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Do you have a website to sell your product or service?

There are many things you should consider, especially if it is a new website or a new product.

You will agree with me that whatever you do, it is to bring potential customers to your website and make them buy your product.

How can you improve your website conversion rate to achieve this?

The truth is that you have done a lot of hard work to have a website for your service or product. But your hard work has been producing little or no results.

Maybe you even managed to get some visitors to your website. The traffic, however, did nothing for your conversion rate.

It currently looks like an impossible task and you probably want to give up on your product. That is a bad idea because winners never quit and I know you’re a winner.

You’re not alone. It is common to see many new websites struggle to get the conversion rate they want even after a lot of hard work.

I have a surprising or not so surprising news for you: you have to be smarter about the strategies you use for your website.

Do you have a strategy? Or maybe you just coast along and hope people will come and buy your product? If you have no strategy for your website, your chance of getting the targeted sales is next to nothing.

If you currently have a strategy that is not as successful as you would like, then you have to sit down and get serious about your website.

You have to refine that strategy until you start getting the results your hard work deserve. Here are 7 strategies that will boost your website conversion rate if you follow them to the letter.

Let’s go into them without further ado.

1. Make your website design beautiful and easy to use

Many times we want people to behave one way but they actually behave another way. Your work as a website owner is not to build your website with an ideal situation in mind.

You have to build your website with reality in mind. What do I mean by this? You expect your readers to be more concerned about the contents of your website.

If you have that belief, then you have been making a big mistake. For your readers to even care about your content or products, you have to captivate them with the design of your blog.

That is your first duty. You have to impress a new visitor to your website. Only these impressed visitors will take time to read your content or buy your products.

According to research by Google, it takes far less than a second (50ms) for new visitors to have a first impression of how good the design of a website is.

Another study shows that the design of a website takes up about 94 percent of visitors’ overall first impression of a website while content takes up the remaining six percent.

What is the essence of having the best product if your crappy website design will chase your visitors away before they even have a chance to read about your product?

Your bad website design will drive your conversion rate down. You need to pay attention and invest in a great website design that is easy to navigate for readers. That is if you’re serious about improving your conversion rate.

Your website design has to pull your readers in. It has to make them eager to check more information on your website.

This is an example of a beautiful landing page by Unbounce. You can see that this page looks beautiful and would pull a reader in to find more information.

2. Create specific landing pages for your products

To sell a product or service to your potential customer, you have to introduce the product or service to them. Your landing page is the page where you convince your readers to spend their hard-earned cash on your product.

This is the page that creates awareness about the product. What are the things you want your readers to know about this product? Why should they even care about your product?

According to a study by Marketing Sherpa, 68% of B2B businesses use landing pages to generate leads for future conversion. The study also found that 44% of the clicks on the landing pages are directed toward home pages.

Top marketing blog HubSpot also explained the importance of a landing page in a detailed post.

If you are selling laptops on your website, this is the page where you tell the potential buyers about specifications like the size of the screen and its resolution, the speed of its processor, the size of the RAM, the size of its graphics card, its battery life, and all other important information you think a potential laptop buyer would like to know.

Now, telling your visitors about the specifications will not convince them to let go of their money. They have probably seen many of such pages.

What will the specifications help them to achieve? What makes your product more unique than thousands of similar products?

A landing page is a page where you tell your visitors that your product is what they need now and why they need it now.

3. Write a catchy headline

Have you ever been eager to click a boring headline? So why should you expect your readers to click the boring headline of your post? Because they love you?

What makes visitors read a post? Because the headline attracts them. This is the most important part of your post.

You have to write your headline in such a way that your readers will feel a big sense of loss if they miss that post. Nobody wants to miss an information that is interesting and beneficial.

One thing your headline must say to your readers: this post is interesting and beneficial to you.

One of the biggest advertising gurus of the 21st century, David Ogilvy said about headlines:

“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar”

This means on average, only two people out of ten who see your headline will read the post.

You must invest a lot of time writing the headline of your posts in a way that will pull your visitors to click. A headline that fails to do this has failed to perform its function.

How can you write catchy headlines? You can learn a thing or two from one of the catchiest headlines in the history of print. The headline went thus:

“They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano … But When I Started to Play!”

In 1925, when John Caples had to write a headline for an advertisement promoting a music course offered by the U. S. School of Music, he came up with that headline.

It is undeniable that this headline is a really catchy one. The headline makes any reader begin to ask many questions. Why would anybody laugh at someone who sat to play a piano?

What happened when he started to play? We can see that this headline did many things right. It is simple to imagine for anybody. It is also clear and precise.

A reader will know that it is about music even if they don’t know the specific details.

One other reason this headline works is that it tells the readers that the product works. They laughed at him when he sat down but he shut them up when he started playing.

This is a headline that has been proven to work over the years. The task of crafting a headline may look like a daunting work especially if you’re not used to crafting headlines.

However, you don’t need to worry about crafting headlines. Some headlines have been proven to work over the years. You can edit such headlines to suit your purpose.

An excellent headline writer you should check out is Jon Morrow. He even has a book of headline hacks that will help you craft better headlines for your website.

One recent example where we can see the power of headlines in the modern media is a post about how Target could be able to detect a pregnant woman through her purchase patterns.

The New York Times went with the headline ‘How Companies Learn Your Secrets’ while Forbes used this headline: ‘How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did.’

The article by Forbes had many more shares (to the tune of thousands) than that on the New York Times after just a week of publication. As at the time of this writing, the article on Forbes has over 3.2 million views.

You can see that the major difference between the two articles is their headlines. If both articles were to be used to promote a product, the article with the catchiest headline would likely pull in more sales.

Just because of the headline.

The picture below is an example of a catchy headline written by Jon Morrow on Carol Tice’s website.

4. State the benefits of your product to your potential customers

If your product has no benefit for your visitors, they will NOT buy it.

They will not buy it. That is the bitter truth.

So you better start telling your readers how your product will improve their lives. You tell them how it will make their lives easier.

The nature of human beings is generally selfish. The readers on your website want to protect their best interests first before other things.

When you understand what your ideal customers want, it becomes easier.

You need to show your readers what they will be losing out on if they miss your product. You need to show them how their lives will become easier with your product.

Without this, visitors will find it difficult to buy your product. Except they’re your family members but you need many more buyers to achieve your conversion targets.

This is a great example of a statement that shows the benefits of a product:

For you to improve the conversion rate of your website, you need to tell your audience in clear terms, what your product will do for them. How will it improve the quality of their lives? How will it make their lives simpler?

5. Reduce risks to your visitors

When a buyer shells out money to buy your product, it’s a risk. There is a quiet voice at the back of their mind telling them they could regret buying your product.

You have to shut this voice up before it becomes loud and directs your potential customer away.

The way to achieve this is to reduce the risk for your potential customers. You have to reduce the amount of risk being taken by a buyer. How do you do this?

Give your buyers a guaranty

If two cars are of similar qualities, which one will you buy, the car that offers no warranty or one that offers 5 years warranty?

You will probably go for the car with a warranty and so will your readers. Giving a guaranty shows you trust your product to deliver its promises.

According to a report by Springer, Hyundai was able to quadruple its sales because of affordable prices and a 10-year or 100,000 miles warranty.

It is common online these days to find people give 30-days money-back guarantee on their products. You should give a money-back guaranty of your own.

What this tells a potential buyer is that you have a high level of trust in your product.

For you to compete favorably against your competitors, you should even give a 45 or 60-days guaranty. Hyundai did it by giving 10-year warranties on their vehicles. This has helped them sell more cars.

A potential buyer of your product wants to know that they can have their money back if your product does not work for them after a specified number of days.

A buyer, in this case, sees the purchase as a trial with the seller bearing the biggest risk.

Include testimonials of current customers

When some people have testified of how life-changing your product has been for them, it becomes a valuable social proof for you.

Buyers investing in your product would have more belief since it has worked well for many.

It is almost impossible for you to sell a product if nobody has ever used it, or if there is no evidence that anybody has ever used it.

Here is a great example of how Resumator has used this strategy effectively by posting testimonials from reputable websites:

Include customer reviews

Customer reviews are a great way to inform potential buyers of the experiences of past users. The reviews could both be positive and negative. This gives your visitor the impression that you are honest and trustworthy.

According to a study by Zendesk, 88 percent of respondents said their buying decisions were influenced by positive and negative reviews. It is a better strategy to include content that plays a big part in buyers’ decision making.

6. Give potential buyers few choices

If you think that giving your buyers as many choices as possible would mean they would at least pick one, then you have been doing your business more harm than good.

According to research, it is much more difficult to make a choice when you have to choose between many options. This is called decision paralysis.

The more you increase the number of choices of your potential buyers, the more they get confused and end up leaving your website without buying anything.

Even if you have many products, you should have them on different pages. Your landing page has a major aim: to get your visitors to buy your product.

You must remove all distractions for your visitor.

If you have a link close to the top of your page that takes your readers to another page, how can you hope to sell the product on your sales page? It becomes more difficult.

The focus of your page must be how to convince the buyer to make a purchase. You have to make them aware of your product, you have to make them interested, and then you tell them the price of your product.

It is important that you tell your potential customers the price of your product only after you have convinced them beyond reasonable doubt that they need your product.

Telling them the price too early can chase your readers away before they even know about your product’s benefits.

Make a persuasive call to action in your post. What do you want your readers to do? You have to make this clear. At some point, you have to tell them to buy your product. This is your call to action.

Your call to action must be as attractive and persuasive to the potential consumer as possible.

7. Never stop testing

It is impossible to have a perfect strategy for conversion on a website. Even if you manage to have a perfect strategy today, you must improve upon that strategy to keep your edge.

According to a survey by Econsultancy, the most valued methods for increasing conversion rates are both testing methodologies with around three in five or 60% of companies saying A/B testing and multivariate testing are ‘highly valuable.’

Advertising guru, David Ogilvy said:

“Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving”

What am I trying to say? If you have a great conversion rate on your website today, you still have a big room for improvement. This is why you need to experiment regularly to continue to increase the conversion rate of your website.

Maybe the yellow color of your landing page gave you 100 more leads. Can blue color improve upon that result? You must always experiment and analyze your results to see what is working and what is not.

You must always be observant to clues and changes that happen on your website and their overall effect. You must always think of your potential customers and how to make them buy your products.

Conclusion

When you follow these strategies, it is only a matter of time – short time – before you begin to see an increase in the conversion rate of your website. I know you really want to see the conversion rate of your website skyrocket.

Don’t just read this post but put it into action. Put these strategies to work and increase the conversion rate of your website.