Is your e-commerce site a conversion machine that turns a significant number of visitors into paying customers – or do you look at your sales totals each day and see disappointing numbers even though your site generates consistent traffic? There are two ways of generating sales with an e-commerce site. One way is by increasing the volume of traffic your site receives, and the other way is by increasing the conversion rate of the existing traffic. Getting more traffic is one of the most difficult feats in the world of online marketing. Getting more sales from your existing traffic, on the other hand, is easier than you might realize – and that’s what this article will discuss.

Do you want your e-commerce site to start earning more money – not in a few weeks when Google re-crawls your site and updates its rankings, but right now? These are the tips that can increase your site’s conversion rate immediately.

Audit Your Website’s User Experience

One of the things that e-commerce website owners tend to overlook in the quest for conversions is that a website will never generate sales if it isn’t usable. Your first priority, then, is to make sure that your site provides a great user experience.

Looking at a site like Vape Juice, for instance, you can see that it ticks all of the boxes; it loads almost instantly and looks great on any screen size. The navigation system is so logical that you instantly know how to get wherever you want to go, even if you’ve never seen the website before. You should ensure that your site provides the same type of experience.

• You absolutely must get your website on a host that can provide almost instant loading times if you want people to take your business seriously.
• Your site’s navigation structure needs to be self-explanatory. First-time visitors should immediately know how to find what they want.
• Your site should look perfect on any device. Remember that although you may be creating and modifying the site’s content on a computer, people will most likely view your site on mobile phones.

Are you sure that your site is doing everything right from a technical standpoint? Don’t rely solely on conversion rates to determine whether your site is providing a good user experience. Study your visitor metrics. If your site has a high bounce rate or the average visit duration is very short, it’s likely that something is wrong with the experience your site is providing.

Add a Mailing List to Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Does your website have a blog? If so, that’s a good thing. A blog is a great way to improve your website’s traffic numbers because most of the articles that you publish will be informational rather than commercial. Your site’s product pages, on the other hand, are commercial. That means your blog and your product pages will rank for different search terms. Put the two types of content together – commercial and non-commercial – and you have the potential to generate a massive amount of traffic.

Informational content, however, does have one problem in that most of the people who search for informational content – an article about how to fix a problem, for example – aren’t actively looking for products to buy. If they’re on your site, though, it means that they’re likely to buy products like yours in the future. Therefore, you have a chance to earn sales from those people if you can find a way to remain at the top of their minds between now and then – and the way to do that is with a mailing list.

If you’re using one of the popular off-the-shelf content management and e-commerce packages like Shopify, there’s a good chance that your website already has built-in email marketing functionality. There’s also a good chance that your list has no subscribers, and to understand why that’s the case, you need to think about the experiences you’ve had as a consumer. When you see a mailing list invitation with a message like “find out about our latest news,” are you going to give that company your email address? That’s pretty unlikely. You already receive all of the commercial email you can possibly tolerate, and if yet another company wants your contact information, they’re going to have to give you something in return. Other people are the same way.

Some effective ways of getting people to sign up for your mailing list include:

• Offering a single-use coupon code as a sign-up reward.
• Holding a random monthly drawing with a generous gift card as the prize.
• Offering a digital good such as an e-book as an immediate download.

Make Your Product Pages as Helpful as They Can Be

If a user lands on one of your product pages, that’s your big chance to make a conversion. A product page is usually the last stop before a purchase is made, so you need to treat every product page as an opportunity to put your best foot forward and really close the deal. Think about the things that you look for when you shop online. Audit your product pages with a critical eye and ask yourself whether those pages would really meet your expectations as a consumer.

• Every product page needs to have high-quality description text that belongs to you and isn’t copied from other sources. The description should present the product in an appealing way and attempt to close the deal. It should also answer the questions that someone interested in buying that product might have. You don’t want people to look elsewhere for the answers to their questions, because people who leave your website might not return.
• Your product pages should have appealing photos. If you’re a reseller, you can use stock photos provided by the product manufacturers if you need to, but it’s even better if you can provide your own high-quality original photography. Anything that makes your site look different from competitors’ sites is a major plus.
• Make sure that your prices are fair and that your shipping policies and prices are stated clearly. The greatest product pages in the world won’t help your website’s conversion rate if your price structure isn’t attractive.