Are You Scaring Away Your Customers? Important Tips (Part 2 of 2)

Want to know a secret? Most businesses with a website scaring away customers and sales by making terrible mistakes with their websites. Here’s part 2 of our comprehensive list of tips to stop you falling into that terrible trap.

Make More Sales With An Improved Shopping Cart

Don’t you just hate a difficult check-out page? Well, so do your customers. Give it a try and see how your own website makes you feel when you use it. Is it clunky, confusing or boring?

Try to buy something from your own site. How many steps are you asked to take during the checkout process? If it’s more than 1, then you need to consider simplifying the whole thing. The term “cart abandonment” is huge in e-commerce right now. The reason? You’ve spent money on attracting visitors to the site, offering your product and dealt with pricing, shipping and everything else.

Now they just need to pay – but you’ve got the most awkward payment page in the world. Customers are easily put off – both online and offline. Your buyers should be able to breeze through the payment page without thinking, almost literally. If not, you’re throwing their money away after so much hard work.

One obvious move is to remove any need to sign-up on your site. What? But how do we get those all important repeat customers without them signing up? Well, if they can’t buy from you in the first place, then they will never get to enjoy your service and certainly won’t become a repeat customer. Focus on getting  them through the door first, rather than stressing them in the hope of getting another sale further down the road.

Companies are now fighting to make it easier and easier for people to try and buy good and services. Now we hear “free trial, no credit card details required”, which was certainly not the case a few years ago. Your company should be considering how to make life easier for customers because someone else in your industry definitely is…

Build Trust With Trust Signals And Social Signals

If you’ve been in business for a few years and are well known locally, this does you a great service as word of mouth or reputation can bring in customers without you having to explain who you are. Unfortunately, one mistake we all make is we often assume that other people know what we know- this is especially costly for you if you do this on your website.

You must assume that visitors have no idea who you are and what you have done in the past. You must tell them in a clear and organised way.

Trust Signals Include:

• Address/ location served/ phone number
• Names of business owners + “our story”
• Social proof: Referrals, testimonials, case studies
• Social media profiles: the more people can find about you from different sources, the more trust you gain

Causes Of Mistrust Include:

• Busy or complex site layouts
• Pop-up advertising or over-the-top advert
• Hard-to-read small print
• Slow website loading times
• Outdated/ poor design and navigation

In addition, social media accounts for your business owners can help bolster trust in branding your business as an authority. People want to know that they are dealing with real people. The more trustworthy those people come across, the better.

Gain Traffic From SEO

SEO is a huge topic. Best practices change  on an almost weekly basis. For now, we’ll keep it simple…

Do:

• Have original images
• Put out original content
• Tick the boxes on trust issues (see above)
• Create social media accounts for your business

Don’t:

• Copy chunks of text from other sites- Google is great at finding them
• Employ questionable writers who have bad grammar or poor writing skills
• Take images from other sites- Google hates this + it makes you look unprofessional
• Stuff keywords into your page by repeating them in an unnatural way
• Get links from cheap or untrusted sources- very bad for Google

Increase Engagement With A Mobile Friendly Site

As we all know, either via data, or common sense – more and more people are using the web and buying on mobile devices. Google has changed how it rates your website based on mobile-friendliness, so the days of being lazy on this issue are gone if you are serious about your business.

When you are building your site or re-vamping it, you need to check that all the text images, buttons, and instructions are clear on a smartphone before approving your design and layout.

Get More Useful Tips

For more tips have a look at these other useful articles giving you some quick wins on issues with your existing site.

• Are You Scaring Away Your Customers? Important Tips (Part 1 of 2)
• The Main Mistakes Businesses Make Creating Websites
• Should I Consider A Re-Design For My Website?

If you have any questions after reading these articles, drop us a message in the comments box, or send us an e-mail.