Let’s get the new week off to a great start with some more ideas for your website. This week we’ve got some great tips for increasing conversion rates, increasing your click through rate on Google, boosting sales from your customers, maximising your use of social media and securing your website.

1. Put a face to your company and increase conversion rates

Research has found time and time again that using photos of people on a website increases conversion rates. There are some really useful articles you can read up on about this here, here and here. With this in mind, how “human” is your website? By showing the people behind your business you are letting visitors know there are real people on the other side, which increases trust and positive sentiment towards your brand. Here are some examples:

WooThemes showcase their staff on the home page

Crazy Egg use pictures of the people who have left testimonials

Wistia use quirky photos of their team on the About Us page

2. Use Google’s rich snippets

In Google’s own words “Rich Snippets are markup tags that webmasters can put in their sites in order to tell Google what type of content they have on their site so that we can better display it in search results.” This is the information Google needs to show star ratings, pictures, reviews etc. next to your website in their search results. Content you can display includes:

• Reviews
• People
• Products
• Recipes
• Events
• Music
• Video content

An example of rich snippets in action:

These really make your website stand out in their search results and increase click through rates. Google has a comprehensive set-up guide here.

3. Implement upsell/cross-sell mechanisms to boost sales

Large online retailers such as Amazon are masters at maximising each customer’s revenue potential through a thoughtful and measured cross-sell and upsell strategy. No matter how big or small your website, you can apply exactly the same principles to your ecommerce strategy. By displaying the right products at the right time, you can greatly increase both your Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Pre-sales

A couple of popular tactics are to draw attention to a specific product with a badge using terminology such as “Bestseller” or “Most Popular” and to have the most desirable product pushed forward in a price comparison table. If you have a range of items within a particular style or category, you can make their life easier by showing them all at the same time, along with a one click “Add all to basket” button.

Order process/basket

Once a prospect has committed to adding a product to their basket they can be considered a ‘warm lead’ who is actively interested in buying from you. This is the perfect time to start presenting them with complementary products and add-ons for that product. Relevancy is key at this stage i.e. how do the cross-sell suggestions improve their purchase?

Order confirmation

Your order confirmation email will have a very high open rate, and therefore should be more than a simple invoice or statement of what they have bought. You can use this opportunity to enhance your customer’s purchase with extra products and services.

Customer emails

An event-triggered email is one that is generated based on a change or event in a customer’s behaviour enabling you to send marketing messages that are relevant, timely and personalised. Event-based emails typically have a higher click-through rate and conversion rate than other types of email marketing because they tick all three of the most important boxes; timing, relevancy and targeting. Here are some examples of the type of event-based email marketing you can implement:

• Welcome sequence: Always send a welcome email to your new customers and, if appropriate, include instructions on how to log in and manage their account. After a period of time (e.g. a month) or a lack of activity (e.g. they haven’t visited since their purchase in the first month), send an engagement message to encourage them to visit your website and let them know about any offers, useful content or community services (such as a forum) they can use.
• Basket abandonment: If a customer is logged in and leaves a product in their basket without buying, send an email alert after 2 hours.
• Personal: Celebrate the anniversary of their first purchase and/or their birthday with a tailored email and an offer for them to buy an additional product.
• Reactivation: If your records show a customer has not bought from you in the past 6 months, send them an email with an exclusive offer to reactivate them.

4. Implement the four Ps of social media marketing

When using social media marketing it can be helpful to keep in mind the four Ps: Perceive, Protect, Participate and Project.

• Perceive: Perception is the most important factor; you need to know what’s happening online, and understand what it means for you and your business. Pay attention to what people are saying about you, and about your competitors – are they doing better than you? Worse? Is there anything in particular that they are commenting on? Maybe they particularly like a certain feature available with a competitor.
• Protect: Likewise, if customers are making negative comments about you on social media, be prepared to protect yourself. The best strategy is one that is both proactive and reactive. On the reactive front, either put them in contact with support, or assist them with the issue. On the proactive front, investigate what steps you can take to avoid the issue entirely in future. Just be prepared to respond to your critics in some way.
• Participate: It is important to participate openly and directly with online communities. If a customer points out a problem with your product on an online discussion board, respond to them directly. Whatever you do, however, don’t set up shill accounts under fake names – long-term members of communities will spot you a mile off. It shows that you care, and makes it clear that your company is constantly seeking to resolve any issues that may pop up. It’s an excellent idea to set up Google Alerts for regular updates of when and where your brand is mentioned around the Internet.
• Project: Blogs, media sharing and social networking sites can be useful for promoting your business (just avoid the activities that lead to active opposition). Social media is also good for projecting your personal brand. But as you speak, remember to keep listening.

5. Back-up your website data!

This isn’t really a tip to improve your website per se, however, it is an important task to secure your website. We see a lot of support tickets come in from customers asking us if we have a back-up of their website because they’ve broken, deleted or lost theirs. Don’t take the risk, use your website’s back-up facility before you make any change to your website, and if everything goes well, immediately after.
 
If you are one of our customers, backing up your website in eXtend is really easy. In eXtend go to “Backup/ restore” within the Files section. From here you can do a full or partial backup of your web files and restore a previous back-up. Simple!