Every single visitor you get provides an opportunity to sell products or services. However, in order to get people to buy those products or services, you have to keep them on your site. Below, you will discover some tried-and-true techniques to keep visitors on your site. They are easy enough to implement, but they’ll have a huge impact on your conversion rates – and your revenue.
Make Sure Your Ads Match Your Products
If you’re relying on paid ads to drive traffic to your site, one of the worst things you can do is fail to match your ads to what you actually offer. Make sure that when visitors click an ad, it takes them to the right page and the right product. Otherwise, they will likely leave your site and choose a competitor’s ad or site, instead.
Ensure Easy Navigation
The last thing you want is for your visitors to feel confused about how to get from page to page while they’re on your site. Make sure that you not only provide an easily-navigable menu bar, but that you lay your pages out in an order that makes sense. What’s more, be sure to make use of submenus if this helps you better organize your site.
Create an Attractive Website
When someone arrives on your site, they will typically form an opinion of it within the first 10 seconds or so. In some cases, and especially if your site or store’s layout lacks aesthetic appeal, they may not even last that long. Keep things simple, make sure your site looks professional, and don’t overcrowd any pages.
Provide Plenty of Contact Information
Today’s consumers only buy products from people and companies they can trust, and one of the best ways to build trust with your potential buyers involves giving them multiple ways to contact you. A phone number and email address are a good start, but a mailing address – even if it’s just a PO Box – makes your business more legitimate. Be sure your site has a “Contact Us” page, and for even better results, include a contact form.
Speed Things Up
In today’s world of instant gratification, people don’t want to wait around for pages to load. When they click a button, they expect that page to appear in front of them in two seconds or less, and it’s up to you to make that happen. If your site seems slow, you have options. You could upgrade your server, especially if you receive a lot of traffic and are on a shared server, consider a caching plugin such as WP Fastest Cache, use a CDN which is especially useful if you have customers all over the world, and constantly test your shop with sites like PageSpeed Insights.
Reduce Distractions
Flashing text, pop-ups, and bright colors might seem like great ways to get potential buyers’ attention, but in the long run, they may be having the opposite effect. Things like this can distract your visitors from the task at hand. Though pop-ups can certainly be effective, it’s vital that you find a way to make them as minimally intrusive as possible. If you will have flashing text on your page, make sure it’s in the right place and drawing your visitors eye where you want it.
Take Better Photos
If your visitors can’t clearly see what they are about to buy, they probably won’t buy it. Make sure that your photos are crisp, clean, and ideally in high-definition. Implement a “zoom” feature to let visitors get a closer look, and be sure that you include high-quality product descriptions, too.
Make it Mobile
Per Smart Insights, an internet- and ecommerce-related data collection and analytics group, more than 50% of all website traffic originates from mobile devices. If your site doesn’t look nice on a mobile phone or tablet, it can cause you some serious issues.
Offer what Your Visitors Want
If you find that your visitors are leaving your site before buying anything, there’s a reason for it, and that reason could be that you aren’t offering the products your customers want. Run a poll, provide a survey – anything that will get people to open up about their experience with your site. You’ll probably discover a few new products to carry to help generate excitement, too.
Create a Retargeting/Retention Strategy
Sometimes people will visit your site without any real intention to buy. It’s the age of information, and people tend to research quite a bit before making even small purchases. If this seems to be the case for you, try to implement a retargeting and retention strategy. For example, you could ask visitors for their email addresses and then use a WooCommerce plugin like Abandoned Cart Pro that allows you to send automated retention messages to people who didn’t buy or to people who left items in their shopping carts.
Help Your Visitors Trust You
Though a Contact Us page is an excellent first step to build trust with your visitors, you’ll need a little more than that. Things like informative blog posts, testimonials, trust logos, and security certificates will make your visitors feel more confident when it comes to doing business with you.
Making an ecommerce site successful is all about gaining consumers’ attention, driving them to your site, then keeping them on your site long enough to make a purchase. All the tips shown here can help you reduce your bounce rates and improve your conversions significantly, so be sure to consider them and make changes where needed.
