Most people think traffic is the most important puzzle of running an online business, but it isn’t. I mean, traffic does plan an essential role, but it is easy to get. You can use so many techniques such as ads, outreach, influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, and SEO to get traffic quickly and in the long term.
But if you send all this traffic to a low converting website or landing page, most of the time and money you invest will go to waste.
This is why before you send any traffic, use the below tips to design a high converting website…
Optimize the site for hot, warm, and cold traffic:
There are three kinds of website traffic. These are hot, warm, and cold. The hot traffic are people that want to buy from you immediately, warm traffic is people that want to buy, but are unsure about your product or brand. Cold traffic consists of people who are just window shopping. Cold shoppers might be interested, but they want to take their time. This could be months.
Most people make the mistake of only focusing on the hot traffic, but as this graph shows, hot traffic makes up the minority.
Image source: digital marketer
Most people visiting your website are cold and warm visitors. This is why the conversion rates of even the top converting websites are lower than 3%.
If you want to get the most sales, you need to do the research to understand all three types of traffic, come up with a marketing plan and optimize for all of them. Here’s how you can do that…
Hot traffic optimization:
You can optimize your site for hot traffic by simply figuring out what your audience’s pain points are presenting your product in the right angle that gets them to desire it. For this, you mainly require a well-optimized landing page with copy focused on a target audience.
These people are product and brand-aware so they trust you. It should be easy to convert them.
Warm traffic optimization:
Warm traffic consists of people who are solution aware. But they aren’t product or brand aware. You still need to get them to trust you. The most effective way to do this is by sharing content. The best content for this audience is case studies. If they don’t buy, you should retarget them with Facebook ads and send them to landing pages where they can sign up for a case study to learn about your business and the results you have helped other people achieve.
So, make sure you set up well-optimized case study landing pages instead of just creating product landing pages.
Cold traffic optimization
Cold traffic consists of people who are problem aware, but they are not solution, brand, or product aware. To get these people to buy you need to make them solution aware first. For this again, you should use a different kind of lead magnet like white papers.
When they read a white paper that solves a problem, they will understand the solution and will want to work with you or buy your product as you provided the most perfect solution.
For this, you can create a separate white paper landing page or an exit-intent popup on the product landing page that promotes the white paper.
These three methods will ensure that all three kinds of traffic convert.
It might seem complicated to get all three right. But it’s easy, as the best website builders can do that for you. They come equipped with themes, AI, tools, apps, and templates that can help you set up a high converting website within a day.
Reduce the number of choices:
We normally think that more is good. More is good sometimes, but not when you want to sell more. An example is the supermarket jam experiment. For this experiment researchers displayed 24 types of jam on one day and 6 types of jams on another day.
Which option do you think generated the most sales?
It was the latter.
Fewer choices lead to more sales as too many choices cause decision fatigue and it makes it hard for us to zone in on a decision. You might notice this sometimes when you are on Netflix. There are so many films and TV shows that by the time you decide on what to watch, you are tired and just want to go to bed.
So, if you want your website to generate sales, you should reduce the number of products you offer at least on the front end. You can promote more products after they make their first purchase.
Use a lot of negative space:
In the past website design was all about crowding the space. This is was because when you crowd a website, it leads to more clicks and sites made money from advertisements. This helps sites that rely on advertising revenue, but if you want to generate sales, it is better to leave space around the important items. This empty space is called negative space.
Negative space ensures that people’s eyes are drawn to the elements that matter most and this increases sales.
Use visuals:
65% of humans are visual learners. They prefer watching videos and studying images than reading lines and lines of text.
This is why, whenever possible you should add visuals to your website. You can either buy stock photos and videos from a library or create them yourself with visual creation software.
But the best option is to hire a graphic design professional or a photographer as they can create original visuals that stand out.
Check out the industry benchmarks and set goals:
When you create your first website, you won’t create the best version. As it requires a lot of experimentation to get it right. You need to create several versions of your website and landing pages, test them out with ads, and keep making modifications till the conversion rate improves.
To get this right make sure you check out the industry benchmarks, then set goals to meet them and work towards it. After you meet them, you can work on exceeding them.
Conclusion:
These are my 5 top tips for designing a high converting website. Implement them to increase sales. You won’t see colossal results immediately. Increasing sales via design will take time, so be patient.