5 Ways to Increase Your Website Conversion Rates: Part Four

Businesses spend a lot of money setting up their website and driving traffic to it. However, converting visitors into customers is an important part of a digital marketing strategy that often gets forgotten.  Day four of our five part series explores the power of online reviews and testimonials.

Using Psychology for Persuasion

Ratings, reviews and testimonials are not just acquisition tools - they also help increase conversion rates; research from Bazaar Voice showed that for one of its clients the use of reviews achieved 60% higher conversion and 82% more page views per visitor.

This type of content is powerful because of social validation - according Susan Weinschenk (see recommend books) products with recommendations generate 20% more sales than items without them. This tool not only helps with the buying decision-making process but can also help with Google pay-per-click advertising
conversion rates. Research by Google Inside Adwords in 2011, showed that adverts with ‘seller ratings’ get a 17% higher click through rate (CTR) than the same adverts without ratings. However, a website needs at
least 30 reviews from the last 12 months to add Seller Ratings (see Trustpilot.co.uk).

Further Reading:
Weinschenk, S. M.,2009. Neuro Web Design: What Makes them Click?
Nahai, N., 2012. Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion

This article has been written by Tanya Hemphill, Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader in Marketing and Public Relations, based at the Warrington School of Management (University of Chester).

 @DigitalTanya 

@WSofManagement

STOP PRESS:

The Warrington School of Management is launching an exciting new business service that will include networking events and ‘Master Classes’ to help small and medium sized businesses grow. If you are interested in registering for more information, please send your details to Beth Morris at b.morris@chester.ac.uk

5 Ways to Increase Your Website Conversion Rates: Part Three

Senior Lecturer in Digital Marketing, Tanya Hemphill outlines the benefits of maintaining regular email contact with your customers and the time-saving tools that will help you achieve this.

Nurture your leads via email

Many businesses take a lot of time and effort to build a database of email addresses but once they have it, it’s often under-utilised. According to the digital marketing advice website Smart Insights, 72% of companies rate email as ‘excellent’ in terms of ROI.

There are a lot of inexpensive and easy to use email systems such as www.constantcontact.com/uk and www.mailchimp.com. A more recent development that offers exciting potential for businesses is the growing number of marketing automation systems available. As a former business-owner myself, I know that one of the biggest issues that stops a company from growing (via marketing lead-generation) is time. Most business owners know what they should be doing but never seem to have the time to do it.

A marketing automation system will send emails ‘triggered’ by a certain action and, if an email hasn’t been opened within a certain period, it will automatically send another with a different subject line. Emails can also be set up to go out at key buying periods, etc. This is ideal for businesses with a product that is usually used within a particular period of time, so that you can remind customers that their product needs replacing soon (and offer them a discount for buying it within a certain time-frame). The possibilities are endless - some systems even link to a customers’ / potential customers’ social media account!

Although time is needed at the beginning to set everything up (i.e. mapping customer journeys/ touch points and compiling emails with the right messages for each stage), the medium to long term benefits of having regular email communications running, however busy you are, are clear.

Critical success factors for this type of conversion tool are: having enough opt-in email addresses to start with, making sure customer journeys are carefully mapped, finding the right software provider with a scalable system and allocating a long-term budget to this tool. Recommended providers include: Act-On, Hubspot, Pardot, Marketo and Eloqua.

This article has been written by Tanya Hemphill, Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader in Marketing and Public Relations, based at the Warrington School of Management (University of Chester).

@DigitalTanya 

@WSofManagement

STOP PRESS:

The Warrington School of Management is launching an exciting new business service that will include networking events and ‘Master Classes’ to help small and medium sized businesses grow. If you are interested in registering for more information, please send your details to Beth Morris at b.morris@chester.ac.uk

5 Ways to Increase your Website Conversion Rates: Part Two

Businesses spend a lot of money setting up their website and driving traffic to it. However, converting visitors into customers is an important part of a digital marketing strategy that often gets forgotten.  In day two of our five day series Senior Lecturer in Digital Marketing, Tanya Hemphill discusses how to optimise your website to suit your potential customers' browsing behaviour.

Make your website 'mobile friendly'

More people are now browsing on mobile devices such as mobile phones and iPads, instead of using traditional desktop computers. The majority of websites have not been mobile optimised, which means

that navigating around a site on a mobile device is difficult and some content /design disappears from the screen. Even large brands fall into this trap.

To check how your website appears on different screen resolutions, I highly recommend the free testing tool at http://mattkersley.com/responsive. Before you think about allocating budget either to change your website into one with a responsive design (i.e. it adapts to the device you are viewing it on) or to create a separate mobile site, it’s important to check what your ‘actual’visitors are using. 

This is where the free software tool Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics) can help - it will tell you what devices your visitors are using to access your website. I’ve found that most consumer orientated

sites generally have a 50/50 spilt between mobile and desktop devices. Recent research suggests that brands can increase their mobile conversion rate by 19%-100% with responsive design.

It can therefore be argued that the ROI against the cost of implementation is potentially high. If you do have a mobile optimised website, think about using ‘click-to-call’ buttons instead of asking visitors to complete data fields for email addresses, etc. which can be ‘fiddly’ on a small hand-held device. Try to make the user experience as simple and easy as possible.

This article has been written by Tanya Hemphill, Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader in Marketing and Public Relations, based at the Warrington School of Management (University of Chester).
@DigitalTanya 
@WSofManagement

STOP PRESS:

The Warrington School of Management is launching an exciting new business service that will include networking events and ‘Master Classes’ to help small and medium sized businesses grow. If you are interested in registering for more information, please send your details to Beth Morris at b.morris@chester.ac.uk

5 Ways to Increase Your Website Conversion Rates: Part One

Businesses spend a lot of money setting up their website and driving traffic to it. However, converting visitors into customers is an important part of a digital marketing strategy that often gets forgotten.  In day one of our five day series Senior Lecturer in Digital Marketing, Tanya Hemphill writes about the importance of your website's landing pages. 

Optimise your Landing Page

If you are running an effective online marketing campaign that includes tactics like search engine optimisation (SEO) andPay-Per-Click advertising (i.e. GoogleAdwords) you should never drive all traffic to your home page.

 I’ve heard that just 5% of all John Lewis’ website traffic comesfrom their home page. Instead, your digital marketing efforts should drive visitors to the page that’s most relevant to their online search. These ‘landing pages’ should link to the visitor’s online search query.

The next stage is to make sure every landing page is optimised to achieve the highest conversion rate possible. Unfortunately, this is a weak area for most businesses with many driving traffic to a particular page in the hope that the content and design works for them. To help improve landing page conversion

rates, the following elements should be considered:

•  Highlight how you resolve your customer’s problems 

•  Explain how you help reduce buying risk – i.e. how do you overcome consumer concerns such as quality,cost, service, etc?

• Communicate a clear online value proposition (OVP) - i.e. why should they buy from you and not a competitor?

• Have a clear call-to-action - highlight what you want them to do next, such as go a particular page, sign up for a newsletter, call to make an appointment, etc.

•  Layout - improving the area ‘above the fold’ almost always accounts for increased conversion rates (a traditional publisher’s concept that also works online)

According to conversion expert and author Benji Rabhan (see further reading), most people think about design before lead generation / conversion and this is the wrong way around. He believes that

half of conversion rate optimisation is about ‘tweaking’ and testing design / layout and the other half is about the message and words on the page.

Further reading:

The Hubspot Blog: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/26866/9-Must-Haves-for-the-Perfect-Landing-Page.aspx 
Recommended book: Rabhan, B., 2013. Convert Every Click: Make More Money Online with Holistic Conversion Rate Optimization. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons Inc.

This article has been written by Tanya Hemphill, Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader in Marketing and Public Relations, based at the Warrington School of Management (University of Chester).
@DigitalTanya 
@WSofManagement

STOP PRESS:

The Warrington School of Management is launching an exciting new business service that will include networking events and ‘Master Classes’ to help small and medium sized businesses grow. If you are interested in registering for more information, please send your details to Beth Morris at b.morris@chester.ac.uk

How to avoid the frustration of traffic jams

IF you are a car-commuter then you will know so very well the frustration of traffic jams or failing services eating into your time.

Warrington's workers suffer from the impact of motorways incidents (the M6 appears to be particularly bad?) local bottlenecks and bridge raises regularly. Peak periods can be a nightmare! These delays are costly to both companies and individuals alike in both time and fuel.

Enlightened employers can help to make folk's lives easier, improve productivity, get better staff and improve customer service by reviewing their working patterns. Fewer industries are now sticking to 'standard working hours'. Customers, both businesses and private consumers now require extended hours of service.

Staggering workforce start times can help to cover twilight service requirements and link into international time zones. How about allowing your workers to work from home some of the time? Technology allows this with no impact on service for many operations. 

Research shows home-workers are usually more productive. The office can be a distracting place. Home can be more family friendly too, attracting quality employees. When time is money then perhaps it's time to review your arrangements, for the benefit of all long-suffering commuters of Warrington.

Professor Lawrence Bellamy is Associate Dean at the Warrington School of Management, University of Chester Warrington (Padgate) Campus.




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