Is your business floating in a cryogenic tank, waiting for something to happen before it can awaken to its full potential?

If you have an incredible product, great web design, and a team of outstanding professionals churning the gears, yet your business is still flat, you may be suffering from stagnation.

You may want to go into hibernation until everything sorts itself out, but that’s not what movers and shakers do. Success seeks opportunity and creates luck. Successful entrepreneurs don’t wait for it to “happen.”

You can look at your business plan, perfect your pricing strategy, and compare your best product to your biggest competitor to look for clues contributing to miserable or flat-lining sales, but you may be experiencing negligible business growth simply because you need to optimize your conversions.

If you don’t want to blend in with every other business out there – and there are 28 million businesses in the U.S. alone – then you need to either become a conversion optimization expert or call on one to help you.

Even if you have a brick-and-mortar store, we live in a world of Internet commerce. There’s no going back.

This means that you need to turn as many people that visit your website or App into a customer as possible, and to take a specific action on your pages. In other words, you’ve got to be a conversion rate optimization (CRO) god.

What good is tons of traffic to your site if it isn’t converting? That’s why you are in business, right? Even if you’re not entirely in it for the money (but let’s be honest with ourselves, most of us are), there are other reasons to convert traffic.

You want your service, your goods, or your ideas to uplift another human being on this planet, and give them something good that will change their lives for the better. Maybe that’s just one perfectly delicious bite of pizza or it’s a week-long seminar on creating a good sales strategy – it doesn’t really matter.

CRO is imperative for your success. It’s imperative to convert an idea into a movement or a simple service into a new industry standard.

And once you’ve kicked the tires on your CRO plan and you wake up the machine it can start churning out new customers (not just site visitors) like clock-work.

If you’re reading this now, you understand that your business success last year doesn’t ensure future, enduring success as you move forward.

You need to constantly up your game to stay competitive and viable in the world today, but that’s where we come in at Second Crew.

Here’s What You Need to Know to Become a Conversion Optimization God:

 

Mobile All the Way

65 Percent of Mobile Users Made a Purchase in the Last 6 Months

A conversion is just a sale. The first way to make more sales is to put your product or service in front of an audience that is looking for what you offer.

The easiest way to do that is by targeting your conversion plan toward mobile devices.

If you aren’t loading quickly, and mobile-friendly, you are killing your conversion rate and there’s no easy way to resuscitate it until this is fixed.

Just how big is the global market share on mobile devices?

Samsung, Apple, and Sony are leading in market share, but more importantly, everyone is on their mobile device searching the web. People in countries that don’t even have bank accounts or electricity still have a mobile device that can easily connect to the Internet.

Image credit: Visual.ly

Statista states that mobile internet traffic is getting 51.2 percent of all traffic, while social media sucks up 21% of the total minutes that people are browsing.

This should tell you 2 things.

1. People are mobile.
2. People are on social.

 

Essentially, if you’re in business, you need to be an e-commerce business – even if you’re just selling pizza slices.

62% of smartphone users have made a purchase using their mobile device in the last 6 months. Your business needs to be in front of all these people.

Let us make this too simple to miss.

Without ever spending more money on Google AdWords, practicing targeted SEO, upgrading your web design, introducing new or better products, or even hiring a squad of salespeople, you can increase your sales. Increase your conversion rate just 20% and you’ll be raking in the dollars.

That’s what Walmart did. This may even be the real reason why they can boost their worker’s wages, aside from tax breaks given by the government.

Walmart is even creeping up to Amazon’s quarterly sales’ returns in e-commerce simply by increasing their conversion rate – and here’s a hint. They did it with a mobile-first plan.

 

5 Seconds to Grab a Customer’s Attention

Slow Load Times are Hurting Your Conversion Rate

Walmart’s web design changes also boosted loading times on mobile devices by 35%. Just as a little marketing aside – do you know how long it takes someone to talk themselves out of a decision to purchase a product, or do just about anything?

Less than 5 seconds.

This means that every extra second your site takes to load, another customer could be lost.

To become a conversion optimization God, you need speed. Really, you need speed. (Did we convey that with enough emphasis?)

Surveys conducted by Akamai years ago discovered that most web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less and they will abandon a site that takes longer to load. You can imagine what people expect now when most information can be gotten in near real-time.

If you aren’t sure how fast your pages are loading try entering your URL at Web Page Test or Pingdom’s free tool to find out.

WordPress sites and the Google Analytics plugin by Yoast incorporates Site Speed features also.

 

The Devil is in the Details

Make it Easier for Your Potential Customers

Little things can make or break your conversion rates too. For instance:

• Do you require a customer to sign up for a “membership” before making a purchase? We’ve abandoned our arts at a number of sites when we just wanted to get in – get what we wanted – and get out without having to give away all our personal info. Make giving information to create a user account an option AFTER they’ve bought your product.
• Use video for better engagement. Video allows you to humanize your brand and makes engagement stats soar. You’ll also get up to 53 percent more shares in a social media campaign with video.
• Your headline is your first place to capture attention. Come up with the best of 5 or 10, and change them out to see what works best.
• Make your forms super easy to fill out. Even one extra data field I a form can lower conversion by 11 percent, according to Entrepreneur.
• Don’t distract your customer. Links to other links on your site should bring your potential customers to the exact product that they are looking for. Check your links. Do they lead your customer where they should? Superfluous links can distract your customer and leak sales opportunities.
• Tie in landing page text with SEO ads and quality backlinks so the user experiences a seamless integration. Instapage has 100 landing page ideas so you can get a head start on this. One example is from Uber. The message is crazy simple but effective.

A targeted Google ad for Uber might just have the words: “Drive When You Want Earn What You Need – Uber.”

• Use empty space to draw customer’s eyes to a call to action. Miles Davis used to say that the space in music is just as important as the notes. The same is true of your web design. Make sure that empty space leads the eye to a call to action. Space is just as important as the areas that you fill with words or clutter with images.
• Put the most compelling information first. Let’s say that you sell weight loss supplements. Your company has paid for scientific research that proves your product works to melt fat 35% faster than similar supplements on the market. Don’t bury this at the bottom of your sales copy pages. Put it first. Every landing page should also be highly targeted and meet a specific purpose.
• Use language that creates urgency. “Limited time,” “this offer ends soon,” and even offer count-down clocks work with our fear of missing out and compel your customers to buy now instead of waiting until later.
• Integrate testimonials. Put relevant customer feedback right next to a product that it talks about. Don’t put all the testimonials on one page. This serves your company’s ego. It doesn’t help sell products.
• Test your guarantees. The industry standard is 30, but what happens if you offer a 120-day guarantee? Does it boost sales?
• Get rid of every “I” or “we”, and replace it with a “you.” Customers don’t care that “we are the best or top-rated company for XYZ.” They want to know what you can do for them.
• Test product images, or better yet use animated gifs or video that load quickly. You want the customer to be able to imagine a product in their own hands. Experiment with your product images or use video to make the shopping experience more visceral.
• If you sell a non-tangible product, make it tangible. If you are selling a seminar or advice, or even music, put it into a tangible, virtual product package by making it look like a finished product.
• Allow your customer to modify an order before it is shipped. Especially for first-time customers, you don’t want them to end up getting something that they didn’t really want. This isn’t good for future sales.
• Suggest add-on products or services. Maybe they didn’t even know that product A works great with product B. You’re missing out on a possible up-selling if you don’t even offer the option.
• Keep both fresh content and evergreen content on your site. Good content is fresh, but also “old” content that is comprehensive and helpful can land a lot of possible customers on your site, and help to convert them.
• Only use promo codes for a product push, and make sure they work. You don’t want someone going off-site to look for a coupon or a better deal. Western Union has a whole host of Promo Codes, but most of them are found off-site. That’s a big no-no.
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Image credit: Giving Assistance

 

Summing it Up

There are hundreds of more ways you can make the user experience easier, and these all boost your conversion success.

Make sure your pages load quickly, you are mobile-friendly, and that you employ as many possible hacks to make landing on your page easy so that you can convert like a machine.

One great way to see where your site is halting sales is to have a few close friends navigate it as if they are going to purchase one of your products and give you feedback on how easy and intuitive the process is, or how and why they may have wanted to click away to a competitor’s site.

You can also test this for yourself with these tips and tricks in mind, and then apply changes as you discover pain-points.

If you feel as though page optimization, SEO, web design, and conversion optimization are all just too much to handle, we’ve got you covered at Second Crew. This is our passion, and we’d love to help you focus on other aspects of your business, while we create great conversion on your site for you.