If you’re getting clicks but no sales, you’re leaving money on the table. There is some sort of disconnect between your marketing, website, and your customers. This is the part of marketing that is rarely talked about as everyone seems to be focused on getting more clicks.

Let’s break down the process top marketing analysts use to diagnose the disconnect you’re experiencing for you to start converting clicks into sales, and ultimately tribe members.

Low Hanging Fruit to Fix

Right off the bat, there are two major factors we need to address:

1. Google says that roughly five out of ten people will abandon your site immediately if it is not dynamic and inviting. So make sure your site is appealing and even builds curiosity to know more.
2. InVision showed that 85% of adults say that a company’s website needs to be fun and compel the visitor to stay on the site.

Making your website fast

Do a quick site speed test on Pingdom or GMetrix to quickly see how fast your site loads. For every second your page takes to load you could lose around 7% of conversions.

After working on hundreds of websites over the last decade, I can tell you that around 90% of the time your site photos are the problem. Having a site with tons of phoos is best on it’s own server and not a shared server.

My three golden rules for website photos:

1. They need to be converted to 72 PPI
2. They should almost never be bigger than 180 kb in size.
3. Never go bigger than 1280 x 1920 px for an image.

If your site is still not fast enough, I would consider minifying (SEO) some of your files and consider using asynchronous loading to improve site speed.

Understanding the Disconnect on Your Site

Identify on what page of your site people get stuck

If you’re selling products, services or memberships, your funnel will most likely look something like this:

Product Page > Add to Cart > Checkout Page> Order Confirmation

The more hassle-free you can make this flow, the more likely you are to convert. For this reason, and after spending nearly $800K on split testing for brands in multiple industries, We always recommend marketers to send traffic directly to the product sales page instead of a pre-sales funnel or product category page.

Here are some rule-of-thumb benchmarks We like to see pages reach to qualify them as effective:

• Visitors on the product page who add a product(s) to the cart are ideally 20% or more.
• Page visitors who have added a product to cart who then go through checkout is ideally 52% or more.
• Around 54% or more of checkout page visitors should have placed an order.

These numbers are just a rough guide and depend on the quality of traffic visiting your site. However, if your numbers are way off on any one page in your funnel — it’s time to investigate it and dive in to some good SEO.

Integrate a live chat widget

A website without a live chat is like a store without a sales assistant. There is nothing as frustrating as having to fill a contact form and wait 1–3 days for a response — by then you’ve already lost a sale to a competitor.

I would argue that there is an even greater benefit for you as an online store owner than just good customer care: you get direct insight into your customers and their needs.

If Tracey asks about shipping times, you know that your shipping times are not clear enough on your site and you need to make it clearer.

Think about it this way, both a seven-year-old and a foreigner that does not understand a word of the language your site is in needs to be able to answer the most common questions you get on your live chats. A great way to do this is by communicating through well-designed icons.

The best websites don’t use FAQ sections simply because their sites answer 99% of possible questions a customer may have — simply communicate clearer.

Live chats can be very costly and usually reserved for large corporations only. After playing around with live chat widgets for the last four years, we have found Tidio to be one of the most effective live chats on the market. We especially like their user-friendly chatbots that can answer customer questions. Ready for bed? Let a chatbot do the answering. The best part is that they actually look good on a site; who doesn’t want to say hi to a friendly face.

Start heat mapping your customer interactions

Understand what your potential customers are doing on your site can help determine where the disconnect is. A lot of times customers scroll and get stuck on a certain page or section that prevents them from moving forward. A heat map is an excellent way to see what works and what doesn’t.

Heat mapping software uses user mouse movements, taps, and clicks to determine what actions users are most likely to perform. One of the most powerful tools We have found for heat mapping is called Crazy Egg.

We use Crazy Egg to determine where a page’s weak points lie. A call to action (CTA) button needs to be a hotspot; if not, try making it stand out more whether through increasing contrast, size, or color and moving it above the fold close to the thumb on mobile devices.

Now that you know where the weak points in your page lie, it’s time to start an experiment.

Fixing the Disconnect

A/B testing (SEO), one variable at a time

A/B testing is the process of testing multiple versions of a web page to see which one is more effective by evenly distributing the traffic between the different variables and actively monitoring conversion rates. In other words, a form of SEO.

Whenever doing any experiment, it is important to change one variable at a time — you will never know what change had a greater effect on the conversion if you change multiple variables.

For on-page split testing, Crazy Egg works like a dream and it has its own visual editor that is compatible with just about every site.

My process of A/B testing is:

1. Split test images: A recent survey showed that more than half of America believes product images are the most important factor they take into account when making purchasing decisions online.
2. Split test CTA buttons: Call to action buttons need to stand out. Try testing different colors and micro-copy. We once had a case where the change of a simple CTA button color increased conversions by 23%.
3. Split test description paragraphs: Focus on benefits rather than features. Try thinking, what emotion or insecurity will make this customer buy.

After split testing specific pages, We usually make variants of the landing page. For this, We recommend using Google Optimize. One of my favorite split tests to run is a short format page vs. a longer format page.

Always keep split testing. You can never have enough data to make decisions.

Build trust in the design of your site

A slightly more complex reason someone may not add to the cart is because of a lack of trust. This is usually because of a lack of an SSL certificate, quality product or service images, or even just bad design choices.

Make sure you ask your host to add an SSL certificate (https://) to all pages to avoid browsers saying your site is insecure. We highly advise against using trust badges, they frankly make your site look cheap and less trustworthy. Most reputable brands moved away from this approach years ago.

If appropriate for your site focus on adding legitimate reviews and customer testimonials. If you already have some, consider moving them closer to the folding point where a user has to start scrolling. Fake reviews are easy to spot — instead, get real customers to post on social media and link their posts directly with their social handles. Don’t be shy to add different testimonials to your add to cart and checkout pages. Humanize your page by adding faces everywhere you can. Adding faces close to your CTA can increase conversions by around 20%.

We like to build trust through elegant design by polishing the finishes on your website and evoking a sense of professionalism that will set you apart from other sites.

Micro-interactions seal the final ribbon of trust. Animations are increasingly becoming more important to web design. The secret is to make the interactions so subtle that they aren’t even noticeable but improve the feel of the experience.

Final Thoughts

It’s not as straightforward to convert traffic into sales and sales as it would sound.

There are some complications that might be to blame if you don’t get the outcomes you desire. Fortunately, you can get to the heart of what’s stopping the customers from making a purchase through a touch of research.

And if you do, with the confidence that more of those qualified visitors will gradually become your clients, you will begin to develop an SEO plan to draw still more traffic. Always be marketing, promoting and advertising discounts, signup special and any other enticements you can think of. This is the way of business management and success!