/website won’t result in any opt-ins. By getting to know your target audience, you are in a better position to create valuable content which draws highly targeted buyer traffic into your sales funnel. See more about targeting your content for your specific audience in my ebook Niche Blogging For Profit.

ecommerce conversion funnel

Content can be found through Google and via social media platoforms. By sharing your content and more importantly writing good quality and useful content, you are more likely to get shares and rankings on both social media and the Google search algorithm.

Paid Advertising

Paid advertising is a much faster way of generating immediate traffic flow to your ecommerce conversion funnel. Again, you need to make sure your audience is well targeted. This means getting to know the platforms you will be using in your paid advertising campaigns. A simple error can mean you choose a much broader audience to send to your website. You can waste money if you don’t get ecommerce conversion funnelit right and there are ways of saving money and getting a much more targeted audience to your site. See my ebook The Ultimate Guide To Online Marketing for more information on this.

Ecommerce Conversion Funnel – Summary

To get an ecommerce conversion funnel right you need a number of things in place:

  • Your marketing
  • Your landing page
  • Your email series
  • Your products

Each one of these steps deserves a book to itself. Get any aspect wrong and your sales will suffer. Get them right and your ecommerce sales funnel will let you build a life of freedom and flexibility. Ecommerce is an amazing model because in large part it can be automed. Your marketing can be automated, your landing page is simply an automated website, even your email follow ups are automatically delivered to subscribers as they opt-in to your funnel.

A sales funnel can work much better too if you have a built in sales team who are closing sales on your behalf. It’s also worth considering a ready made sales funnel which has:

  • A range of products ready to go
  • Automates the process of setting up the sales funnel, landing pages and website
  • Allows you to skip straight to the marketing step (and teaches you this too)

Learn more and access a fully pre-made marketing funnel. You can start sending targeted visitors directly to it with the minimum of fuss.

Access here.Â