Top 5 Tactics to Increase Website Conversions

While getting traffic to your website may be easy, through developments in search engine optimization or the use of social networking, a high conversion rate is something a bit further from our grasp. A high conversion rate essentially means that a significant number of visitors actually perform a desired action, such as making a purchase or submitting a form. Here are the top five tactics to increase your website conversions.

Good Content is the lifeblood of any website. The type of content on your website will predominantly determine its conversion rate. If you want your visitors to become customers, your content has to reflect that. For a sales page, the content (obviously) has to be geared towards encouraging the audience to purchase the product or service being offered. Informative content, by itself, will not encourage people to buy. Along with quality, the layout of the content must be aesthetically pleasing. Using bullet points and avoiding long paragraphs is a simple way to create engaging content. High readership leads to a lower bounce rate.

A Call to Action is essential for making sales. If an electronic store’s window has a banner reading ‘40% Off Your Order!’ wouldn’t it catch the attention of potential customers? The case is identical with websites. You have to lure the visitors to probe further. Essentially, one thing leads to another, which eventually results in the conversion of visitors to customers. The best place to have an attractive message placed is at the top of the page. Also, make sure it shows up in the description of your site throughout the search engines. A small call to action with some visual aids can significantly improve your website’s conversion rate.

Interactive Web Pages have a very strong effect. Try and incorporate multimedia functions into your site. By having pictures, videos and chat boxes on your website, its bounce rate will decrease. The more time that visitors spend on your website, the greater the chance of making a sale. However, you have to be careful and avoid overkill. Only use interactive content where it is appropriate. Overloading your website with multimedia that takes ages to load and causes frustration for the visitors is clearly not a practical business measure.

Sales Forms and Contact Information are great ways of generating leads from your website by providing complete contact information prominently on your website. If the visitor is able to get the information without having to look around, he is more likely to make use of it. Also ensure that you have sufficient options available in such forms for detailed data about the lead. What are they looking for? Why are they contacting you? How can you directly impact their satisfaction with your company? Lack of information provided by a visitor can destroy a perfectly good sales lead – but this is less likely to happen if you encourage details in your forms.

Back to Basics – This is the most important tactic for increasing your website’s conversion rate have a quality website design that is user friendly! If your visitors like the feel of your site they are going to spend more time on it and will tend to revisit frequently. This is the most basic step towards improving your site’s conversion rate. Also, make sure that your website has the right design, color scheme, theme and navigation. These are the basics of website design which have to be integrated into your website. They are literally make or break. Only once you’ve perfected them can you make the other tactics work for increasing your site’s conversion rate.

Over the last 2 years, Richard has been helping ecommerce businesses to improve their sales online. Richard is a trained Magento developer with over 3 years experience.