What is the goal of your website?
If you are an e-commerce retailer, you want your website to generate business and increase revenue. You want repeat customers and customers who spread news of your great products.
Once you understand your goals, it’s time to make them happen. In this article, we’re going to discuss four ways to squeeze more profit out of your website.
#1: Offer Free Shipping
Yes, we’re suggesting you will squeeze more profit out of your website if you give something away. Yes, you’re going to need to do a bit of testing, but this one is almost a “must have”. Why? Because Amazon has practically made it “required” in the minds of your visitors to get FREE shipping. The cool thing is you can test and see the difference it has on your conversions. Does that increase your profit or make it sink?
Offering free shipping will improve your conversion rate. You just have to be careful that it doesn’t attack your profit margins. Here’s how:
- Before you offer free shipping, establish a reference point. Know what your conversion rate is without free shipping.
- Offer free shipping and see if it gives lift to your conversion rate.
- Set a minimum order amount for customers to qualify for free shipping. This encourages customers to spend more to “earn” the free shipping. Then, you can compare this against your earlier reference point.
- Test the waters some more. Offer free shipping only on certain items that you know you can afford to ship for free and see what happens.
- You can also try to increase your prices slightly to make up for the loss you incur from the free shipping. Test this and see how it affects your conversion rates.
The trick with the free shipping offer is to find your sweet spot – the place where your higher conversion rate boosts your profits without slamming your bottom line.
#2: Optimize SEO
You can squeeze more profit out of your website by working on your SEO (search engine optimization).
When crafting your website and landing pages, you must pay attention to your SEO. You can’t build it and just expect people to show up on your landing pages and purchase.
It pays to optimize your site for search engines. Why? Quite simply, if your site is optimized for search engines, your products show up higher in searches. For example, let’s say you sell men’s jeans. If you’ve optimized your site for search, your jeans show higher in searches (think Google) which in turn drives more traffic to your site.
More traffic on your site = a higher conversion rate = increased profits.
To optimize for searches, you want to choose keywords that your customers are searching for. You can use Google’s Keyword Planner to help. While you certainly want to optimize for “men’s jeans,” you also want to optimize for brand names as well as long-tail keywords.
Long-tail keywords are 3-4 keyword phrases that are very specific to what you are selling. Think something like “men’s bootleg jeans.”
Lastly, to optimize for search and squeeze more profits out of your website, keep your page titles short and succinct. Don’t overstuff them with keywords and make them unique to each page. Use your keyword in your page’s URL.
#3: Use the UpSell and the Cross Sell
Upselling and cross selling are terrific ways to increase your profits.
What is upselling? It’s introducing your customer to products that compliment what they are already interested in.
Why is this profitable? According to a Forrester research analyst, product recommendations like upsells and cross sells are responsible for an average of 10-30% of ecommerce revenues.
Let’s look at an example of the upsell and see how it might help you squeeze more profits from your site. You are selling printers in your online store, and someone is interested in purchasing a simple black and white printer for $100.
After selecting the printer for purchase, you immediately offer your customer two additional options: for $50 more they can upgrade to a color printer and for $100 more they can upgrade to an all-in-one printer that prints, copies and scans.
You’ve now offered the upsell to your customer in the hopes that they’ll spend a little more and upgrade.
When it comes to the cross sell, you are offering your customer complimentary products. Using the above example, once your customer selected the printer and decided on the upgrade, you would present them with the option to add paper and ink cartridges to their order.
Paper and ink are logical accessories, and by offering them, you not only increase the chances you’ll sell more, but you are offering your customer something they’ll need and that saves them time down the road.
Upselling and cross selling boosts your profits and benefits your customer. You are ensuring your customer picks the right product for their needs and clicks away confident that they have everything they need to use the product.
How do you choose which to offer? Try the upsell on the product pages and the cross sell during the checkout process. The best way to know what works for you is to test both.
#4: Fast Loading Pages
While it may seem that fast loading pages aren’t nearly as important as the upsell and the cross sell, we are here to tell you that slow loading pages will cost your business.
Fast loading pages offer you the chance to squeeze more profit out of your website. Why? Because your customers will stay on your website.
According to Shopify, slow loading pages can mean the kiss of death for your e-commerce shop. You have to keep a customer on your site long enough to make a purchase, so if your site is slow, you lose the customer.
One of the easiest ways to increase your site speed is to optimize your images. Use a tool like TinyJPG to do the work for you.
The Take-Away
The goal of your business is to squeeze more profit out of your website and help you utterly dominate your competition.
By utilizing the four tips mentioned here, you are well on your way to increasing and retaining your website visitors and increasing your profits.
Are you ready to squeeze more profit out of your website? If so, we can promise you we’ll do just that. With our guarantee, you can rest assured we will increase your profits.
If you’re ready to work with the leader in landing pages and conversion rate optimization, contact us today.
We’ll provide you with our FREE site performance analysis so we can work on your landing page conversion rates.
Image: KJGarbutt via Visual Hunt / CC BY
I’ve always said that having a fast loading ecommerce site is important because if the loading times are too long, you give the customer time to contemplate his purchase and ultimately change their mind. Get those page speeds up and stop losing those impulse buyers 😉