How can I turn more of my website visitors into customers?

Conservatively, 20-30%. That’s 30% more income, each month. This seems a lot, so let’s make it feel more achievable.

First, let’s make it clear what we’re talking about. If your conversion rate is currently 2%, a 25% increase will make it 2.5%. So if you were previously getting 4 out of every 200 visitors to buy, you’ll now get 5 out of every 200.

Which doesn’t sound too impossible. It’s like running a market stall where you have 200 customers visit each day and you set yourself the target of getting just one more customer to buy.

And you don’t just have one
lever to pull to make that
happen, you have many.

We’re not aiming to find one single thing which will increase your sales by 25%. Rather, it’s a combination of many different small changes which have a cumulative impact, bit like compound interest.

Let’s say there are ten steps from a customer landing on your homepage to making a purchase. That’s ten things a customer has to understand and act on in order for you to get your ‘order received’ email. These could be:

• 1
  Reading the homepage message and heading
• 2
  Understanding the homepage image
• 3
  Finding and clicking on the homepage call to action
• 4
  The product images on the shop page
• 5
  The product descriptions on the shop page
• 6
  The product detail on the product page
• 7
  The description on the product page
• 8
  The images on the product page
• 9
  The ‘add to cart’ button
• 10
  The checkout process (in itself this has many steps, and, if optimised, could improve conversion by 20%)

If we can optimise each of these steps by just 1.8%, then over the course of all ten steps in sequence your website will convert 30% higher.