Your website attracts a decent amount of visitors every month, but how do you get those customers to actually pull the trigger on the deal and make a transaction? Welcome to the realm of conversion rate optimization (CRO)! Here are what I believe are the four most important things you should be doing to convert lurkers into buyers:
1. Social Proof
So, pretend you are after a “how to” video on to replace a fan blade. You do a regular youtube search. The same video has come up twice in the results. One of the videos has 100,000 views, the other has 20. Which video are you going to watch? It’s the typical herd mentality of showing more interest in something that is already popular. For this reason you MUST have social proof that your product is damn good. Here are a few examples on how to do this:
Example 1
If you have 155,000 subscribers to your newsletter then you need to let it be known. Your opt in rates will increase just by implementing this tactic. It seems obvious, but you would be surprised at the amount of companies that fail to publicise things like this.
Maybe you don’t have thousands of fans. Then, ask yourself have any companies endorsed your product? Conversion rates skyrocket when banners like this are shown in the right areas. It’s proof that you are who you say you are. If I’m a buyer I look at all the brands below like USA today and Adidas and make the assumption that this company must be legitimate if all these companies have endorsed them.
2. What Have You Done?
Ask yourself what it is that your company has acheived. Maybe you have been selling online for the past ten years; this in itself is something you should be telling your customers. It’s nice to know that the company I’m going to buy from has been around for ten years. Maybe you have an online shoe store and you have sold over 3,000 pairs of shoes. You can brand this across the front page of your site “OVER 3,000 pairs of shoes sold to date”. Customers will think, “Hey they must be pretty good if they have managed to sell all those shoes” because customers eat these kind of things up.
3. A Sense Of Urgency
You don’t want the customer to think about yesterday or tomorrow, you want them to buy it now. Statistics show that once they leave the site, they are probably not going to come back. They need to feel like if they don’t purchase now, then they are going to miss out on a great opportunity. This may be in the form of a “limited time summer sale”, “stocks running out”, etc.
I’ll give you an example of urgency that I felt last weekend. I went into a store to purchase some furniture. The first thing the sales lady said to me was, “You have come at a great time, our sale ends tomorrow”. Already this made me feel like I have untapped something special. I was excited to purchase and felt like if I was to rest on it than I would never get these same prices again. This is a fantastic time tested selling technique that is equally effective online. Take a look at your website today and ask yourself, “What can I do to make my customers want to buy NOW?”
4. Certifications
You must demonstrate that you can be trusted. What certifications do you have in your industry? For example, plumbers in the UK have to be gas registered and companies abiding by these laws often demonstrate by displaying their cerification number on their website. The company I work for, SEO Guelph, are Google PPC certified. We highlight this by displaying our badge on the front page of our website.
Secondly, ask yourself what your company is doing to show customers that their details are secured. Pictures of locks, ticks, and verifable 3rd party security companies are a must.
