If like most e-commerce sites you’re looking to increase sales and conversion rates during 2010, it’s important to understand the reasons behind users buying decisions. There are a number of factors which when understood could help you turn more visitors into customers.

Here are 7 factors which influence your conversion rates:

• 1. Prices and availability -  People go online because they expect to find a great deal for less. They also expect to find the item in stock and with them within a few days. Therefore it makes sense for the business to ensure prices are always competitive and items are in stock. Plan well ahead and always keep your competitive edge intact.
• 2. Product positioning and merchandising - Similar to any high street shop, where products are positioned within your e-commerce site can have a huge effect on conversion rates. Merchandise your site in such a way that best sellers are never more than two clicks away from the homepage or main category pages, that products are always categorised and that there’s always a clear call to action.
• 3. Product offers and promotions – Take another example from the high street and make sure to always have a few offers online. Some visitors might find free delivery offers appealing, some find discount offers appealing and some find buy one get one free offers appealing. Plan well ahead and draw yourself a type of promotional road map to maintain your competitive edge and make your offer irresistible to both new and existing customers.
• 4. Level and expertise of your staff – Before making a purchase some visitor groups might place a call or send an email to the business. The way in which your staff is able to response, and in particular how quickly and thoroughly will effect your online sales and bottom line revenue. The key is to train your staff and adopt business practices which put customer support ahead.
• 5. Trust and credibility – Before handing over their money and personal details, visitors are looking for signs that the e-commerce site is credible and trustworthy. These signs can vary from displaying a physical address to listing terms and conditions in a clear and easily readable manner. Other trust factors are displaying a telephone number, displaying 3rd party accreditation and professional affiliations.
• 6. Seasonal fluctuations and trends – Some types of products might be selling better or worse at different times of the year. For example, you’d assume that greeting cards will sell better during the major holidays compared to the time in between. Use your historical data to promote different products at different times of the year. If you haven’t gathered enough historical data, try one of the trends perdition tools such as Google Trends.
• 7. Level and depth of your information – When visitors arrive at your e-commerce site and hopefully at the product page you should aim to answer all the questions they might have. Any uncertainty due to the level and depth of the information on the page can cause visitors to go elsewhere. When adding new products or services, ask a few people to read your descriptions to ensure there are no unknowns and later on tweak as you go along.

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Article by spectacles seller Glasses Direct. Sellers of spectacles and sunglasses online.

Here is a very good video I found on YouTube this morning. It is titled Optimizing Ecommerce Product Images. Although the video features two American marketers, what they talk about isn’t region specific so is good advice if you are in the UK.

Because of how dropshipping works you may be thinking “well I can’t do that because I don’t have the products to take photos of!”. Good product images can really help sell items, so spending money on buying the products yourself direct from a dropshipper to take photos of them is an investment. And once you are done you can then sell them on to recoup your expenditure anyway.

If you sell hundreds of products then it may become a slight issue. So perhaps only do it with your best sellers to begin with. You could clearly see in the video what a difference it makes so don’t underestimate the use of product photography.

This is a guest post by Ran Nir, the founder of online marketing agency Conversion Counts and a Google Analytics Consultant.

Google Analytics offers free enterprise level analytics software for everyone which just a few years ago would have cost an arm and a leg. Google Analytics will be an important tool to achieve your business goals provided the initial configuration is carried out correctly. Although Google Analytics offers some very complex solutions, the 10 benefits below are my favourites to increase conversion rates and revenues. They all require a basic understanding of Google Analytics and in many cases no additional configuration.

1. Track your website revenue: The Google e-commerce module is very comprehensive, in fact it can be used as a simple stock management system. Both online and offline orders can be tracked using Google Analytics which will provide your business with a complete picture in terms of revenue by category, revenue by channel, revenue by keyword, conversion rate, average order and many more important measurements.

To enable e-commerce reporting, follow these steps:

- Log in to your Google Analytics account
- Click ‘Edit’ next to the profile you’d like to enable
- On the Profile Settings page, click ‘edit next’ to Main Website Profile Information
- Change the E-Commerce Website radio button from ‘No’ to ‘Yes’
- Get a developer to install the tracking code available from Google
- Schedule a daily email e-commerce report so every morning you can start the day with a smile

2. Analyse and fix your sales funnel : You can use Google Analytics in many ways, but the most straightforward is to analyse and optimise a sales funnel. If the goal is set correctly then each stage in the sales funnel can be analysed and optimised to increase conversion. For additional information on how to set goals, visit the Google Analytics support page

3. Locate website errors and fix them : Having broken links on a site is bad news for user experience, site revenue and for your search engine optimisation efforts. Using Google Analytics to find error pages (404s) is really a breeze.

To locate error pages, follow these steps:

- Make sure you have a custom 404 page (you should have one anyway)
- Customize the page title of your error page, for example ‘Sorry Page Not Found :: SiteName’
- Visit your Google Analytics account >> content >> content by title
- Paste your unique page title in the free text under ‘containing’

4. Improve content by analysing the bounce rate : For online retailers, a high bounce rate hits where it hurts – the bottom line. Bounce rate is the percentage of entrances on the page that result in the visitor immediately leaving the site = missed revenue. There are a number of ways to reduce the bounce rate, my favourites are:

- Get rid of low quality traffic if you’re paying for it
- Improve the page content and address some basic usability tactics
- Ensure accurate metadata descriptions so you’re not promising something you can’t deliver
- When selling a product, ask yourself is the price competitive?

5. Track the effect of SEO metadata and content optimisation : If one of your SEO goals is to increase organic search CTR (if not, never too late to start!), Google Analytics can help. Once your changes have taken effect and are visible in the engines, head to Google analytics and follow those steps:

- Compare two dates, before and after your changes, taking into account seasonal and weekly fluctuations
- For site wide analysis, head to traffic sources

6. Track revenue sources : Best practice is to track and report on every channel which can turn into revenue. Using Google Analytics URL Builder it’s easy to assign a unique trackable URL or Tag URL as some people call it. Once the URL is tracked, you can analyse revenue, bounce rate, page views etc and start spending more cash where it matters. 

7. Track outbound links : If you link out from your site or blog, make sure you add onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(’/link/linkname’); “ It’s nice to know where your users are going to.

8. Compare historical data : One of my favourite features in Google Analytics is the ability to compare historical and seasonal trends. With e-commerce websites I use this information to better understand customer behavior and shopping habits so the right offer is always available at the right time. New offers can be compared to historical offers so your business can see what’s working and what’s not. Great for comparing seasonal keywords, traffic sources and more.

9. Manage sub domains and directory separately : This feature makes it easy to analyse and report, especially for websites with large folders and many pages. If you run a large website, this might be the only way to really turn raw data into actionable information. For additional information on tracking sub domains, visit the Google Analytics support page 

10. Reports by email : A great feature for businesses who like to stay 100% on top of things and get involved as much as possible. Using Google Analytics you can configure different reports to be sent to different people in the company, resulting in less manual work for yourself and happy customers.

The series on Increasing Revenue has now been finished. Here is the full list of all the articles:

Post 1: Looking At The Possibility Of Tripling Online Sales
Post 2: Increase Revenue 100% Without Getting More Traffic
Post 3: How-To: Improve Conversion Rate Of Visitors
Post 4: How-To: Increase Average Spend Of Shoppers
Post 5: How-To: Increase Number Of Times Customers Purchase
Post 6: How-To: Increase Traffic To Your Ecommerce Website

I’ve also added it to the Series page which I’ve created to list the post series which have been published. It makes it easier for you to refer to in the future should you want to refresh your memory on any methods/ideas.

Conclusion
I’ve managed to fit a lot into the 6 articles so I hope all the information contained within them can help your business. Even if you are only able to implement one or two of the tips it should have an impact on your sales. Most of the points mentioned can also be expanded upon in more depth. So if you feel I have been a bit brief with some elements have a good search and you will find even more info I’m sure.

Reach The Customers!

This article focuses on traffic. In percentage terms the amount you can increase your traffic using the content below will vary. But young businesses should be able to increase their traffic a notable percentage.

First off; you must be going for targetted visitors who can convert into customers, not just any old visitors. Give me 50 targetted visitors over 5000 random ones any day! A while back I wrote an article with 7 ways not to promote, worth a read to check you aren’t doing any of those methods.

I’m now going to split this post into 2 parts, Long-Term and Short-Term.

Generating Traffic In The Long-Term
SEO – search engine optimisation, it is all about the SEO! Get your website ranking highly in Google for popular terms in your niche and you will receive thousands of visitors every month. You can either pay a company to do SEO for you, or do-it-yourself.

Paying someone is going to cost a fair bit of money, I can’t give exact figures because I do all my SEO myself but I know it isn’t cheap (well it can be if you hire someone crap!). If you have the time I recommend you learn yourself. It will take a while to learn, take action and see results, we aren’t talking weeks here – we are talking many months and possibly years.

It is a massive subject so their is no point me trying to cover it in this post. Instead here are some websites I’ve used to learn SEO which have served me well.

Search Engine Guide – A huge archive of articles, the whole blog is about search engines but pay close attention to the specific SEO category. Covers everything from the absolute most basics upwards.

Problogger – This blog focuses on bloggers, so you can ignore most articles, but the SEO category has lots of good articles with information that can be used regardless of whether you run a blog, ecommerce site or just a content site. Go through the archives and have a good read as their is lots of content so don’t just skip through it as you may miss important stuff.

Those are the main 2 that I’ve used so I highly recommend them. Everything else I’ve learned has just came from being active online looking through forums, searching etc. There are a fair few SEO specific blogs, perform some searches for terms like ‘SEO blog’, ‘SEO tips’ etc and you will find lots of resources.

One thing I will say is make sure the SEO advice you read is relatively up-to-date, anything over a few years old may now not be sound advice. The search engines are changing the ways they rank websites all the time, so if an article tells you to do tonnes of link exchanges, quickly leave the website! Generally from an SEO point of view I say the fresher the better.

Generating Traffic In The Short-Term
If your website isn’t ranking highly in the search engines you need to use other methods in the short-term to get potential customers to your website.

• Shopping Directories – Submit your website to all of the major shopping directories like ShopSafe. All the good directories have strict requirements so it means you won’t be listed amongst a load of crap like you are in general directories.
• Review Sites – Get your website listed in all the consumer shopping review sites like Ciao.co.uk. You will probably need to submit your website to be in their database, so search their FAQ’s and if you can’t find how to get listed then drop them an email.
• Pay-Per-Click – All the search engines now have sponsored results, Google call theirs ‘Adwords’. You only pay for the clicks you receive. You will need a decent budget to be able to really utilise PPC effectively though. A good way to get instant traffic.
• Paid Banners & Text Links – Pay for banners and text links on targetted popular websites. Must be done carefully. Ask the website owners for stats on previous ad campaigns they have done for people to see what the CTR (click-through rate) is like. I once spent £50 on a banner and text link ad on a blog in my niche. The whole time the ads were running I received about 5 visitors! Not a good ROI! So make sure you know roughly how effective the ad placements are.
• Offer Products In Return For Reviews – Contact bloggers and website owners in your niche. Drop them a quick email asking if they would like to review your service. You don’t charge them for the product so the reviewer gets a free product and you get some exposure within your niche. Can be very effective because the cost of the product to you could soon be clawed back from the direct sales made from the review.
• Sponsor Niche Forums – Contact forums in your sector to see if they will let you sponsor them. If you can get a good price and the forum has lots of loyal users you could get a fair few visitors and a good ROI. Because of how loyal forum members can be they will have a higher trust in you before they even visit you simply because their forum is willing to let you sponsor them.
• Create Coupon Codes – Create special coupon codes for reductions and free delivery and then try and get word out about your ‘limited time coupons’. Contact blog owners etc to let them know. You can also submit to websites which list retailers coupon codes, search in Google for them as there is a lot of those types of websites so you should be able to get at least a few listings.
• Submit Press Releases – I’ve covered this methods of advertising before, check out this article: Press Releases For Marketing. If you can get featured in the press it can drive a lot of free traffic.
• Social Media – Utilise facebook and myspace groups which focus on topics in your niche to drive traffic. Although don’t spam them, join in the groups properly! You can also tell relevant friends and family who like the sort of products you sell.
• Start An Affiliate Program – Sign-up affiliates to promote you and pay them a cut everytime they make a sale! You could either create an in-house affiliate program or use an affiliate service like Affiliatefuture, using a service like that would make it easier to hire affiliates.
• Offline Methods – Leaflets being one of the most popular for those on a tight budget. You could even design a simple leaflet on your computer at home (you will need the natural flair for design of course) and then print-off a few hundred just to get you going. For small and young online businesses I really don’t recommend offline advertising in the early days. You need to build up an online presence first and then move into offline ads.

Conclusion – A Good Mix
Long-term SEO should be your main traffic generation focus. The amount of highly-targetted visitors you can receive from being high in the search engines for absolutely no money makes putting a lot of effort into SEO very worthwhile.

Having said that it is also important you have a good mix of traffic streams, just encase one of them suddenly drys up. Instead of 95% of traffic from search engines and 5% from returning customers. It would be good to have 60% of traffic from search engines, 10% from returning customers, 10% from banner ads, 10% from directory and review sites, 5% from PPC and 5% from forums you sponsor. That would make your traffic levels a lot more solid and also shows a greater web presence.

Traffic Generation Is A Huge Subject
What I’ve talked about in this post is only the very basics and designed to introduce you to the different methods. There are whole websites about traffic generation, it is a huge subject. So use what I’ve mentioned above as your starting points. And when you go searching for more information on them you will also learn about other methods I’ve not mentioned. Just being active reaps its rewards.

Test, Test, Test
And one last thing, remember to Test, Test, Test! Not all methods will work for you, some will provide a poor ROI and some will provide an incredible ROI, so keep trying and changing things and eventually your traffic, sales, revenue and profits will all keep on a nice upward line.

This is the fifth article in the series looking at how to triple online sales and increase revenue without getting more traffic.

The figure I gave in the second article of the series was to increase the number of times people purchase by 30%. This article covers ways to do just get existing customers buying more often.

• Newsletters – If you don’t already do them, then it’s abut time you do! If you do then you may want to consider the current regularity of your newsletters. Send them too often and customers can start to just instantly delete them, send them not often enough and you could be missing out on sales. And when you are sending newsletters make sure you are monitoring their success. How many people are reading them? How are they converting?
• Special ‘members only’ offers – Offer people who have already purchased from your special offers. This could also entice new customers! Being exclusive to existing customers if the offers are good they could get people coming back to buy again, if if they hadn’t planned to.
• Special offers after first purchase – Once the customer has purchased once, wait until they have received their order and then give them a special code for 10% off their second order. A nice surprise for them, and it could entice a second purchase quite quickly, especially if the customer was happy withe their first order.
• Supreme service – Mess up a customers order and there is a very good chance they will never buy from you again. So avoid that at all costs, even if it will mean you losing money. Provide an absolutely perfect service and their is a very good chance they will come back to buy from you again.
• Encourage ways for people to remember you – Tell new customers to save emails with their login details and encourage them to bookmark your website in their favorites. Otherwise they could forget about you completely. If they stumble across your link in their bookmarks a couple of months later they may come back for another look around!
• Offer finance – Buy now pay later is very attractive to customers and wins a lot of sales. If you can’t offer this directly then you could inform customers of the Paypal buyer credit service. This would allow them to buy from you now, but pay later! Many customers can’t resist so this is a great way to increase how many times people buy from you.
• Think of other unique and cool ways – Try and come up with other ways to remind customers about you and to get them to buy. For example; if you have all you customers birthdays recorded why not send out a special email on the day of their birthday with a special discount exclusively for them (time limited of course). Or how about sending christmas cards to some customers who have made high value purchases from you. The hosting company that I use send me a christmas card every year, it’s only a small gesture but it honestly does make you feel like a more valued customer.

I don’t consider these methods particularly radical, or anything ‘genius’ but they are effective. As always try them all out and test, test, test. If I come up with any more I will be sure to publish them!

Get customers to spend £40, instead of £20!

The figure I quoted in the second article was to increase average spend by 20%. So this doesn’t mean getting more customers, it means getting higher value individual shopping baskets. A great way to increase revenue, and hopefully profit long-term and possibly even short-term.

Here are 5 ways to increase the average spend of your shoppers:

• Increase Prices – the most obvious one. You may think “oh god no, all the customers will realise and never buy from me again!”. That is just wrong. For a start if you are a small and fairly new business I bet the vast majority of your sales are currently from new customers, not returning customers. And if your product is really good and still represents good value for money existing customers won’t be put off by the increase. The amount you can increase will vary product to product and the nature of your business. If you are high-end, with big price tags you should get away with raising your prices, but if you compete purely on incredibly low prices then you are going to struggle.
  
  
• Cross Selling or Add-On Sales – ‘Would you like fries with that?’ I know you’ve heard that before, but never thought about it hey? That one line is worth millions of pounds per year, without it you may not have had fries with your meal, but instead you just say “erm, yes please” and bang, the fast food restaurant has increased its customer spend and profits. This is called Cross Selling, or sometimes referred to as Add-On sales. You go to buy one thing and are recommended/asked/promoted another product on top of what you already want. Do this on your ecommerce website and you will increase average spend. For example; below existing product listings you can put ‘Customers who bought this item also bought these’, or you could just put ‘Similar items we also recommend’.
  
  
• Offer Bundles or Packs – putting together products in ‘bundles’ or ‘packs’ will mean higher value baskets. In the short-term you make a lower profit per product, but overall the profit you make on that individual basket will be higher. I think this is an especially good strategy for smaller retailers. For Example; it is much better to be making £10 profit on a £50 order, rather than £7 profit on a £25 order that the customer was originally intending to place. And by providing better value for money you should have happier customers who will then come back more often!
  
  
• Clever Customer Service – if a customer queries a product you could give them a quality answer on what they wanted. And at the end of the email you could also say, “or maybe you could go for the ANAME Model which costs a little bit more but you get these extra features; blah, blah, blah. Which would mean you get better value for money.” This will draw the customers to the more expensive product, do this on a regular occasion in a polite and genuine way and you should see the higher sales coming through as a direct result.
  
  
• Special Offers & Rewards – offer rewards for high value baskets. For example, free postage if your order is over £75, I’m sure you’ve seen offers like this before and taken advantage (or been suckered in, depends how you look at it!) of them. Or you could offer 10% off orders where the checkout value is more than £100. Other types of offers also work EG buy 3 items and get the cheapest for free.

So there you have 5 ways to increase average spend. I’m sure there may be other ways but at the moment I can’t remember any/think of any. If I do come up with any more I will be sure to post them up here.

In the meantime put all of the above in to action and watch your average spend increase!

Improve Conversion Rates

Firstly here is a list of articles I’ve previously written on this website which help improve conversion rates. I’ve linked to the article and given a brief overview of what the article is about.

Previous Articles (they open in new window so you don’t lose this page)

Show off the paypal logo, 1 in 3 shoppers look it – Many customers want to know if you accept paypal so show a clear indication that you do. If they can’t see it they may just leave. And if you don’t already accept it as a payment method then you really should. Improve conversion rates just by showing off paypal logos.

Make customers feel safe buying from you – This was a 3 part series of articles about making your business appear larger than it really is. Confidence is key when buying online and if customers aren’t confident in your business and service they won’t buy from you. Improve conversion rates by appearing larger and increasing customer confidence.

5 ways to increase customer confidence – Once again confidence is the focus, this article has 5 different ways to increase confidence covering; checkout process, contact details, customer guarantees, customer testimonials, overall service.

Other Ways

Increase product range – More choice should mean more sales, but it must be done properly. Products should fit into your niche, and the website shouldn’t become overcrowded, the products should fit in nicely into your existing range.

Checkout Process – This is touched on in a couple of the articles above. One of the key things to consider the checkout process is ‘how many steps’ does a customer have to go through to complete the checkout? Do they have to add to cart, then create an account, then fill in delivery address, then fill in invoice address, then go the payment processor page, then fill in more details, then finalise payment, then come back to your website and receive confirmation of the order. Remember; the more steps the more potential problems and the more chance of orders not going through. So try and reduce steps to improve conversion rates.

Customer Guarantees – This is covered in the third article above. Explicitly show off guarantees about ‘100% refund if not happy’ etc. Guarantees are very powerful and can result in a significant % jump in sales.

Change Sales Copy – If your product descriptions are short and missing vital details then customers won’t buy if they are unsure exactly what the product does. Improve sales copy and you should see sales rise.

Customer Testimonials – Very powerful, show lots of previous happy customers and this will improve confidence amongst visitors. If you are not naturally getting testimonials then offer customers something in return for a testimonial. EG 20% off your next order if you give us a 25 word testimonial.

Promotions & Offers – Run special offers to get visitors to convert there and then. EG one day offer. Customers often visit once, and then may return in the future to look again. Get them to convert on the same day so there is no chance of them forgetting to return, your overall conversion rate will increase.

Change Your Existing Marketing Efforts – This may not increase your traffic but it could increase conversion rates. For example if you use Google Adwords try testing offers, or reviews, in your text. Office Depot did this and saw a 23.8% increase in conversion rates, they also saw an CTR increase of 78.5%, if you can’t afford the extra clicks you could still experience a significant improvement in conversions. You can read the full article on this here: bazaarblog.com.

Web Design Tweaks – You may already have a nice web design but little tweaks can really help. For example; try moving your ‘Buy Now’ button, only a tiny aspect of design but very important. If you have it below your product descriptions, try moving it above the descriptions. Just see what happens and if results in a decline in sales just move it back. You can do this with all aspects like your navigation bar, where you place boxes of information (like payment, delivery etc), header, search box, footer etc etc.

TEST TEST TEST – The key (as always) is to try something and record the results, then try something else and record the results, and same again. Without testing different things you don’t know what works best and what will result in your highest conversion rates possible!

Conclusion
In the original article (linked to at the top of this article) the figure given was to improve conversion rates by 30%. So if you currently convert visitors into 1,200 customer over a 12 month period, you want to increase that to 1,560 customers. When you say ‘30%’ it sounds quite scary, but it isn’t really, in real terms it may be improving from a 1% conversion rate to a 1.3% conversion rate. When you say it like that you realise how possible it can be.

Obviously how close you get to the 30% figure (or how far you go over it!) depends on the current state of your business and how much of the above ideas you can put into action. But I doubt very much there is many ecommerce websites that couldn’t put at least a few of these into action!

Reduce Empty Carts!

Now this is sounding like one of those ‘make millions over night’ style articles, but it isn’t, here is the maths.

Here Is An Example Of Figures
– You currently get 1,200 unique customers per year
– The average total checkout value is £20
– The average unique customer purchases from you 3 times during the year
– That would mean 3,600 transactions at £20 each generating a total of £64,000

Here Is The Maths
– You increase your conversion rate by 30%
– You increase average spend by 20%
– You increase the number of times people purchase by 30%

Your New Figures Would Read
– 1,560 unique customers
– Average total checkout value of £24
– Average customer purchases 4 times per year
– That would mean 6,240 transactions at £24 each generating £149,760

So as you can see the figure has gone from £64,000 revenue to £149,760, an increase in revenue of 134%.

How you go about achieving this is obviously a big subject and it would require a good effort to achieve those figures. But having said that even increasing your conversion rate by 5%, average spend by 5% and number of times people purchase by 5% would make a worthwhile difference.

I’m going to carry on this theme in next Mondays article and focus on how to increase conversion rates.

Increase Conversions & Visitors For Triple Effect

It involves improving both; the number of visitors to your website and also increasing conversions on your website.

Here is an example of the figures:
– You currently get 3,000 unique visitors per month
– Your current conversion rate is 2%
– So at the moment you would generate 60 sales per month

Here is the maths to triple your sales:
– Increase website visitors by 100%, so 6,000 unique visitors
– Increase your conversion rate by 50%, it will now be 3%
– So with 6,000 visitors at 3% conversion rate that is 180 customers

My Thoughts
You are probably sitting their thinking “yeah right, i’ll just go and double the number of visitors I get, because that’s easy isn’t it!”. To be honest if your only getting 3,000 visitors per month then it is fairly easy to double your number of visitors, at least. Using a diverse range of promotional methods this could be achieved relatively quickly, and if you are stuck with your promotion then research new ways to promote your website.

I think the easiet figure of the two is increasing conversion rates. Doing things to improve customer confidence, improving your web design, responding faster to customer queries and adding a Paypal logo should all see conversions rise, maybe even higher than the figure I gave above.

Follow Up
Next week I will be doing an article similar to this, about incresing revenues in a similar way.

Image credit: doglotion