You just don’t understand it: you’ve gone through a comprehensive website refresh and are now proudly sporting a brand-new design backed up by compelling copy. You’ve handpicked a selection of products your customers will love and are busy promoting them through email, targeted ads, and social media. Your SEO efforts are starting to pay off, and your customer service is on point and you have no idea why are your customers leaving.
That’s right, no-one’s biting. The traffic is coming in, but it’s going out again nearly as fast.
Let’s take a look at what may be hindering you on your path to success and how you can pinpoint the precise reasons:
The Most Common Reasons You’re Missing Out on Conversions
You’re Not Offering The Best In Terms Of UX
Your new site may look great, but a flashy design isn’t going to keep visitors on there for long. Not only is bad UX terrible for your SEO, unclear navigation means that a customer arriving on your site for the first time is going to have a very hard time finding what they’re looking for.
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Your Brand Isn’t Coming Through Clearly Enough
Does your site look just like thousands of others out there? Are your marketing campaigns generic and impersonal? In this day and age, brand personality matters, with customers increasingly in search of an emotional connection to the brands they chose to buy from.
Your Registration Requirements Are Ill-timed
Having to create a user account is one of the reasons for cart abandonment, and while gated content may be a great way to get leads into the sales funnel, too much restriction is a sure-fire way to kill your conversion rate.
Your Products’ Benefits Aren’t Laid Out Clearly Enough
You know your products are amazing, but is the message getting across to your potential buyers? Compelling descriptions that lay out the benefits of what you’re selling, rather than just their features, will get your clients moving through the sales funnel.
Working Out What the Problem Is
Even when you’re aware of the most common issues that can cause buyers to drop off, it can be pretty hard to pinpoint the issue with your own website. This is even truer when the problem may be related to a combination of different factors. Here are some troubleshooting techniques you can use:
Point-Of-Conversion Surveys
It would be great to be able to get feedback from the customers who chose not to buy from you, but input from those who did is the next best thing. Setting up post-purchase surveys is a great way to get valuable feedback about your all-round customer journey. Be sure to keep your questionnaire brief and to-the-point, and include questions such as “What could have stopped you from making a purchase?” and “What was your biggest challenge with finding the product you needed?”
User Tests
You might not have the resources to run fully-fledged usability tests, but don’t let that stop you. Informal testing is better than no testing at all, and feedback from friends and family may help you pinpoint what is turning users away from your site. Define specific tasks for your testers, such as asking them to find a given product, and find out how efficiently they are able to undertake them. Asking them to screen record their testing session is a great way to find out how they instinctively interact with your site.
Feedback From Your Sales Team
Your sales team (or salesperson) is a fount of knowledge when it comes to your customers’ concerns, problems, and frustrations. Be sure to check in regularly and take note of any problems that are coming up on a regular basis. If you’re just getting started and don’t yet have a sales team up and running, interviewing sales professionals who work with products similar to yours is a great way to get input.
Google Analytics
This one may seem a bit obvious, but Google Analytics combined with a bit of detective work is an efficient way to find out why people are leaving your website. Taking a look at your Exit Pages, Time on Site and Bounce Rate columns can help you identify your problem areas.
You’ve Identified the Problem. Now What?
Boost Your Customer Experience
Customer experience is set to be the next battleground in an increasingly competitive landscape, with a Walker study predicting that customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator by 2020.
But how can you ensure that potential buyers are getting the best experience ever? The trick is to get to know them. Work closely with your sales and marketing team to find out your customers’ needs, pain points and frustrations and develop appropriate solutions. If you’re a one-man or one-woman business, don’t let that stop you: create polls and surveys or if need be, hop on the phone. The more familiar you are with your customers, the easier it will be to create meaningful experiences that are in line with their requirements.
Streamline Your Sales Funnel
Once you’ve used one or more of the tools defined above in order to locate the bottlenecks in your sales pipeline, it’s time to smooth things out. Your website is obviously a key element in the sales process, and of the utmost importance when it comes to attracting leads. Once visitors are on your site however, it’s essential to ensure that there is as little friction as possible between your content and your potential buyers’ ability to engage with it.
What are some things that cause unnecessary friction? As suggested above, obtrusive registration requirements, as well as lengthy forms, are likely to cause a customer to sigh and head elsewhere. One trick to getting around this can be to add chatbots to your site. You’re no doubt familiar with these little guys from a customer service perspective, but the truth is, their benefits are numerous all through the sales funnel. Not only are they able to swiftly and efficiently handle simple customer queries, but they can also point potential buyers in the direction of what they need, remove the need to fill in forms and connect them with the right salespeople.
Conclusion
Long story short, there are many reasons for which you may be missing out on conversions – but the good news is, there’s a solution to every problem. Take the time to do a thorough audit of your website, think about how you can better connect with your customers and you’ll soon be on the path to success.
Guest Author Bio
Michael Deane is one of the editors of Qeedle, a small business magazine. When not blogging (or working), he can usually be spotted on the track, doing his laps, or with his nose deep in the latest John Grisham.
