Increasing conversions is vital to the scalability and profitability of companies that are leveraging online traffic to drive sales. After looking at close to 200 different campaigns in the last few months alone and after having run thousands of split tests we have found several big mistakes companies are making in the conversion strategy department that are killing their sales.
So here are the 13 conversion strategies that are killing your sales…
1. Features
Visitors don’t come to your site to learn about the features of your product/service or how amazing it is. They come to find a solution! Leading with solutions will almost certainly kill your sales conversions. Instead, try driving your sales with benefits and the end result they will get out of your product and mix in some of the features. The more you can get your visitors to picture the end result and the experience they will get by using your product the better you will be.
2. Not paying attention to visitor behavior
It is important to really understand who your audience is and more importantly how they interact on your site. To do this you can leverage your analytics data to find bottlenecks as well as implementing heat/click map software to find out what they are paying the most attention to. Finding out how visitors behave on your site can help remove friction points and give your visitors exactly what they want resulting in an increase in sales.
3. Not continuing to sell
This is a BIG one that we see far too often. You spend a good amount of time, effort, and money to get visitors to engage in your content enough to make a buying decision but once the visitor is on the checkout page, companies stop selling.
Every page of your site and process should continually sell the benefits of your product, highlight risk reversal elements and leverage proof of how well your product works. This includes the checkout pages.
4. Failing to optimize for revenues
Often times companies focus on individual page conversions rather than optimizing for what is more important and that is revenue. There are cases where increasing the conversion rate on a page could make you less money. Try optimizing for revenue generated where you can or at least pay close attention to it.
5. Failing to optimize for customer value
What are your day 1, 30, 60, 90, 6 months, 1 year, and lifetime values of a customer? You would be surprised to find out how many companies simply don’t know. A big step to increasing conversions is to figure out what your maximum CPA value is and knowing your customer value so you can figure out how much you can spend and when you are going to be profitable with a customer. By knowing these numbers and actually optimize them you can be more profitable quicker.
6. Not following up with objection handling
You capture a lead, they see your presentation, but for some reason, they don’t buy. A great strategy that yields big results that simply isn’t leveraged enough is handling the objections during your followup sequence. Find every reason possible that would cause a lead to not become a customer and handle it. You can also mix this objection handling into your sales message for maximum results.
7. Not digging deeper with surveys to find patterns
We touched on this topic just a little with the visitor behavior but to take it a step further you can leverage survey to find out what makes your leads and customer tick. What friction points are they running into? What problems are they facing when seeking a solution such as yours? What is causing them not to buy?
Ask and you will typically find the answer.
8. Not forming hypotheses
After analyzing your visitor data you should come up with hypotheses on what you can do to improve your results from click to repeat customer. Then prioritize your hypotheses and test them.
A large number of companies simply are flying blind and don’t have a steady list of things to test that will improve their sales.
9. Killing tests early
This one is HUGE! You may be testing but are you letting tests run long enough to determine a true winner. Killing tests too early could lead you to a false positive on the test and actually hurt your results. Make sure you are giving your tests enough time to determine that you are indeed improving your results. For more information on how long to let a test run check out this post.
10. Quitting after you get a win or two or quitting after you get a loser or two
We have preached this since we started our company. You need to constantly be testing to gain and keep a competitive advantage no matter what market you are in. Don’t just give up after you have achieved a few wins or worse after you see a couple losing tests. That one big winning test could more than makeup for any losers and you would be surprised at just how much you can win if you continue to test. We have worked on campaigns for months and years and still consistently see improvements in test results. It just never ends and it shouldn’t.
11. No funnel
There has been a lot of buzz around with the word “funnel” lately. It basically means that you pour traffic at the top and it leads the visitors down a specific path to becoming a lead, making a purchase, buying additional products, and then coming back later to buy even more.
No matter what you call it, the importance is off the charts. Make sure you know how well you are performing at every step of your process.
12. Incongruent ads
We simply can’t count how many times this has been a big bottleneck for companies we have worked with. Your ad says one thing and the landing page they go to after clicking says something completely different. Make sure your benefits and sales message is congruent throughout the entire process.
We consulted a company recently that was spending an insane amount of money on traffic with ads that said 50% off their first order and when you got to the landing page it said NOTHING about the 50% discount, how to redeem it, and even some landing pages said 35% instead of 50%.
13. Failing to follow the 80/20 rule
Pareto’s principle or in other words the 80/20 rule where 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. So many times we are able to help cut clients’ advertising costs and CPA values by simply cutting the losing ads, campaigns, and elements that aren’t producing results.
What good is it if you are bidding on 8000 keywords on a campaign only to have the majority of them not actually producing your leads and sales? You are simply wasting money. Look at every aspect of your traffic and sales process to find areas where you can cut “losers”.
This should give you a good idea at some of the areas to look for improving your results.
Be sure to like, comment, share, and subscribe so you never miss a single valuable tip.
If you want to get a hands-on look at your process to uncover some areas for improvement be sure to contact us right now for a no-obligation conversion acceleration session. We will most likely be able to give you 3-5 tips that can improve your results.