5 Tweaks to Your Website That Could Increase Sales 300%
This article is part of SWOT Team, a new series on Mashable that features insights from leaders in marketing, brand-building and public relations.
A company website is a must-have in today’s Internet-driven economy. But while most companies have a website, few use them to their full potential to drive sales and revenue. That’s a shame, because websites are often a major investment in terms of time and money, and they can be a lot of work to keep updated.
So if you aren’t maximizing the return on investment of your site, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.
Luckily, there are a few relatively simple updates you can make to your website that can have a huge impact on customer attraction and retention, sales, revenue and long-term brand loyalty. These steps don’t require hundreds of thousands of dollars in investment and can be implemented by small companies and multinational corporations alike.
There are five common areas that most company websites can improve upon and expect to see an immediate boost in revenue. Taken together, they have the potential to increase your revenue by 300% or more (depending, of course, on your industry, location and a variety of other factors).
1. Add video content
Consumers love video — and so should you. Our brains process visual information 60,000 times faster than text, so ditch the long-winded product descriptions and opt for dynamic video content visitors can engage with on your website. Videos on your landing page can increase conversion rates by 86%, and 44% of customers purchase more products on sites that provide informational videos — and these numbers are only rising.
Customers also tend to stay longer on sites with videos, and even better — they are more likely to return. Engaging product videos, customer testimonials and even tours of your work space can help increase conversions.
Potential opportunity: Up to 86% increase in sales
2. Go global and multicultural
The global economic potential of online communication totals $45 trillion. But if your site only offers content in English, you miss out on a whopping two-thirds of that market potential. Making your website available for multilingual — and multicultural — audiences will help you reach a much bigger slice of the pie, improving your overall market potential by as much as 200%.
Choose a translation management system that integrates into your site; it’s much more efficient than manual translations, which often require time-consuming email communications with translators. New translation tools make it easy to roll out and maintain translated websites for the long-term.
Beyond translation, it’s important to be sensitive to the different cultural norms of your markets. Make sure you don’t make the same blunders as companies like Pepsi, whose light-blue branding alienated an entire market of consumers who associated the color with death. By preparing your site with localized content, you open a world of new opportunities to your business — literally.
Potential opportunity: Up to 200% increase in sales
3. Prevent downtime
On Cyber Monday, Amazon sold 36.8 million items worldwide. Minutes of downtime could have cost the company a big chunk of change. Same goes for your site. If it isn’t loading fast enough, you can lose customers before they even get a glimpse of your content and products. In fact,
57% of visitors abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. It’s important that your website is resilient and scales to meet demand, since 24% of people cite downtime as the reason they abandoned their shopping carts.
Improving your site’s scalability will prevent slow load-times and downtime, ultimately keeping more customers on your website and driving more purchases. Make sure to build your website on an elastic cloud platform that maintains your content and application quality, even when major traffic surges hit. And make sure to frequently test out your page speed on Google.
Potential opportunity: 24% increase in sales
4. Use responsive design
The majority of consumers access sites from multiple devices, so implement responsive design to provide a consistent visitor experience no matter where customers are accessing content. This year, 29% of all ecommerce transactions are expected to take place on mobile or tablet. Responsive design gives you the opportunity to take advantage of those sales, and also eases your back-end site management and ups your SEO.
Make sure you’re using a modern CMS platform like WordPress or Drupal, which make it easy to enable responsive site design. Need more convincing? Think about responsive design as a way to future-proof your content, not just for various screen sizes and resolutions, but also for digital experiences on new devices introduced as the Internet of Things takes flight.
Potential opportunity: 29% increase in sales
5. Post customer reviews
It’s important to include great content for your site visitors throughout the entire path to purchase, and some of the most important pieces of content on your site are customer reviews. Why? Think Angie’s List — which is built entirely on the idea that people trust their friends and neighbors to recommend reliable professionals.
According to Forrester Research, consumers trust brand recommendations from friends 70% of the time, and ads only 10% of the time. Consumer reviews act as this kind of friendly recommendation on your product page. Make sure to include them on your site — and expect to see an 18% uplift in sales online.
Potential opportunity: 18% increase in sales
Adjustments like these can yield huge results for your bottom line business goals. Don’t be afraid to test out new methods and techniques to make your content more engaging and your site more cost-effective overall. The most important thing to keep in mind? Your customer. Making your website as accessible as possible is key to increasing sales and improving revenue.
