10 SIMPLE Ways to INCREASE Your Conversion Rate!

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm gonna answer a question from my forum administrator GT, who posed a really great question in our forums, and it's basically, what do you do with visitors who come to your website but don't buy? It's a huge percentage, probably the largest percentage of the types of people who come to your website. And what can you do to increase the conversions and get them to take more action on your website. So just to illustrate what he's talking about, you know, this is a big circle of all the people who are coming to our website. These are all of our visitors. Maybe this will be the number of people who will buy right away. You know, this might be the number of people who request more information and might sign up for our newsletter. And maybe this is the number of people who will share via social media. You know, they tweet about it, they put it on their Facebook page. But then you have this huge mass of other people who aren't doing anything. And you might have other types of conversions, maybe somebody clicks on an advertisement as an example. So the idea is how can we make all of these circles just a little bit bigger and be able to convert far more people to, to, uh, who are coming to our website, convert them to take action on our website. So a couple of ideas that hopefully can help, and I haven't figured it all out myself. This is a continual challenge that I face with my business as well. I think anybody who owns a website is always looking for ways to improve their conversions. But the first thing you can do is segment. So what I would do is look at the different types of traffic that you're getting. So if you're getting social media traffic, maybe those guys aren't buying a lot from you. So I don't wanna focus on the, the buy now button. Maybe I wanna focus on the sharing button. Somebody comes from Twitter may not buy from you, but they may tweet about it, right? They may share it, they may put it on their Twitter, they may You know, Facebook like it. And that stuff, you know, maybe you don't think of it as a conversion because it doesn't give you money, but what it does do is it, A, provides social proof for what you're selling, for your website, for your organization, for your product or service, and it will also help you improve your organic search engine rankings. So if somebody is tweeting about it and that can drive up your SEO rankings, then people who are searching for your product or service are gonna land on your website a lot more often. So those are guys who you still wanna treat really well and encourage them to, to share even though they're not gonna buy. So it's segments. So if you do find that social media traffic doesn't convert well in terms of buying, if somebody comes to your website from Twitter, from Facebook, then don't show them the Buy Now button as big, show them the sharing features as bigger. So then they'll wanna do that a lot more and you'll improve your conversions on that side. If you have people who are coming from referred websites, for example, and you find that those guys really sign up a lot for your newsletter, or people from, you know, SEO traffic sign up for your newsletter a lot compared to tweeting about it, then don't make the social media stuff as prominent, make the newsletter signups more prominent. So what you do is you basically show different versions of your website to different people who are coming to find your site depending on where they come from. So the content may be the same, you've written great articles that talk about what you do and what you sell, but all the surrounding stuff, the next step, the conversion action that you want them to take can be different depending on where people come from. And you can code that into your website that it basically searches when somebody comes from your site, it says where they come from, and you just show a different conversion next step for them depending on where they've come from. So that can really help boost your conversions. The next thing that I would think about here is simplify your site design. As website owners, we usually start with a nice clean website, and we've got our content, and we've got our headline, and then we start adding a whole bunch of other stuff, right? We add our little buttons in, and we add more ads, and we add conversion steps, newsletter, buy now, tons of products. These stop conversions, we put them in our content here, and soon it becomes this ginormous mess. And people don't know where to go. And if you look at, you know, when you have too many options for what to do next, you usually give up and go back and find something else. So what you want to do is make it simple again. So identify the top 1 or 2 conversion steps that you want people to take and highlight those and eliminate everything else. And we just went through a new site design as well, and it tends to kind of creep up. So there's a new toolbar that comes out, you want to put it on your website, It's the greatest thing since sliced bread, so you gotta have it on your site. But it adds confusion, and people will often leave your website instead of converting for any of them. So what you wanna do is, again, take away all the stuff that isn't super important, right? So we have our headline, we have our content, and you have maybe, you know, an action item here and an action item here, or whatever your site design is. and it's a lot simpler, a lot easier for people to do, and they're more likely to convert to those steps. So again, you're identifying the primary step you want them to take, maybe a secondary, and that's all you're promoting besides your content. And again, these can change depending on where people are coming from. So it might be really big, you know, share social media if they're coming from Twitter, or it might be really big sign up for our newsletter if they're coming from search engine traffic. And again, you have to test to see you know, what type of traffic converts at different levels. The next thing that can help across the board is emotion. So what you wanna do is tell stories that have an emotional connection to make people wanna take that next step, right? If you look at most websites, it's pretty boring, right? There, you know, maybe the corporate bio or entrepreneurs kinda hiding behind the website. People like to buy from people and they like to convert with people. They like to take the next step by working with a person. So what you want to try to do is tell your personal story and tell your customers' stories and do that before you start selling, right? If you want them to sign up for your newsletter, you don't say, "Sign up for my newsletter." You talk about the people who've signed up for your newsletter and have gotten great value from it. So you give them an emotional connection to want to take that next step with you. With you. And that'll increase across the board for any type of traffic and any type of conversion step. Make sure you're getting that emotion across. The last thing I would do is date. So if you think about when you are in love and you're finding a relationship, you date before you get married, right? And it's the same thing when you're dealing with a web visitor, a potential customer, somebody who can potentially convert for you. You don't wanna go in and ask for the sale right away. You wanna get to know them and you wanna date first, build a relationship, and then it's more likely that you're gonna be able to convert them. So if you're looking at just purely from web visitors to buying on the site versus newsletter subscribers to buying on the site, people are more likely to buy from you if they're on your newsletter and they know you, they like you, they trust you, they wanna do business with you. So you wanna give it easy next steps to be able to get people to convert with you. So I would definitely start by looking at my newsletter, get people to sign up for that, make it super easy, just ask for their name and email address and start dialoguing with them, and you have a much greater chance of being able to convert them to buy your products than just saying, "Hey, buy now," kind of take-it-or-leave-it approach. We will also follow our customers on Twitter, try to engage with them. We look for opportunities to send them brownies. Example, one of our customers tweeted that her air conditioner was broken in her office. And she was working at a Starbucks, so we sent her brownies and said, "We hope it feels better, you know, soon and the air conditioning is fixed." It's a hot summer day at the time. So those kinds of stories win over customers, and it could be, you know, borderline customers who become customers for life, or prospect customers who see how great a person you are and they get tied to your story, and then they wanna continue to, you know, sign up with you and do a lot more business with you. So look at trying to date with your customers before you try to seal the deal a little bit too early, and you'll improve your conversion rates a lot. So I hope that helps. I'd love to hear what you guys are doing. I know I don't have all the answers, and these are only a couple of things that you can do to improve your conversions. So, you know, please give the video a thumbs up if you liked it below, and I'd also love to hear what you guys are doing if you wanna leave a comment under the video. And stay tuned for the next episode. ¡Gracias!