How to Increase Website Traffic and Sales
Looking at your website's data can quickly reveal the drawbacks on potential sales, while paying attention to best practices used by most ecommerce brands can help elevate your overall store experience. If you're confident in your business idea, these small changes are often what you need to start earning your first sales.
Be honest about your homepage
Your store’s homepage is like the display window of a physical store. It needs to simultaneously reflect your brand in the best light, while also encouraging customers to enter and start shopping.
Your brand is on display on your website homepage. Everything from the font you choose to your color palette is used by shoppers to understand who you are as a company and whether they should become your customer.
Create a seamless branded look that will ensure the trust of potential customers. The same can be done with product photography. Your photos will be used by shoppers to judge the quality of your products, which shoppers won’t be able to see in person. Invest in them accordingly.
For lifestyle photos, you can shoot your own or use professional stock images.
When it comes to creating your own high-quality product photos, use simple and affordable tools like:
A homemade photo studio
Remove the background on your product photos if needed
Free photo editing software
If your current website doesn’t use professional and clean-looking photography, it could be turning customers away.
Navigate your store like a new customer
Your website won’t be the first experience your potential customers have with online shopping.
Much in the way you expect products in a brick and mortar store to be located at the back of the shop, there are certain conventions that users have come to expect from a website. While some may seem obvious, a misunderstanding can easily result in lost sales.
In most cases, users find their way from your homepage to your product page to your checkout by using your navigation menus. These are typically found at the top and bottom of your website.
Header navigation menus often feature a Shop button, which usually either leads to a collection page featuring all of a brand’s products or a drop-down menu to sort products into further categories, like sweaters, t-shirts, and shorts.
Depending on your business, you can also include links to other pages customers might want to visit before making a purchase
Visitors frequently refer to the footer navigation to find out more information about a company.
Footer navigation menus are another best practice for online stores. The links found here are different than those found in your header. Links to your returns and exchange policy, customer reviews, privacy, and terms and conditions, all inserted in the footer of your website, and not the header.
Is your website appealing to your target audience?
Selling online is all about trust, and nothing looks as unprofessional as a glaring typo on a website’s homepage. Even if you’ve proofread your own website, it’s worth referring to a friend’s point of view or even hiring a copywriter or editor from Upwork.
Your homepage should be persuasive and to the point. Unnecessarily long sentences or big paragraphs can make users lose interest in what you’re trying to sell.
Does your business look trustworthy?
Building trust on your site when you have no sales yet can be very challenging, but it’s a necessary step in converting website visitors into customers. Since your visitors can’t get to know you in person, you’ll need to make sure your website is inviting and makes every visitor feel safe.
Make use of social media to build your brand:
While you don’t need to be on every social platform, you should maintain a presence on the ones your customers use. This requires you to regularly update your social profiles with content to show that your business is active, and engaging with customers in comments or even direct messages.
Integrate live chat:
Live chat can let you greet visitors while they’re still looking around and answer any questions they might have about your products. Live chat will help you build a one on one connection with every visitor. A live chat function can be added to your website using apps like Tidio or Facebook Messenger.
Tell your story and share it with customers:
People like to fell like their buying from like minded people. That’s one edge you have over big retailers. If your brand is missing that personal element, consider incorporating your story or mission into your homepage to connect with new visitors and encourage them to give your brand a chance.
Is your website mobile optimised?
The majority of ecommerce website traffic now comes from mobile devices, where your website can look very different than it does on a desktop.
Load your homepage on your own mobile device, as well as any other devices you have access to, in order to make sure it looks good and functions properly.
Does your homepage host a good call to action?
Similar to a navigation menu, having the correct call to action on your homepage can help guide customers and direct them from one page to the checkout. A call to action draws attention and encourages action from a website visitor.
Ecommerce stores typically feature their main call to action through their homepage banner. The main banner typically catches a customer’s eye first and is used to promote your best-selling product.
Your call to action should convey a clear message that speaks directly to your target audience, compelling them to click through to shop. If your own homepage doesn’t have a strong image or if it contains too many repeating messages upon first glance, you could be confusing customers and losing them as a result.
Are shoppers adding products in their cart?
Looking at how many of your website visitors are adding products to their cart is a good way to evaluate changes you might need to make to your store. Use an analytics tool to see how many visitors are adding your products to their cart. Make sure your Add to Cart button is easy to find on both desktop and mobile versions of your site.
Is price or payment gateways preventing shoppers from checking out?
If your conversion rate is strong from product page to checkout, but you are losing people at the final point in their purchasing journey, you may need to revaluate some of your pricing and shipping costs to be more attractive to shoppers.
Provide customers more options for paying at checkout by adding mobile payment options like PayPal, Apple Pay, or Google Pay. You could also provide a wider choice of shipping rates, from inexpensive standard shipping to a more costly express post
The easier you make the checkout process, the better chances you have of increasing your conversion rates. If customers make it to this final step of the checkout, it is up to you to make the checkout experience effortless.
Remarket to your website visitors?
It’s important to keep in mind that not all consumers are ready to make a purchase on their first visit to your store. Depending on your product and price point, their decision might require multiple visits to your store.
Remarketing targets previous website visitors based on the actions they took, like abandoning a cart or browsing a certain product page. It’s an effective strategy to keep your brand top of mind for website visitors who aren’t ready to buy yet.
Remarketing usually takes the form of email marketing or retargeting visitors with paid ads.
Next Steps:
It’s not uncommon in the beginning to receive hundreds of site visitors per day, but still not see any sales yet. Figuring out exactly what is stopping these preventing these customers from following through with making a purchase can feel like a dead end, but like any problem, you need to objectively site back and evaluate every potential cause in order to root out the actual issues before you can address them.
