It doesn’t matter what you started with or where you came from, at the end of the day business is all about sales. Making them, growing them, nurturing them. When it comes to doing business online the word is conversion. So what can you do to improve conversion for your online business? Well, a lot. We have practical tips drawn from digital marketing and web design to help you increase your conversion.

Just a word before we go into it. While the online business has a plethora of stats to keep you informed it is really important to understand the customer journey and your demographics behaviour. How many times have you seen something online, done all your research and questions online then went to buy it in a store? Right! Just remember that customer behaviour looks more like a spider web than a straight line that we are accustomed to.

Everything is connected, or at least should be

The first tip is to make sure everything is connected. Having a website is great but how do you drive traffic to it? And this is not limited to a website but any channel really, how do you drive traffic to it? If you’re going to have a Facebook page, a website, a twitter account, a physical location, a WhatsApp business number and whatever else please connect it all. It is more than a little annoying to find put about something on a platform and have no further information and nowhere to go. Make it so that someone who has found you in one place has found you everywhere with a simple click or two. Omnipresence also helps get people over the line. I may be oversimplifying this but a business with a Facebook page alone is not as convincing as a business with a Facebook page and a Google my business profile.

Call to action

If you don’t ask the answer is always no. And this is something that often goes amiss with beginners online. A call to action is a statement to encourage an action. These are known to massively improve conversion and they work great. They can be added into long or short copy easily. “Get one now”, “get a quote” and the like encourage the next step and tend to get people over the line. Not all CTAs are created equal though. “Buy now” is a much better converting CTA than “Inbox for prices”.

Simplify

This cannot be stressed enough. Simplify your processes. Earlier I spoke about researching a product extensively online.and then making the ultimate purchase offline perhaps even from another vendor. Yes, this behaviour is engrained in our demographic but it is not entirely their fault. Let’s be fair, buying offline is still much easier. It is made so much easier by all the information we have online. I came across a tweet yesterday where someone ordered okra online and unfortunately received okra seeds instead of okra which they had prepared sadza for. I’m sure the sadza was an exaggeration but they were devastated. Stories like this make offline purchases still the way to go. But if you simplify your process you can realise increases in conversion online. If it involves more than three steps its too much process. I understand there are multiple processes in the background to make things happen but your customer should only see select, pay and receive.

Think like a customer

Speaking to the previous point this is very important too. I respect the complicated processes and background work that goes into fulfilling a customer order. But is that any of the customers business? There’s a fine line between preparing your customer for the process and letting them into your kitchen while you make them their meal.  When you look at your purchase process look at it as a customer. I understand you need proof of payment and all these things to go ahead but is there a way to make the process easier. Not necessarily faster but easier. Less stress, fewer steps.

Automate

The top tip to increase conversion is to automate your selling process. One of the easiest ways to see if your selling process is automated or not is to develop a quality ranking for your customer interactions via your various platforms. If we use the 6 step sale journey of introduction, attention, pitch, ordering, payment but excluding delivery because it is not in the customers’ hands we can create a simple scale to measure the quality of interaction. For each new customer interaction, place it in one of those categories. Is the customer only getting to know of us? Is the customer aware but seeking an understanding of our process/products? Is the customer aware and seeking information on a specific product? Is the customer making an order? Is the customer settled on everything else and wants to know how to pay? The further down the line your interactions start the better. Now here’s the tip; if you keep getting questions on products then you are not doing a good enough job on product information on your website or social media. So go and rewrite that to include answers to those questions. With time you want to see the bulk of your interactions to start from the order part of the process. This is the automation of the selling process. Automation isn’t about machines, it’s about design.

Employ these 5 tips and you will see an improvement in your online conversion. The best source of information is your customer, just remember to place more credence to what they do than what they say.