Once you have set up your business, spent time and money promoting your services and products, you’ll need to think about how to convert your visitors into customers. I am going to look at methods by which you can improve your conversion rates by discussing some of the reasons that people will not make a purchase after visiting your advertisement or site.

1. Getting the wrong people to your site

If you are targeting the wrong market sector with your advertising, then it really doesn’t matter how successful in drawing the crowds it is – they are not going to be interested in your products or services.

Be as specific as possible. If your market is a niche market, then put advertisements in magazines or on Web sites that serve your niche. Decide on your target audience, and bombard them with advertising. You will find that targeted advertising will pay dividends more than generic advertising – if you add your business to our directory, then make sure you add it to relevant categories. Adding your new Website Optimisation service to a ‘Website Hosting’ directory will get you very few interested parties. Add your business to a relevant directory, and you’re target market will find you!

2. Poor content quality

People will not read everything on your Web site or marketing material. Most people skim read when browsing, and as such, need content that is easy to process and digest.

Always ensure that you have spellchecked your copy before posting it to your site; misspelled or grammatically incorrect passages will instantly give your visitors a bad impression of your business, after all, if you can’t be bothered to check your own marketing material for correctness, then your products and services are probably going to suffer from the same lack of professionalism.

3. Not describing products or services fully

Visitors will want to find out more about your products and services before they buy. By not explaining the features or specifications in full, you are leaving questions unanswered in the minds of your customers. If these questions are important enough, there is a good chance that your visitor will look elsewhere for answers, and end up purchasing from your competitors.

Make sure that you cover as much detail as possible when describing your products – ideally, you should aim to be able to explain enough about the product that the potential customer has no need to research further. They should be ready and willing to make a purchase based on the information you have presented.

4. Not providing clear prices

There is no better way to lose the trust of potential customers than to provide obfuscated or inaccessable pricelists. If a customer is looking at your prices, then there is a good chance that they are either ready to make a purchase or are comparing prices. If you can present the price of your product or service on a page of your site in a way that allows a user to determine what it is within six seconds, then you’re doing well. Any longer, and you risk overloading the user with options, decisions and ultimately turning them away.

5. Confusing navigation

Navigation is arguably the single most important aspect of any website; if no-one can find what they want, how are they going to buy from you?

Getting navigation right, however, is no simple feat – books have been written on the subject that can cover it to a far deeper level than I can in a short post such as this. Furthermore, there are an endless number of sites dedicated to disseminating the best practices in navigation design that would make far better reading. For example:

Summary

I have discussed some of the reasons as to why people may come to your site and not make a purchase. If you can avoid some of these common mistakes, then you are effectively reducing the number of barriers standing between a browsing customer becoming a paying customer.

One final word of advice: Take a look at your site now – can you see any other potential barriers that may prevent a visitor from finding what they want and spontaneously purchasing it? If so, look at how you can remove these barriers – each time you do, you are effectively opening your doors further, and allowing more people to make purchases.