Best Way to Increase Website Conversions: Sales funnel FAQ

If the aim of your website is to sell a product or service then you'll be constantly looking to try and improve your website conversions. If you're short on ideas here are a few tried and tested ways to increase your sales.

First and foremost, the most important thing you need to do is set up a sales funnel. A sales funnel is essentially a way of structuring a page and applying your content to try and obtain interest and convert that interest into a sale, guiding people from a generic interest or curiosity at the mouth of the funnel, to the cart and making a purchase at the spout. Here are some things to think about when building a web page:

Awareness

Your converting traffic will likely fall into one of two categories. The first, and most difficult to sell to, is the person who already knows that they have a need or requirement for your product or service. They are usually well informed and will compare equivalent products on the market. To secure a sale to this type of traffic you will need to ensure that you really sell the benefits of your particular product or service. The second type is traffic which is not aware of any issues or need for your product or service until you convince them otherwise. This type of traffic is usually the most easily converted and more likely to respond to your sales funnel.

Either way, your best bet is to attempt to structure your page using the sales funnel idea, starting with broad and general information, becoming increasingly specific and attempting to direct people to the relevant sales call to actions.

Interest

In order to secure sales you'll need to increase your visitors levels of interest in your product, typically by showing off the benefits of your product/service features or service as well as any pricing advantage which may be present.

There are a lot of ways of securing the interest of your traffic and one particularly effective method is to utilise videos and images. People will usually be more receptive to more visually stimulating media compared to large amounts of text. Whatever form of media you choose, a popular strategy is to walk people through the applicable ways that your product or service can be of benefit to them, how it can improve day to day efficiency or solve a problem.

Call to action (Sale)

The call to action hopes to consolidate the interest that you've helped cultivate into sales. Simply, it direct people from an informative page to a direct selling page. Obviously, sales will only happen if the prior steps are working as intended and this can certainly involve some trial and error. The design of the call to action itself can even impact how successful your sales funnel is, with different sources citing different colours, sizes and key phrases as being the most converting. Whatever you choose, you'll need to make sure its in keeping with the overall design of your site, however generally you can't go wrong if you make it simple, clear and easy to follow. Reducing your websites clutter and making sure it is as easy as possible for your end user to buy your product or service should take priority over website aesthetics.

Another concept you may want to think about is your checkout or cart process, you want to reduce the amount of clicks between the user selecting your product and paying for the product. There are many easy-to-use out of the box shopping carts to use which have been tried and tested and this is certainly worth looking into.

Conclusion

Overall, your goal should be to make your website clear and easy to use. With that said, structure your content in an intuitive order to better enable your users to get the most from the information on offer. You probably won't get it right the first few times, but trial and error will show you where you have gone wrong and where you can improve.