You might have created an attractive website and spent thousands of dollars on advertising.
But what’s your sales conversion rate?
Are you still not generating leads or conversions?
This is a common problem among many marketers. In fact, as many as 47% of marketers say that lead generation and traffic are their biggest challenges.
And if you can’t drive traffic to your site, then it means you won’t have any new leads to convert. And even if you manage to generate leads, your sales conversion rate might not be exemplary.
So, before we proceed, let’s find out what a good sales conversion rate is. A study found that for ecommerce, a good sales conversion rate is only 1.80%.
However, to achieve this rate, you need to outperform your competitors in many aspects.
But how?
Here’s how you can double your sales conversion rate:
Disclaimer: This content contains some affiliate links for which we will earn a commission (at no additional cost to you). This is to ensure that we can keep creating free content for you.
The following tactics can help your sales and marketing team get more qualified leads and boost your sales conversion rate.
Check them out:
It is necessary to chart out a well-defined path to convert your prospective buyers into qualified leads and loyal customers.
The sales funnel is a visualization of where your leads in their process of decision making. It’s wide at the top and, as you go deeper, It also has defined stages that start with awareness and end with loyalty.
Image via Fit Small Business
When your sales team has a well-thought-out funnel, it becomes easier to move your prospects down it and get them to convert.
But how do you use the funnel to boost your sales conversion rate?
However, as many as 68% of organizations haven’t attempted to measure a sales funnel or even identified it. The survey also found that 79% of leads never got converted into sales. This is why it is necessary to have a sales funnel.
While the conversion goals at each level may vary, in the awareness stage, you’ll need to attract those prospects who aren’t familiar with your brand or products.
The next stage will involve engaging them, knowing their needs, and then educating them. Once this has been done, you can go ahead and share an offer.
The next stage involves negotiation and making your final offer before closing the deal.
However, even after converting leads, you need to re-engage your customers to boost loyalty and retention. This can also help encourage your paying customers to spread the word about your brand if they’ve had a good experience and increase your sales conversion rate.
When your visitors land on a product page or landing page, they’re usually looking for some detailed information about your products. For this reason, your descriptions should be elaborate and well-written.
They represent your sales pitch and should cover all of the features of your product and detail its benefits.
You must figure out the pain points of your customers and tailor your descriptions based on them.
Your product should also serve as the solution to their problems, and you should focus on providing value through the content that you publish on your product page. This includes text, videos, and images.
What’s more?
The quality of your content matters throughout your website. It can help you convey the value of your brand and products to your visitors. Your homepage should also tell compelling stories about your brand too.
Kuna, an ecommerce store, partnered with Fake Crow to improve their sale conversion rate. They modified the product descriptions and added keywords that customers would ideally use to search.
The position of the demo video was also moved above the fold. They multiple implemented changes and managed to get an 89% increase in sales in just three weeks.
Image via Agency Spotter
According to Statista, mobile traffic accounted for 54.8% of global web traffic. In addition, by the end of 2021, researchers expect mcommerce sales to account for 53.9% of all retail ecommerce sales.
This makes mobile conversions extremely important.
If your website isn’t attractive and optimized for mobile devices, users might face issues navigating it leading to a poor sales conversion rate. Worse, they may leave your website and head over to a competitor’s site.
To avoid such a situation, you need to optimize your website for mobile devices. Building a responsive website can ensure that even for different screen sizes, the website browsing experience is always pleasant.
Zalando, for instance, has optimized its website for mobile devices. As can be seen from the screenshots below, it’s easier to navigate in the mobile version of their website.
Image via Zalando
In today’s busy world, everyone is pressed for time. This has resulted in our attention spans reducing over time. The same applies to your prospective leads waiting for your website to load.
In fact, Yottaa found that for every second of delay in your page loading time, your sales conversion rate could drop.
Image via Yottaa
To get an idea of how immense the loss is, if you look at a business that makes $1000 per day. A delay of one second can lead to a loss of $25,000 over a year.
To find your page loading speed, you can use Google PageSpeed Insights. This will show you the exact time that your page takes to load on both mobile and desktop. Along with this, it shows you a detailed Core Web Vital’s report.
Image via Google PageSpeed Insights
But that’s not all.
It also provides you suggestions and solutions that can help you optimize your page speed.
Other factors that can affect your page loading speed are your website host and hosting plan. A hosting plan with higher bandwidth and performance can improve your page loading speed.
What can affect your load speed?
Similarly, media on the website is usually heavier than text and takes more time to load. This can affect the overall page loading speed and your sales conversion rate. You should check your images and videos, and optimize with a tool such as TinyImage so that they can load faster.
SEO can help you rank higher in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
And when you rank higher up in search results, you can get more traffic to your website as well. This, in turn, can increase the number of quality leads and boost your sales conversion rate.
To do this, you need to optimize your website and make it better than those of your competitors.
But how?
The first step involves researching relevant keywords for your brand and products. And for this, you can use keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner or KWFinder.
These keywords are the phrases that your target audience uses to search on Google.
And when you discover what they are, you need to incorporate them into your website content, articles, and product descriptions. They should also be added to the titles, meta tags, and URLs. This can help you rank for those keywords.
Image via KWFinder
However, you should also keep in mind that you should not stuff your website content with keywords.
Remember, you’re writing for your readers and not for search engines. Keep it natural.
Visual content can easily catch the attention of your website visitors, so the quality of your visual content needs to be top-notch.
However, that doesn’t mean that you should neglect the text content on your website. The text content is essential to convey information and sell your products or services. Well-written website content can help with lead generation, conversion, and retention.
In fact, Freckle their sales conversion rates by 2.4 times with just better copywriting.
Image via Stacking The Bricks
You must also observe how your visitors navigate through your page. Most will just skim through the page and won’t read much. The Nielsen Norman Group found that people usually skim through a web page roughly in the shape of an “F”.
Image via Nielsen Norman Group
However, the popularity of Zigzag layouts and comparison tables has also led to a new gaze pattern known as the lawn-mower pattern.
With this type of gaze, readers start at the top-left cell, then move right until they get to the end of the row. This is then followed by a drop-down to the row that follows, a move to the left until they get to the row’s end, then a drop-down to the row that follows, and so on.
Image via Nielsen Norman Group
You can place information on your page based on these patterns.
However, if you want to increase your sales conversion rate, keep the most important and relevant information towards the top-left of the page. Also, make sure you split your text into multiple subheadings. This can make it easier for readers to skim through your content.
The content should also keep your target audience’s interests in mind. For this, you’ll need to build consumer personas based on location, demographics, and interests.
When you develop everything with your target audience in mind, it will be more user-friendly for them. This can help generate more leads and increase your sales conversion rate.
Whenever you search for something on Google, you will see links in the search results. These are the titles of the pages that have ranked for the search term. And to ensure that people click on them, you need to make sure that they are attractive.
But how?
Make the titles informative and tell people what they can expect from the page. Your SEO title should be solution-focused as well. This can help prompt searchers to click on it.
What’s more?
Along with the title, you must also pay attention to the meta description, which is the text that appears below the title.
This should detail everything that the page has to offer but should not be too long. Ideally, it should be about 155 characters long. Similarly, the SEO title should be about 72 characters. Make sure to include your focus keyword once in both of these.
Image via Google
For example, OppoSuits uses funky SEO titles. These are attractive and at the same time they show the benefits of the suits they sell. This helps them improve their rankings in the SERPs.
Cart abandonment can start cutting into your digital marketing campaigns budget fast.
All of the efforts that you put into getting your sales-ready prospects to the bottom of the funnel can be in vain due to this reason. And these lost opportunities can reduce your sales conversion rate drastically.
But how can you protect your sales pipeline?
To reduce the effect of cart abandonment, you can use cart abandonment software. They can help you get your prospective leads back to your website to complete their purchases.
You can also send automated emails to leads when they abandon their carts to remind them about the products they didn’t purchase. These emails should also have a call-to-action, using which your prospects can complete the transaction.
Want to sweeten the deal?
Add a discount coupon to these emails.
The layout of your website is one of the most important factors that can affect your sales conversion rate.
A user-friendly layout makes it easier for prospective customers to find the products they are looking for. It will also make the whole checkout process simpler and more convenient for them.
But how can you build a friendly layout?
Vary the positions of the buttons, sidebars, and more to figure out what suits your customers the best. You can also try different color combinations to find out which one works the best by analyzing their performances.
Slide Shop, an ecommerce store, wanted to increase their sales conversion rate. They did so with the use of heatmaps and click flow data. Based on this data, they figured out which parts of the page their users were interacting with the most. There was a promotional bar to the right in their layout but it hardly got any engagement.
They replaced it with a navigation bar which they placed towards the left. This change increased their engagement by 8.9% and the add-to-cart rate increased by 34%.
Visual content is catchy and connects better with website visitors than textual content. That’s why if you want to increase your sales conversion rate, you must make sure that you include ample high-quality images and videos.
Your product pages should have multiple good photos of your products if you want to double your sales conversion rate.
What’s more?
Get creative and include a video or two of the product. This can go a long way to help explain what the product looks like and what it does. The details can be conveyed in a concise yet interactive manner through videos.
You could also display tutorials or how-to videos about your products on your website and elsewhere. They should have compelling calls-to-action that encourage viewers to buy the products.
Image via Kelty
Kelty uses this method of marketing to get more new customers for its outdoor products. Their videos help to explain their products better and can help improve their sales conversion rate.
A call-to-action (CTA) button can make or break a sale.
These buttons are the ones prospects click on to reach the final checkout page. So, they need to stand out from the rest of the page. This can help prospects spot them easily.
How can you make them really attractive?
Make them unique by changing the color of the button and making it large.
For example, in a recent test of the CTA buttons, changing it from green to red led to a 21% increase in the sales conversion rate.
Image via HubSpot
You can also add different captions to the button to lure your prospects and turn them into leads. For instance, you can replace a simple “Buy Now” with “Get 20% Off.”
And most importantly?
Make it a point to test the effect that your CTA buttons have on your sales conversion rate. Keep A/B testing them to find out which ones work the best.
Exit-intent popups give your prospects one more chance to buy your products. And when they are navigating away from your website, these popup boxes can be used to share a discount coupon code.
Such incentives can make them re-think their decision to leave your website and might increase your sales conversion rate.
How can you make the exit-intent popups work for your site?
Try to make this box as interactive and attractive as possible. For instance, you can add a scratch card or a spinning wheel to get your prospects to interact with it for a discount. This can help improve the user experience and increase engagement.
Image via PixelMe
If you don’t want to offer a discount, you can ask for their email address to send information about future offers. If they provide one, you may get them to purchase your products at a later stage through emails.
Forget you are a business owner for a second and put yourselves in the shoes of your new customers.
You’ve selected your products and want to checkout. But at the last moment, the website asks you to register by filling out a lengthy form. This can be very off-putting and, in the worst cases, can make the prospect leave, thus affecting your conversion rates.
It’s best not to test the patience of your prospects.
If you offer the option to make a purchase as a guest on your website, they can sail through with their purchases. For example, check out how Sephora uses the guest checkout option to make the process seamless for their leads.
Image via Sephora
You can also include other checkout options, including social networks and PayPal. Additionally, you can ask for the relevant information while checking out. This can greatly help increase your sales conversion rate.
Live chat imbibes trust in your prospects. It makes your website appear more authentic. It also serves as a portal for immediate problem-solving and having it can increase your sales conversion rate.
If your leads do face any issues or have questions while making purchases, they can ask them instantly. And if you address all of their concerns immediately, there are greater chances of them making a purchase from you.
In fact, live chat has a positive effect on sales, revenue, and loyalty. They also found that 51% of people buy again from companies that offer live chat.
The same study by Smart Insights found that live chat made 63% of visitors revisit the website. Additionally, 38% of visitors even made purchases with help from live chat.
Image via Kayako
Live chat software might be expensive, but it is worth the investment. If you don’t have the budget, you can integrate Facebook Messenger into your website and get going.
Free shipping can work wonders for your sales conversion rate.
Shipping costs can be very off-putting for leads. And the worst-case scenario is when they are added right at the end of the checkout journey. This can make the whole process frustrating for your prospects.
However, free shipping is a great way to encourage your prospects to make a purchase from you.
But how?
When they see that they only need to pay for the products and not the shipping, the offer becomes more attractive to them.
And while you may have to bear the cost of shipping the products, you will benefit from a higher sales conversion rate. This will mean more sales and higher revenue.
Best of all?
Through this mode, you can easily recover the costs of shipping products for free to your customers.
You can generate sales-ready prospects who convert and hopefully become repeat customers due to the very same reason.
To test this hypothesis, NuFACE included a free shipping banner at the top of the fold. They showed one version of the website without the free shipping incentive and another with it.
Image via Red Door Interactive
And the result?
A 90% increase in orders from those who viewed the incentive.
Giving visitors a free shipping incentive can therefore increase your order value and boost your sales conversion rate.
Q1. What is a good sales conversion rate?
A. Sales conversion rates depend on your industry. However, the average sales conversion rate currently stands at 1.80% across industries.
Q2. What does sales conversion mean?
A. It’s the conversion of a prospective customer to a quality lead and finally to a customer.
Q3. How do I calculate conversion rates?
A. The formula for calculating conversion rate involves dividing the number of conversions by the total number of unique visitors, sessions, or leads times 100.
Conversion rate formula
Q4. How do you calculate sales conversion rate and lead value?
A. Calculate conversion rate by dividing the number of sales you got within a certain timeline by the number of leads generated, then multiply the answer by 100.
To calculate the lead value, divide the value of your sales by the number of leads or divide the average sales by your conversion rates.
Q5. How do you increase conversion rates?
A. Use these tactics to increase your sales conversion rate:
For more tactics to boost your sales conversion rate and how to effectively implement them, check out the post above.
Q6. What are 4 general ways to increase sales?
A. Use these strategies to increase sales:
Q7. How do you attract customers?
A. Leverage these tactics to attract new customers:
Q8. What is the conversion value?
A. It’s the numerical value assigned to certain conversions depending on their business impact or importance.
Q9. What is a good B2B sales conversion rate?
A. A good B2B sales conversion rate goes above 0.6%.
Q10. What is a good conversion rate for SaaS?
A. According to industry benchmarks, a good sales conversion rate goes beyond 1.1% for SaaS companies.
For every online business, the sales conversion rate matters more than anything else. And with a higher sales conversion rate, you will be able to get the most out of your digital marketing efforts.
Optimize your website and make sure it’s mobile and user-friendly. You also need a well-defined sales funnel to create awareness and boost your lead conversion rate.
What’s more?
Using cart abandonment software and exit-intent popups can help your sales team avoid losing customers. Lastly, live chat and free shipping can also help boost your sales conversion rate.
What do you think is the most important factor for improving sales conversion rate? Let us know in the comments.
Disclaimer: This content contains some affiliate links for which we will earn a commission (at no additional cost to you). This is to ensure that we can keep creating free content for you.
In 2024, marketing will be more challenging than ever before owing to changed consumer behavior…
Why do you need native advertising platforms? If you’re looking for new ways to reach…
Performance marketing platforms help you run marketing and advertising campaigns driven by results. And since…
Are you looking for the best SEO reporting tools? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial…
If you’re in the affiliate marketing business, then you certainly know how popular ShareASale is.…
Why should you look for Agorapulse alternatives? Agorapulse is a popular social media management tool…