Are you struggling to get sales on your website? Is your traffic sporadic? Do you have a high bounce rate? Do your visitors abandon their shopping carts? If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, you’re not alone.
Thousands of business owners share the same experience. They build a website, launch with a bang, and nothing happens. They might get a few sales here and there, but nothing substantial or steady.
If your website isn’t generating leads or sales, there’s a reason. Once you discover that reason, you can fix the problem. Start by exploring the following possibilities.
1. Your website’s design impedes conversions.
Your website should generate regular income and leads. Otherwise, it’s just an expensive online business card. If you’re not generating leads and sales, your site’s design could be impeding those conversions. Design elements that prevent conversions include:
- Distracting animations
- Confusing navigation labels
- A distracting color scheme
- Hard to find ‘buy’ buttons
The above (and more) elements are likely present if your marketing team didn’t get a chance to collaborate on your website’s design. After all, your website is your biggest marketing asset.
Designing a website that gets conversions requires marketing knowledge, and marketing is a skillset missing from many developers’ portfolios. However, the development team at dev.co has extensive marketing experience and knows exactly how to create a custom website that serves as a profitable marketing asset.
2. You have barriers to your content.
Barriers that impede conversions include popups, required registration, required email list signups, required video plays, and anything else that prevents a visitor from accessing your content immediately.
Some of these elements serve a purpose, but only when used in the right way. For example, a lead magnet page will obviously require visitors to sign up for your email list to get the download. However, lead magnet pages should be reserved for your PPC ad campaign. You can offer your lead magnet to visitors on normal pages as an option, but visitors should never be required to give their email address to view your website.
Popups are another element that can impede conversions. For instance, a single popup when a visitor arrives on your site is generally okay, but don’t bombard visitors with multiple popups as they navigate or try to exit your site.
Instead of forcing visitors to take certain actions just to view your content, use marketing principles to influence those actions. If you’re not familiar with marketing, hire an experienced agency.
3. Your checkout experience is frustrating.
Most popular hosted ecommerce sites have the checkout experience down pat. However, if you’ve built a custom website from scratch, you might need to make some decisions regarding your checkout process.
There are several key factors that create a smooth checkout process:
- Allow guest checkout instead of requiring account registration
- Provide shipping options and cost before the user is asked to enter their credit card number
- Make your coupon code area easy to find
If you’re using popular ecommerce software, it should be easy to set up your checkout process without calling a developer. However, you might need a developer to redesign a few elements like the coupon code area.
4. You have too many product options.
People become overwhelmed when presented with an abundance of choices. Hick’s Law states that as the number of options increases, people take longer to make a decision.
People have a hard time making a choice when there are too many options. For instance, if you were presented with the option to try three flavors of honey, it would be easy to make a choice. However, if you were presented with thirty flavors of honey, you’d probably need some time to decide which flavor sounds the best.
Time is on your side when you’re making decisions in the real world. The same isn’t true for online purchases. If your visitors can’t decide what they want, they’ll find another website that doesn’t give them so many choices.
Limit the number of options you provide on your ecommerce site. If your products are all distinctly different, that’s okay because people will search for the product they want. However, if you’re selling a pair of shoes that comes in 500 different patterns, narrow it down to your top ten best selling patterns.
All conversion problems can be resolved through diagnosis.
If you can find out exactly why your website isn’t converting, you can fix the problem. Consult with a professional website developer to assess your site and make suggestions.
If you’re not getting conversions, don’t let it go. Your website is your most valuable digital marketing asset. When optimized for conversions, it can become your best source of revenue.
