New Year Online Shopping: 1000% Increase in Sales Conversions

' Do you know that tweaking your website design to be more intuitive can drastically increase your conversion rate?

' Discover how to stop your visitors from leaving your website without making a purchase

' Be as successful as Proflowers and achieve up to 14.1% conversion rate

Although you might be tempted to immediately submit your newly set-up online store to internet marketing search engine, start link exchanges or even pay for an SEO consultant, it's important to realise that no matter how much traffic you get to your website, it won't help your business if your average conversion rate is poor.

The conversion rate of your website is critical as it's the ratio of visitors to sales on your website. Results from Forrester Research indicate that the average conversion rate for websites is 2.9%.
However, knowing certain tips to increase the effectiveness of your online store can easily increase your conversion rate by up to 1000% to cash in on the festive spirit. After all, successful websites such as Proflowers, Coldwater Creek and FTD manage to achieve up to 14.1%, 13.3% and 13.0% respectively. Here are some tips to emulate their successes:

1) Design your website around ROI
Ensure that your web designer knows the importance of the design of product pages, shopping cart and check-out processes. These elements need to be extremely intuitive to the customers. To determine the level of intuitiveness of your website, consider carrying out usability testing. Always intensively test your website before it goes live.

2) Focus on showing information, not products
If you feature 10 different products on each page with little information accompanying these products, you are offering more questions to your customers instead of answers. Remember that customers need plenty of information to make their buying decision. Instead, put up quality photos with different angles of the products, give intensive product descriptions and allow for customer reviews. Ensure that your website design does not require customers to leave your site to seek answers somewhere else.

3) Provide an excellent search tool
Having an excellent search tool alone can increase your conversion rate by as high as 500%. Customers need to find what they are looking for quickly. Your website has 3-4 seconds to show them that it can fulfil their need before they start searching elsewhere. Check out Overstock for an example of a really good search tool for your web developer to emulate.

4) Internationalise
If you allow for sales outside of the US, ensure that you don't include 'state' field that usually show a dropdown list of only US states. This will unintentionally deter everyone else not living in the US from carrying out business on your website, thus bringing down your conversion rate. Another tip to remember is to do as much work for our customers as possible so they can click on 'Proceed' without much thought. Consider putting the price in your customers' currency so they don't have to do math and geo-locate them automatically so they don't have to go through the 'select your country' field.

If you wish to calculate the success of your business after the holiday season, find out the benchmark of the current average rate of conversion. According to e-consultancy, subscription to sale conversion is typically within the range of 1% to 7%. Also, remember that the figure changes once you start segmenting your conversion rate. For example, websites selling electronics has only an average of 1.1% conversion rate whereas catalogue e-tailers receive an impressive average conversion rate of 6.1%.

Melissa has 8 years experience working with companies such as HSBC, Bayer Healthcare and Packard Bell at Online Marketing Company - Conversion Hub. She is also a SEO consultant for a certified SEO company as well as an expert in social media marketing.