One of the common recurring questions I have seen over and over again in many ecommerce communities or forums is “Lots of traffic, but no sales. What am I doing wrong?”. This dilemma gets a lot of ecommerce merchants scratching their heads in confusion. If you are facing this issue, then you might be doing a couple of things wrong . In this blogpost, I am going to highlight top 5 techniques that can help you increase your conversions and turn your visitors into buyers.

1. Improve the quality of your store traffic

Do you know the quality of the visitors who come to your store? The first thing to do is to determine if the right people are visiting your store. One way to know this is to analyse your traffic data in Google analytics (I hope you’ve got Google analytics installed).

In Google analytics, go to audience > demographics > overview to get information about the gender and age distribution of your visitors.

You can also find the information about the interest of your website visitors by navigating to audience > interest > overview.

Let’s take a scenario where you sell female jewelry. If you find out that your traffic comprises of a majority of males under 18 who do not have any interest in jewelry or fashion, then you know you are definitely not attracting the right people to your store.

Other key information to take note of is your bounce rate, average page per session and your average session duration. The bounce rate is the share of visitors that left your website after viewing just one page. If you have a high bounce rate then your visitors are definitely not sticking around. This can mean the page your visitors are landing on is not optimized for a good user experience or they are just not the right audience for your offering. You can find your bounce rate by going to audience > overview.

The average pages per session is the average number of pages a visitor views before leaving your store. If this number is high then you know your visitors are exploring around. For an ecommerce store, this number should not be less than 2. To find your average pages/session go to audience > overview.

Likewise, your average session duration can be found at audience > overview and this tells you how long your users stay on your website. If the average session duration is high then it means your visitors are interested in your product offerings and are staying to find out more.

If you find out your store traffic is of poor quality, don’t worry you can improve it by taking the following measures:

Get your SEO right

Implementing an effective SEO strategy can help you attract the right people while driving organic (FREE) traffic to your store. SEO comprises of two parts and you must ensure to get both right in order to boost your traffic and attract prospective buying customers.

The first part is called on-page SEO. This part is where you make sure your store contains the right keywords for your target niche or market. This will enable your store get indexed by search engines and show up in search results on platforms like Google, Bing etc.

The second part of SEO is called off-page SEO. This is where you get other reputable sites to link (backlink) to your store through content such as blog post, social media posts, infographics etc. This will help your store to build credibility (SEO juice) and rank high for top keywords in your target niche/market. Doing this will make it easy for your target audience to find you.

Take a scenario where you sell baby clothing and your store ranks high on Google for the search keyword “Baby rompers”. This will mean you will not only be attracting the right people to your store but also you will be getting a ton of relevant traffic who will be more likely to convert.

Optimize your paid acquisition

Running ads has now become an integral part of the marketing process of most businesses. The most important part of paid acquisition which is missed by most marketers is targeting. Targeting the right people with your advertising is the most essential ingredient in the recipe for a good ad campaign. Getting your ad targeting wrong will attract the wrong people to your website.

In creating Facebook ads make sure to use the Facebook audience insights tool to drill down on your target audience. When creating search engine ads such as Adwords make sure to research the right keywords to target in order to attract the right traffic.

Below are resources to help you get your ad targeting right

2. Boost Buyer Trust & Confidence

Online visitors need to be convinced to make a purchase on your website especially if they are first time visitors. Below are two effective ways to increase buyer trust and confidence.

Social Reviews

88% of buyers trust online reviews as much as recommendations from friends and family. In fact, 39% of them read reviews regularly and only 12% do not read reviews at all (Search Engine Land).

This means showing positive reviews from other buyers can boost the confidence of your visitors to buy from you. Displaying reviews on your website promotes credibility and increases the probability of a visitor making a purchase. Top marketers use social reviews to influence buyer psychology and you can also do same.

I guess you will be asking yourself “how do I collect and display reviews on my store?”. Simple, use Kudobuzz social reviews to easily publish all your reviews from your social accounts. You can also use Kudobuzz social reviews to send after-purchase emails to collect more reviews from buyers.

Click here to install Kudobuzz social reviews

Trust Badges

The ever growing trend of online shopping has triggered a demand for online security and trust. Online shoppers must be assured that their personal data is safe and the products they are buying are going to come in a good condition.

You can give your visitors an assurance of quality and security by displaying trust badges and seals on your website. Placing seals and trust badges on your website can help improve the credibility of your store. This can create an impression of a secure store and will make your visitors feel safe when making a purchase from your store. Below are examples of trust badges.

There are different kinds of trust badges which include SSL certificate badges, payment/shipping method badges, security seals, verified reviews badge etc.

The usage of trust badges and seals can greatly affect your conversion rate and boost your sales. Check out a blog by the creator of Distrokid on how he increased the conversion on his checkout form by 60%. But remember not to use trust badges and seals in a spammy way, don’t place them all over your website. Doing that will rather make visitors suspicious.

3. Branding and design

Although growing rapidly, the ecommerce industry is one of the most competitive business landscapes due to the ease in setting up an online store. The number of ecommerce businesses has increased and the only way to stand out is by building a strong brand.

Create a brand story that will resonate with your target audience and take advantage of every opportunity to emphasize on this story or identity. Great branding is making sure the story and identity of your business can be seen in every aspect of your business. It should be baked into your store, emails, product descriptions, checkout page etc.

Think of your business as a person. Ask yourself, what do people have? Every person has a story or history, every person stands for something, every person talks in a particular way, every person has a peculiar fashion style etc.

When you see your business as a person then you will be able to think about various aspects of your branding and help you build a great identity for your business.

Create a “Mission” and an “About” page that will convey your story. Betific.co has an amazing story page that tells visitors their mission and what the company stands for. They also highlight their social contribution efforts, how their products are made and the kind of team behind the company.

The next major item on the branding list is design. Put work into creating a store that looks and feels great. If you are not a web developer then hire the right designer/developer to create your store.

Keep your colors and theme consistent not only on your store but in all your marketing content. Every email or social media post should have a design that is consistent with your brand’s design theme.

All your messaging or copy should be in a tone and style that best represents your brand. Keep your store and email messaging simple and avoid jargons. Communicate with your audience in way that you will communicate with a friend.

Check out this blog by SleekNote on ecommerce email marketing for examples and inspiration.

4. Product Images

Buyers usually want to see a product before they buy it. They also normally want to touch and sometimes even smell the product. Although the last two experiences cannot be replicated online, you have to find innovative ways to convince your visitors and turn them into buyers with your product images.

Use high quality images

Your images must be clear and of high quality. Do not use small and blurred images for your products, doing that will make your visitors think your products don’t look great. A great example can be seen on helmboots.com. The images of the boots are so sharp and crisp that you want to wear them already.

Use alternate images

Many stores use just a single image to sell a product. Since buyers cannot touch and hold a product online, you should use multiple images that show different parts of the product at multiple angles.

Use context

It is always great to show images in context of their functionality. If you sell earrings, have an image that shows someone wearing one. If you sell sofas, add an image that shows someone sitting in one.

This helps your visitors to easily connect emotionally with your product. It helps your visitors visualize themselves using your product by replacing the person in the image with themselves.

Use zoom and 360 degree images

Use an image zoom feature to help visitors see fine details. This is great for products that have a lot of fine details that needs to be seen by visitors. A 360 degree viewing feature will increase visitor interaction on your store.

5. Improve mobile experience

In 2017, mobile phones contributed 50.02% of the global web traffic. Statistics have shown that 40% of visitors will go to a competitor after experiencing a bad mobile experience.

Although mobile contributes a high amount of traffic, its revenue contribution to ecommerce sales is very low. This shows that the checkout experience on mobile is not optimized.

You are losing a lot of money if your store is not optimized for a good mobile experience. You can check your mobile responsive score with Google’s mobile responsive test tool.

Conclusion

The above techniques if well-implemented will help tip the needle in the direction of growth for your business. But there are several additional techniques that can help convert your store visitors into customers, below are a few bonus tips:

1. Improve the loading speed of your store.
2. Make your store easy to navigate.
3. Provide a returns policy.
4. Provide shipping and tracking information.
5. Do not copy and paste product descriptions from Aliexpress. Craft your own product descriptions.
6. Do not try to be a general store, focus on a particular niche and build your brand.
7. Do not put all your products on sale, it makes your store look spammy.
8. Reduce the number of pop-ups that show up on your store. Control their sequence and the number that shows up because they might distract your visitors.

Happy Selling!