326: Want a better Conversion Rate? Start here.

Hey, it's Susan. Before we dive into this episode, I have a little review that I want to share with you. So here goes. This member said, all of the lessons worked together and helped me to understand how each element of my homepage should look and what it should do.

I'm already seeing people stay on my website longer and dig deeper simply from the changes I made in bootcamp. Now this store owner is talking about our $15 Browsers to Buyers Bootcamp. And today I have an invitation for you because we are running this bootcamp again. I want you to come and work with me, our mentors and our coaches in Browsers to Buyers Bootcamp.

And let's get you set up to turn more of your web visitors into actual paying customers. Because for only $15, you are going to experience what it's like to be a member of my Inner Circle program. Now, during boot camp, you're going to get the lessons to do the work and you'll get VIP access to my members only Facebook group. We've never done this before, but I want to make sure that you have the time you need and the support you need to get this high converting work done.

So when bootcamp is over, I know you're going to walk away feeling confident that you have removed any conversion killers on your website and you are truly set up to convert more of those web visitors into actual buyers. It's going to be the best $15 you spend this year. Now you can register at www.thesocialsalesgirls.

com forward slash bootcamp. So hit pause, run over, get registered, and get yourself ready for your best fourth quarter ever. If you've ever had that sneaking suspicion that your conversion rate could be better, I want you to grab a pen and join me for this episode. Today I'm sharing two things that you can do to increase your conversions, and I'm also sharing one big conversion killer that I see all the time.

You're going to want to check this on your site. So I want you to come listen, and I'm going to see you on the inside. We'll walk through it step by step. Welcome to the eCommerce Roadmap, the podcast for store owners who are growing their sales without spending a fortune on ads.

Each week, you'll learn actionable strategies and tips that will fast track the growth and profitability of your eCommerce business. So buckle up and join your host, Susan Bradley, as we dive into the work that will grow your sales this year. Hey there, welcome back. So today we're talking about how you can turn your browsers into buyers.

And I think there are three things that every store owner needs to know. Now, when I'm talking to store owners, the shocking thing is that most store owners think that their conversion rate is kind of meh. It needs improving. It's not great.

They feel like they could do so much better. They probably heard other people doing better. And even though they know that, they're actually lost. They're not really sure.

They can't put their finger on what they need to do to improve their conversion rate. And so before we dive in to what I think you need to do to improve your conversion rate, I want to just share what's normal when it comes to conversion rates. This is a fact about conversion for e-commerce stores. And the fact is that average conversion rates for e-commerce stores are 1% to 2%.

So if you put that in a kind of a visual, it's if you had 100 web visitors today, and your conversion rate is average, normal, you'll get one to two sales. So one or two people will buy. Now, there are things that you can do that will significantly improve your conversion rate over time. And these things are absolutely worth doing because what it means to you is in the short term, it means more income.

So you get more sales because wouldn't it be great if you could turn one to two buyers for 100 visitors into three to four buyers? That would really help you with more income without having to go buy more traffic. But for the long term, it's so much more profitable for you as a store owner because you're able to reach your sales goals without having to pay for more traffic. Traffic is expensive.

So today on this episode, I'm going to share two things that every single online store owner can do to get more sales from the people who are visiting your store every single day. But I want you to hang on for the third thing because I'm also sharing the one conversions killer that we see on almost every website. We see it all the time. So I want to dive in and let's do the positive first.

Let's talk about the things you can do to improve your conversion rate. Now, the first thing, and hopefully everybody listening knows this, but you need to have a pop-up on your site that gives people a reason to buy now. Even though you might hate pop-ups, we know that they work. So the pop needs to have an offer on it that gives someone a reason to buy now instead of coming back another day If you think about your own behavior most of us visit a website multiple times before we make a purchase.

So how do we get them to buy right now while they're here? Offers that convert really well are things like get 10% off today, get $10 to spend today, get to maybe you have a signature product, one thing that most people buy, a discount on that product or bundle of products, Or maybe you have a great little gift with purchase. So a gift that has a high perceived value, doesn't cost you very much, and would appeal to the people who shop your other products. A free gift is always a great offer if you get it today.

Get this free gift today. Now, many of you probably already have a pop-up. You probably already have a pop-up. But again, I want to just tell you what the fact is.

Here's something you probably don't know, and it's about submit rates. So submit rates are really when we take a pool of people that have seen the pop-up and then the pool of people who have submitted their email address and we work that as a percentage. What we know is that average pop-up submit rates are 2 to 3%. So once again, that's two or three people out of 100 that will give you an email address.

And that's great. That is really good news because what we know is that if somebody gives you their email address, it signals an intent to buy, that they are interested in your product and they are thinking about a purchase. Now, that's great and everyone should have that and most people do. But what most people are also not doing is they're missing this great opportunity to at least double, if not triple, the submit rate.

How do we go from two people submitting to six people or nine people? How do we do that? And the answer is, you need to add a teaser to your pop-up. Now, if you don't know what a teaser is, it's this little tab that appears on every page before you get to the cart.

So this little teaser follows people around as they're browsing. So if they hit a collection, it's there. If they hit a product, it's there. And it really doesn't interfere with their browsing process.

They can still see everything, but it's tiny and it doesn't have room for a lot of copy, but it shows the offer. So it might say, save 10% or get $10 to spend. It might say that. And the reason that is so effective is that, of course, out of 100 people who saw it, maybe 97 aren't giving you their email address.

That doesn't mean that they're leaving. What they're usually doing is they're closing the pop-up and they're shopping around. And when they get shopping and they become more interested in what you have to buy, they may remember that there was an offer and they can't find it again. They can't see where to get that offer.

They might not even remember what the offer is. But what they know is they're missing out. Like they've got that FOMO. Like if there's a chance to save some money, they want to do that too.

And what you don't want to happen is you don't want them to leave because they can't find the offer and they don't want to buy until they have it. You want them to get that offer. So when you have a teaser, those people can get that offer. They can go to the thank you page and check out right away.

All they have to do is click on that tab. The pop-up opens up again and that is a clear path for them to go ahead and make a purchase. And so that really helps your conversion rate. So if you don't have a teaser, or your teaser worse just says something like wow, or join the fun or something like that, what you want is a teaser, and you want it to clearly display your offer.

And that's something that you can get done today. And that should significantly improve your submit rate on your pop up and down the road, that should really improve your conversion rate. So that's the first thing you can do. It's a light lift for a really good result.

We teach this in our inner circle to our members. And what I would tell you is that many of our members have like on the low end, their submission rate would be 4%. But many of them have 7, 8, 9% submission rates because they've got this teaser. So don't miss that.

The second thing that you can implement that isn't hard and is very effective is using an exit intent pop-up on your cart page. And you want to use the same offer that you've used on your pop-up. And so we know every online store owner is super disappointed when you see the number of people who added product to cart but actually don't buy. But again, if you think about your own behavior.

How many times have you added something to cart and then gone and done something else? Most of us have five or six tabs at least open and we hop around a lot. I know I add things to cart to save them sometimes, like to remember what it was I was interested in on that site. And so people adding to cart and not purchasing is really common.

And what I want you to know is I want you to think about the checkout process So the first stage of the checkout process is adding to cart that the first page Second page is when they reach the checkout And so that an important page because that where they add their information So you get their email address their shipping address their credit card number And then the third page is the success page where they actually completed the purchase And so if you think about the add to cart is at the top of funnel.

And what you need to know so that you don't feel badly about your results is that it's really normal for somebody to lose half of the people. So half of the people that added to cart aren't going to reach the checkout. And so if you had 100 people in a month or a week, add to your cart and 50 reach checkout, that is really normal. That's absolutely normal.

And then when it goes on to the success page, onto the completed purchase, you're going to lose another half. So really, if you start out with 100 people, adding to cart is a very common to actually only have 25 purchases from that. And that's normal. So why does the exit intent pop up on your cart page work so well?

And it's for two reasons. Firstly, the way this functions is that if somebody hasn't signed up for your pop-up and they are on your cart page and they go, they start moving their cursor over to the browser to leave that page, that's when that pop-up shows up. So it doesn't show up if they just go right to completing purchases or to reach checkout. It shows up when they're leaving.

And it's the most important part in that whole transaction part that's when they're hottest and most likely to buy. And so that pop-up coming up then, which says get $10 to spend now or 10% today, that is a really clear reason for them to buy. And so if they take that offer, they click it, they submit their name, they get the code. They then, once they get the code, they move on to reach checkout and then they add their code and they complete the purchase.

So that's the first reason it's really effective. But the second reason it's really effective is that if they do that and then they don't complete the purchase, you can put them in your abandoned cart flow. You can set up an automation so they get the abandoned cart flow. And so that is a huge win too, because even though you don't get that purchase that time, you're set up to now email them in the abandoned cart flow.

And we recommend two or three emails. And that flow, abandoned cart flow, is the highest converting flow as per Klaviyo. That one will convert at almost 4%. So that is a really good flow.

And even if they don't convert then, they're now on your email list. You can email them regularly and you have a much better chance of getting a purchase from that browser. So it's really a good way to, with a very small change on your website, increase your conversion rate over time. The other thing that's really interesting, the other stat is when somebody's in the card, that's actually when they're most likely to sign up for that pop-up.

That pop-up in the cart, even though it's the same offer, converts 5% higher than it will when somebody hits your site and sees the pop-up. This is a really good way to catch some low-hanging fruit and fix some leaks in your bucket. And so those are two things that are a pretty low-lift for you to implement that have the potential to have a very good ROI, to have a huge impact on your conversion rate every day, every month, all year round. Now, let's talk about the conversion killer, because the majority of websites we see, and of course, we see a lot of websites in the inner circle, the majority of those sites have this one big kind of conversion killer, and it's on your homepage.

and I'm sure you can relate. You know, when you have that uneasy feeling that your homepage isn't great or your website isn't great or maybe it's your website that is stopping you from getting sales, you know how you can spiral and go down that rabbit hole. What I would share with you is that it's partially true. So traffic for sure is the number one thing that stops you from getting the sales you want.

If you don't have traffic, you're not gonna get the sales you want. But if you send traffic to your site and your homepage creates confusion in the mind of your web visitor instead of trust, you are leaving money on the table. And so time and time again, we see homepages that are missing key elements, things that every online store should have on their homepage. And often we also see unclear messaging.

When someone is cold, they're completely cold, they know nothing about you, they're coming to your website from social media, and they're trying to figure out if this is someone they should buy from and they go and look at your homepage, very often we'll see that your homepage doesn't clearly communicate what your store sells. It doesn tell you who it for It really doesn tell you why you would want to shop with that particular business and why they need your products And so it really doesn build the kind of trust you need to get someone to go ahead and push the buy button And the crazy thing that we see is that this fundamental messaging and information is missing for sure.

Often it's missing on early stage stores, but we also see it all the time on established sites. established stores where they do have sales, where the conversion rate is okay, but it could be so much better. And I think it's because you're too close to it. You just don't know that you're missing those elements that really build trust with your customer.

I think really a lot of this confusion that people might feel when they hit your homepage is because you assume too much. You assume that they know more than they know. And so your messaging is better for someone who's followed you for ages on social media, or who's visited your site multiple times, or has purchased from you before, or has seen you in person. And it's just not clear enough for that person who is very new to you.

And it really needs to be fixed. We spend time and money driving traffic to our site. It's really important that when we do get people to our site, they know what to do. We need to tell them where to click, what to do, what their next steps are.

What are the steps you want people to take when they hit your homepage? Like once they hit your homepage, what should they do next? We want them to be very clear on what to do. We don't want them to be confused.

We don't want them to bounce. Because did you know that in e-commerce, average bounce rates are up to 60%. So again, think about it. If you have 100 web visitors in a day, up to 60% of them could bounce.

They could only be looking at one page and then leaving. And do you really want to pay for that? Or do you want to fix that so you can keep people on your site longer, have them look at more pages, and get them closer to making a purchase? And I think that as store owners, every one of us owes it to ourselves to actually make sure that we do this work, we look at our homepage with fresh eyes, and we get our conversion rate as high as possible.

We do everything we can to make people trust us and make it easy for them to buy from us. And that will get our conversion rate up. So here's what you can do to be confident that your homepage has all the fundamental content you need, and your messaging is not killing your conversions. July is conversion month inside of our inner circle.

And starting July 6, we are running Browsers to Buyers Bootcamp, and we're doing that so that every one of you can get this work done. If you're a member of our inner circle, you don't need to do anything. The lessons will be in your classroom and all the support will be in our members group on Facebook. But if you're not an Inner Circle member, we're going to invite you in for a little bit.

You can come into the Inner Circle and work with us on your homepage for only $15. You'll get the same lessons and the support and the feedback you need to get the work done. Now the Inner Circle is known for having the very best support in our industry. Questions in that Facebook group are always answered by our mentors and our coaches.

And the best news is they are considered answers and they are actionable. We'll tell you exactly what to do. You can even book a one-on-one coaching call to get an expert pair of eyes on your work during this bootcamp. If you're not a member, I'm going to tell you how you can register.

I'll give you the link, then you can pause the episode and go over to the page and register. It's www.thesocialsalesgirls.com forward slash bootcamp.

We'll also put it in the show notes for this episode. I want you to come and join us. I know you're going to walk away feeling confident that your homepage is set up to turn even more browsers into buyers. And this is the perfect time for you to come and experience what it's like to be an Inner Circle member.

So go get registered. I'll see you on the inside. discounting your products. The strategy that you will learn in conversion school works for e-commerce stores of all stages.

You'll use your store's data. So if you're starting out, you'll learn how to get consistent sales every day. And if you're an established store looking to really scale your sales, you'll use your data to learn how to achieve significant sales growth every month, month over month. So head on over to the show notes, grab the link and get your copy now.