This Christmas, Flint Studios wanted to give something back to our followers: so we have decided to create #12DaysOfContent, which allows us to provide you with free tips and tricks to help your business grow and stand-out during these over-crowded festive times.
#12DaysOfContent will provide our readers with our expertise and knowledgeable advice in 12 different blogs!
Today we will be looking into how you can stand out during this busy shopping period. With the eCommerce market becoming a saturated place, it’s proving more and more difficult for businesses to stand out from the crowd - especially at Christmas when everyone is sending out similar messages!
So, how exactly do you make sure your traffic leads to conversions, decrease abandoned carts and improve your brand’s image? Here are 12 ways you can do to help increase your conversion rates over busy shopping periods.
1. Provide Social Proof About Your Products
Social proof, also known as social influence, is a common marketing tool used online to influence customers to purchase a certain product/service by providing a review from a previous customer.
Social proof is a reliable source that first-time buyers will trust, so it’s vital that you encourage your return customers to provide feedback and leave reviews about their purchases.
While you may want to take out the negative comments to avoid increasing your bounce rates, it’s crucial that you keep them in as it ensures customers that you are a credible and legitimate site.
If you don’t already have a place for your customers to leave a review- contact us, Flint Studios and we can integrate a rating platform for you.
2. Product FAQs Page
An FAQ (frequently asked questions) page is a list of commonly asked questions about your products or services put in the one place for users to access and find out the answers to their questions. FAQs can benefit your customer’s user experience and help them make that all important purchasing decision!
If a customer cannot easily find the answer to their questions, then they are more likely going to ditch your website and your cart and find someone else (your competitors) who can provide them with some answers.
If you aren’t too sure what questions you should answer on your FAQs page, start paying attention to the questions you hear most often through customer service, you can also analyse your competitors and see what they are answering.
Top Tip:
You could create a general FAQs page about who you are, your returns policy, how to get to your site etc. and create a product-specific FAQs which could be displayed under each product description: these means if a customer has a specific questions about your process that would stop them from a conversion, you’ve already got it covered!
3. Optimise Your Checkout
Your customers should be able to check out and have their order processed in as few clicks as possible. If this process is a long, complicated and slow process, you will see an increase in your shopping cart abandonment rates.
By improving the user design of your shopping cart on all devices devices and offering a selection of secure payment options for your customers: it will allow for more freedom and choice, especially for first-time buyers. It should also increase the overall experience for users, decrease shopping cart abandonment and increase return customers.
For example, if you integrate PayPal to your checkout, it allows those with a PayPal account to check out in as little as two clicks and will improve your conversion rate!
If you don’t believe us? PayPal found out that those who integrated with them have an average checkout conversion rate of around 89%.
89% increase with one alternative checkout method! There are a large number of different payment options that you can integrate into your website, but here are our favourites
Best Third-Party Flexi-Payment Companies
- Klarna
- Paypal
- WorldPay
4. Proofread Your Work Before You Upload
Your website should have outstanding grammar. No matter what. There is no excuse for poor grammar online as there are loads of tools that you can access to ensure your content is grammatically correct.
Poor grammar is off-putting to your customers and can be seen as unprofessional or unreliable. Customers will be dubious about giving you any personal information, never mind buying something from you.
Top Tip:
You can either hire someone, such as a content writer or a copyeditor to read over and correct your site: start off with the most trafficked pages as these are the ones people visit the most.
If you are on a limited budget, there are a number of free tools you can use: Grammarly is an excellent digital writing tool, and so are built-in systems into Word and Google Docs.
5. Keep Your Website Clear, Concise And Consistent
Your website could be the most well-designed, creative and unique site that your users have ever seen, but if users can’t read it then none of it matters.
It’s crucial that your website is clear, concise and consistent - but what exactly does this mean?
- Keep your website clear
It’s really important that you are being clear and making sense when creating and writing content for your site because this is all they have to rely on.
When a customer is shopping in a store, they are able to see the actual item and try it on - it’s a tangible product, however, online customers do not have this same experience. They are totally reliant on the descriptions of the products that you have crafted.
This is why it’s crucial that you include as much accurate information about the product as possible in order to correctly inform customers, and provide them with all the information they need to know.
For example, you should include sizes of the item, what materials it’s made from, what size the model is wearing etc.
You need to be clear with what you are selling and ensure that you are providing any details that the customer needs to know what they’re buying.
- Keep your website concise
Keeping your website concise is an important factor for your online users: they don’t want to read through long paragraphs of text- they want to be told what you are selling and if you have any deals, FAST.
Make sure that your text is easy to read and so users can scan through it and come away with all the key messages: if you are unsure, ask a friend or someone outside of the business to see what they have taken from your text.
Concise content is also vital to ensure that your website transfers over well onto a tablet or mobile - if users on these devices have to scroll down large amounts of text, the likelihood of them leaving your site is high.
- Keep your website consistent
There are many factors that ‘consistency’ can relate to - pricing, brand image and your key messages. Here are some top tips that you need to check over and make sure that your website as a whole is consistent.
- Headlines
Make sure that every headline is in title case, or caps (whichever one you have chosen) and ensure that it’s the same on every single page.
- Fonts:
Ensure that your fonts are consistent on your site; if they are not, it will make your website look messy or unprofessional and customers will leave to a better-looking site. If you have one font for your headlines and another for your body text, ensure that this is the same on every single page of your website.
- Colours:
Establish a colour pallet of your brand and keep it consistent through your website. If you have a certain colour for your titles or one for your body of text; make sure that it’s the same colour throughout your website.
- Description of colours:
If you are describing something as ‘lemon’ in one instance, don’t call it ‘yellow’ in another: this will help avoid confusion for customers because referring to the same colour as two different adjectives will cause the customer to make assumptions or simply get confused.
- Product description:
If you keep the way you describe products the same, your customers will be able to find the information they are looking for more quickly: this improves UX and will help lead to that all important conversion.
6. Easy To Navigate Website
The best way to determine whether or not your website is user-friendly is to get someone who has never visited it before to see if they are able to get the item they are looking for with ease. If that person is unable to find what they are looking for quickly, then they are more than likely going to leave your website and convert somewhere else.
It’s also crucial that you think about how mobile-friendly your website is. Google ranks mobile-friendly sites higher on their results page, so optimising your site for mobile devices should increase your organic traffic and in turn lead to sales.
Top Tip:
If you would like to ensure that your website is optimised correctly for mobile, get in touch with Flint Studios, where we can discuss what we can do for you.
7. Avoid Excess Amount Of Product Categories
Product categories are an important part of your site: they help customers find what they are looking for quickly and effectively and are very useful for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
That being said, having an excess amount of product category pages will make new users feel overwhelmed when they visit your site. Ensure that you aren’t sub-categorising your products so much that it actually defeats the purpose of why they are there in the first place.
8. Use High-Resolution Photos Throughout Your Website
It’s an absolute must that you should have photos throughout your website: a number of studies and researches that have proven that photos help customers engage with your company and help conversion rates. If the images you are uploading are pixelated and blurry: it’s actually doing your website more harm than good.
Product photos are vital on an eCommerce site: they explain to the customer what the product is, how it looks on, what the sizing is like. Good photos can make or break a sale.
9. Upload Engaging Non-Product Images
Customers will get bored and feel like you are just pushing sales if all you are providing on your website is product-related images. To engage with your customers a bit more, and provide more of an experience, you should include non-product images throughout your website.
10. Write Relevant, Valuable and Original Content
In order to improve your rankings on search engines, you need to be writing useful content that is relevant to your products/ brand image. If you are able to provide valuable and original content, users are more likely to visit your site.
What content should I be writing for my website?
You should be writing content that relates to your business: if you are a home interior company, write about trending styles and link to products you sell, if you are a mechanic, write about how you would fix a broken suspension and how much that would usually cost.
Your content should be informative and educational to your customers: providing them with relevant and valuable information about your products and why you are the company to shop with.
Your content should be spread across your site: set up a blog to write and upload your content to and create informative information on your product descriptions. The more informative and creative your content, the more likely your target audience is going to buy from you.
Top Tip:
When writing content for your website, don’t forget about SEO! If you are in need of some SEO help, contact Flint Studios, and our award-winning team would be happy to chat!
11. Special Offers In Busy Periods
One of the easiest offers that you can offer to your customers is free shipping!
It’s become a standard on the majority of eCommerce platforms to provide free shipping over a £X amount. So, by offering free shipping during this busy period should attract more traffic to your website!
Another tool that you can use to your advantage is coupon codes! You could offer a discount for a limited amount of time - this puts buyers under pressure, making them feel like they should purchase quickly. Shoppers hate to miss a deal during Christmas!
12. Offer Live Chat
Live chat is a programming system which you can integrate into your website that allows customers to direct message you about any queries or questions they have.
This creates a sense of human connection and builds trust. Once you have proven yourself and have delivered high-quality customer service through this software, it will increase the customer’s perception of you, and will hopefully share their positive experience to their friends and family.
To Wrap It Up:
12 ways in which you can do to help increase conversion over busy shopping periods:
1. Provide Social Proof About Your Products
2. Product FAQs Page
3. Optimise Your Checkout
4. Proofread Your Work Before You Upload
5. Keep Your Website Clear, Concise And Consistent
6. Easy To Navigate Website
7. Avoid Excess Amount Of Product Categories
8. Use High-Resolution Photos Throughout Your Website
9. Upload Engaging Non-Product Images
10. Write Relevant, Valuable and Original Content
11. Special Offer In Busy Periods
12. Offer Live Chat
These 12 tips should help you increase your traffic to conversion rates, decrease abandoned carts and improve your website.
Flint Studios are more than happy to help. If you would like our team of experts to look into your website and offer our services, please don’t hesitate to
contact us on:
028 9045 5554
Or email us:
[email protected]