Conversion rates can look less than fantastic during the holiday shopping season, even after a very successful sales period. Your site is bound to have more shoppers just browsing; many people are looking online for the perfect gift and are visiting sites from which they don’t typically make purchases.
Quick Links
While your holiday-season conversion rates may be skewed and don’t show an accurate picture of your revenue, you may still be interested in improving your conversion rate in the months ahead. Here are six tips.
1. Meet Shopper Expectations
Whether you are a real estate agent creating a listing presentation or an e-commerce site selling handmade soaps, you don’t want to mislead your audience unintentionally. Your landing page should match the meta description that appears on a search engine site. You won’t have a high conversion rate if potential customers don’t see what they expected. If you find your conversion rate lacking, check to make sure your meta description accurately reflects your product and, especially, your landing page.
2. Experiment With A/B Testing
Split testing, or A/B testing, is a strategy in which you show part of your audience one campaign variation and another part a different variation. You create two versions of one piece of content (with changes to one variable) and see which performs better. You need to plan for a long enough period to get an accurate picture of each version’s performance.
One example is to experiment with the placement of your call-to-action button. Try placing it near the top of one page version and to the side of another version. Which one performs better over time? The answer may determine effective website changes.
3. Attend Abandoned Shopping Carts
Many shoppers leave behind shopping carts with one or more items in them during the holidays. They may be looking through Black Friday specials and do lots of shopping at once, and they may get distracted. Perhaps they thought they found the perfect gift for someone and later decided on something else instead. Whatever the reasons for an increase in abandoned shopping carts, you can implement a campaign to lure them back to the product.
Try sending an email to customers reminding them of the item they left behind. Let them know it’s still available. You can even consider offering them a discount on the item. These tactics can bring your product back to the forefront of shoppers’ memories and potentially increase your conversion rate.
4. Streamline Your Purchasing Process
Shoppers don’t want to spend a lot of time in the checkout process once they’ve decided to make a purchase. Your procedure should be as quick and straightforward as you can make it, especially for mobile users.
You can help consumers check out quickly by offering multiple payment methods, removing restrictions on online forms and allowing shoppers to check out as a guest.
5. Optimize Local Marketing
Mobile users often visit your site to get contact information or find out where your business is. You can localize your content by:
- Creating content that speaks to local customers
- Adding location pages to your site
- Managing your directory listings
Once customers know where and how to find you, they may be more likely to warm up to your site and products.
6. Increase Audience Trust
You can help customers trust you by offering free returns or money-back guarantees. You can also include “About Us” information to give your business a human touch. Making your site easy to navigate and shop helps build customer trust, too.
Keep your site up-to-date. If you haven’t added a blog post in a while or store hours have changed, your audience may become wary of your site and assume that you don’t pay attention to it — or even that you’ve gone out of business.
Conversion rates might not look great after the holiday season, but the numbers don’t have to stay low. Using some strategies in the first quarter can boost your conversion rates and revenue.