How to Double your Conversion with ONE small change

Are you struggling with your online conversion?

It can be frustrating to be sending hundreds, sometimes thousands of visitors to your eCommerce site daily, and NOT seeing any sales.

On average, eCommerce conversion rates in North America generally sit between 2-3%. This means, for approximately every 100 unique visitors to your website, on average 2 people should purchase.

This varies by device -- now with mobile being extremely popular, that brings the average down, as mobile conversion rates tend to be much lower.

That said, if your average conversion IS below 2%, then increasing this rate should be one of your number one objectives for your online retail store.

HOW TO INCREASE YOUR CONVERSION. OVERNIGHT.

Lately, I've been super addicted to the Lede. A podcast by Copyblogger. It's all about content marketing.

A recent podcast featured Joana Wiebe who speaks on the reasons why people aren't clicking your buttons.

The podcast uses examples for startups, and more B2B websites but it definitely peaked my curiosity, so I decided last week to test her theory on my site, Encircled.ca

THE LIZARD BRAIN

Joana Wiebe advocates that primal human behaviour online just like in life is driven by one's lizard brain.

That is, the part of our brain, the Amygdala, that senses danger -- the fight or flight mechanism.

It's primal. Innate. And It's simple.

Her main point on the podcast was that if your 'buttons' (in this case for my readers, your "Add to Cart", "Buy", "Checkout" etc), are the same colour scheme as the rest of your website, they are less likely to be clicked on.

This is because our 'lizard brain' will recognize and pay attention to anything out of the ordinary.

Your regular colour scheme + buy button matching = ordinary. Your regular colour scheme + bright, different coloured buy button = conversion uptick, yeah!

Joana had done a study with a B2B provider testing different colours, and the net results were it didn't matter specifically the colour per se but it just had to be different than your overall colour scheme.

BRANDING FAUX PAS?

Being a branding-monger that I am, I hesitated to change my beautiful, silky purple "ADD TO CART" buttons. However, in the interest of 'test and learn' (and more revenue!), I switched it to the bright pink last week (see below).

Almost immediately, I saw the impact.

It was a Sunday when I did it, typically a low sales and traffic day for me, and in the evening I started getting several sales on low volume.

This continued into Monday and Tuesday (also low shopping days on my site).

Net was my conversion doubled over those 3 days.

I can't comment on the remainder of the week as my conversion WAS very high but I also released a pre-order (fairly targeted).

OTHER WAYS TO IMPROVE CONVERSION

Your main goal is to reduce the 'friction', or reasons why someone WOULD NOT buy from your website.

Be it, changing the button colours, removing additional steps in the checkout, including FREE shipping, or reassuring people on the security of your website.

The specific changes you need to make, I'm advocating should be done one by one, so you can test and compare the results. So, maybe try one weekend of free shipping, one weekend without.

Try to keep your changes controlled, so measurement is easier.

By the way, this post from Joana on Copyblogger.com is PHENOMENAL for retailers. Shows real life examples of simple changes you can make to your website to enhance your conversion overall.