Many online shop owners today are haunted by poor sales. Some of them are even enjoying increasing flow of traffic and yet sales remain low. In this scenario, it is easy to presume poor conversion rate as the culprit. So the best thing to do, in this case, is to start analyzing the sales copy and initiate necessary modifications to improve the conversion.
Many entrepreneurs are spending dollars just to capture customers, only to lose approximately 50% of them during the checkout process. It’s quite unfortunate to have some loose ends causing some of your prospects to slip away from your hold, which is tantamount to loss of investment. To maximize the investment made on getting people to check your blog, you need to split-test the important parameters that tremendously affect the prospects’ decisions to complete the purchase.
Split-testing has been proven to be an effective conversion rate optimization procedure. It can accurately pinpoint the bugs that need to be fixed, and this can also help marketers to pin down the areas that possibly deterred potential shoppers to push the shopping cart to the end of the line. So if your web store is encountering poor sales despite having increasing traffic then it’s an indication that there are a couple of issues that need to be tweaked.
It is hard to fix something if you do not know what the problems are, and there are a lot of components in the site that are probably causing such low conversion. Pinpointing the root cause can be quite daunting, but you can easily spot them if you conduct a series of split-testing on the critical areas of the site with great influence on sales.
3 Critical Areas to Split-Test
Landing Page
The sales copy must be always optimized for higher conversion. It should be compelling enough to convert prospects into clients. Among the crucial components of the landing page for split-testing are the headline, the content, the images and videos, the feedback section, and the shopping carts or the ‘buy’ buttons.
More time must be allocated on the headline, since this is influential in attracting prospects. If you fail in igniting interest, then people will no longer bother to read the rest of the contents. The headline must also contain your existing offers. So if Black Friday Deal is approaching, then the popular ‘Black Friday’ keyword must be inserted to attract more organic viewers. The same
is true when it’s Christmas time and Valentine’s Day.
Aside from the headline, the shopping cart is another important aspect for split-testing. The increasing rate of shopping cart abandonment now at approximately 56% makes it all the more important to conduct a series of tests to improve the rate.
Signup Form
Successful marketers don’t just think of getting sales today but future sales, as well. One way to get more repeat customers is to maintain communication with them, and this is possible if they opt to receive regular emails and newsletters from you.
According to some marketing experts, the king of leads generation is the signup form. After all, email marketing is dead without the opt-in form. That is why it is important to split-test the form to optimize the number of signups per month.
This is crucial not just in email marketing but also in customer retention. One way to maintain contact with existing customers is to ask them to subscribe so that they can receive regular updates and future promotional offers.
Nonetheless, a couple of things that require split-testing on the signup form are the overall visual design, the content, and the process. The visual presentation is essential, and it must draw the attention of the readers to the form.
The process is similarly important. Make it simple and quick. People don’t have much time to spare, and they are usually excited to proceed to the next steps towards completing the purchasing. So make sure that the signup form only requires a few seconds or a minute to complete.
Another area to test is the captcha field. While this is effective in minimizing or totally eliminating spam, this can sometimes cause inconvenience on the part of the prospected buyers. In fact, this is one of the many reasons why some shoppers drop out of the transaction. So check if this field is necessary, and properly weigh in your decision on whether to use this or not.
Marketing Campaign
There are many methods of marketing. It is important to conduct split-testing on each one of them. This must include not just the paid campaign like the pay-per-click advertising but the free promotional methods as well like article marketing, forum posting, video marketing, and social media campaign.
One of the most common techniques is email marketing. According to MailChimp, conducting an A/B split-test can improve clicks by 17% higher and 11% better open rates. Among the areas to check include the best day and time in a week to send out those emails, the subject line that works best, the email format, and so on.
Another tactic to split-test is the social media marketing. This one is relatively more extensive and a bit complicated compared to email marketing, depending on the number of social sites the campaign involves. In most cases, this usually includes Facebook and Twitter, while some are also going into Pinterest and Instagram marketing.
Similar to email promotion, among the areas to split-test are the right time to post and to comment. This normally differs from one site to another. The best time to post and share contents in Facebook is not quite the same with Twitter and in other social networks. Therefore, conduct split-tests in each network in order to maximize the output.
Moreover, the format of the content is another area for evaluation. This includes the length of each post, the headlines or titles, the anchor texts, and the call-to-action statement among others. The ideal frequency of posting must be determined, as well.
For video marketing, this is a bit easier than the social campaign since there are only a few top video-sharing sites. In fact, most campaigns are mainly focused on YouTube, while others include the Vimeo due to its increasing popularity. In any case, the things to inspect in video promotion include the headlines, the length of the video, quality, and the best time to upload and share.
The headline must be given more importance because it is responsible in capturing the attention of the prospects. It must be compelling enough to ignite interest and curiosity so that people will be intrigued to see the video. Videos today are encountering increasing incidences of poor watch-time due to the inferior quality of the files.
A series of A/B tests must be conducted to assess what type of video the appeals to the interests of the viewers in order to increase the watch time and to make them watch the flash presentations to the end.
There may be other areas in marketing that requires split-testing as part of your conversion rate optimization procedures, it is advisable to include the above things in order to fully maximize sales and profits. Remember, everything boils down into conversation rate since if it is low despite the raging high traffic, sales will hardly go up.
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