If you’re running an e-commerce business, or are advertising online, you’ll naturally want a good proportion of your visitors to become customers. Your sales conversion rate is the percentage of people who viewed your offer online and then went ahead with a purchase. So, what is a good sales conversion rate? Most authorities agree that anything from three to five percent is pretty good.
Sounds low? Remember, if you’re seeing a lot of traffic, three to five percent could represent a substantial number of sales. If you’d like to check how you’re doing, calculating your sales funnel conversion rate is as easy as looking at how many unique visitors you’re getting and how many of them make a purchase. It’s that simple.
However, growing your conversion rate isn’t quite as simple as calculating it. Now that you know how to calculate your sales conversion rate, you can get a baseline and work on doing better. It really is possible to do a whole lot better than a “pretty good” five percent. Try these ideas.
Use Paid Ads
When people click on an advertisement, they’re showing an expression of interest in what you’re selling. As you’d expect, more visitors who have a genuine interest in what you’re offering means a higher average sales conversion rate. Paid advertising allows you to target your preferred demographic and interest group and helps people who might not otherwise know your business existed to find out about you.
Have Free Trials or Special Offers
Who doesn’t like a bargain? Offering discounts to first-time buyers could tip the scales in your favour. Once they’re converted, it’s much easier to sell to them again – provided they were happy with the purchase.
Free trials are a great way of proving your worth if you’re offering online tools or software. If your product proves as useful as your customers are hoping it will be, they’ll be happy to pay for the privilege of using it once their free trial period is over.
Make it Easy
Are a lot of people failing to purchase after adding to cart? You need to find out why. Average cart abandonment is close to 80 percent, so beating this figure will be among your aims.
Typical reasons for abandoning cart include high shipping costs, insisting that users must create an account, or not supporting a preferred method of payment. Your website’s design also matters. If navigating it to find what they want is difficult or time consuming, or finalising their purchase seems complicated, users may decide to look elsewhere instead. Troubleshoot the user experience. The fewer clicks it takes to make a purchase, the better.
Give a Guarantee
When people shop online, they often worry that they’ll end up buying something that just isn’t as good as it looks on the surface. To win over their trust and demonstrate your confidence in your products, offering guarantees works wonders. However, you should be very sure that you can live up to your promises. Failing to honour your guarantees will wreck your reputation.
Do A/B Testing
Seemingly small details can affect your conversion rates. The colour of a button, the wording of a headline or call to action, the images you use and their placement, and the type of ads you choose can all play a role in how you increase conversion rates in sales. The best way to find out what works is to test two versions and see which one performs best.
Generate Red-Hot Leads and Follow Up
Getting lots of traffic is great, but not all of your visitors will be a good fit for your product. Some of them, however, will have real potential as clients but won’t make a purchasing decision right away. Finding out how to capture their interest sufficiently to share their contact details is an art.
Get it right, and your sales team will have a list of red-hot leads to follow up on. To do this, you need to offer something that your ideal customers would be interested in – having too many “leads” who aren’t really interested in your product is counter-productive.
Offer Excellent Customer Support
Since you’re wondering how to improve your sales conversion rate, don’t miss out on the most important point of all – being there for your customers. No matter how carefully you crafted your FAQ, or how good your chatbot is, having easy access to real people who will attend to their needs is a must for many of your prospective customers.
If they find it difficult to get help and advice while they’re considering a purchase, you can be sure that customers will be put off. If, on the other hand, they receive the attention they’re looking for, it could be the final deciding factor that gets you the sale.
Never Underestimate the Power of People
Having the right people to represent you is super-important in growing your conversion rate. Apart from having great customer support agents who are available around the clock, you need people who can follow up leads and bring in outbound sales. And when people don’t convert, it’s helpful knowing the reason, since by addressing it, you can improve your conversions even further.
Looking to grow your lead-to-sale conversion rate through customer outreach and support? RSVP and its team of outbound sales and retention specialists has the answers you’re looking for. We’re laser-focused on helping our clients to achieve their goals, and we have the track record to prove it. Talk to us about your business and your plans to supercharge your sales – because we get results through the power of people.