A homepage is created to reel in your customers. The wedding dresses are in the glass storefront for all to see.
Whatever you do on your homepage is what ensures that your customers will take a step into the rest of your website. If you don’t want them to take any action or never glance at your site again, then don’t put anything important on your homepage.
Improving Your Homepage
There are some things you can do to make sure your website’s homepage is designed for success.
1. Research Your Target Audience
When designing your homepage, it is essential to keep your target audience in mind. Do the people in question prefer informal or semi-formal speech? What is the specific design or navigation they are used to? Do the people who would need to see words in bigger fonts tend to be older?
When you research your target audience, you can better understand their specific needs, wants, and preferences. This allows you to create targeted content that appeals to them, which can result in better engagement and conversions.
You figure out what the person likes, what works for them, and what does not. This will ensure that your website’s homepage accurately reflects the mindsets and needs of your target audience.
The people who respond to your survey should be part of your target audience in order to get an accurate idea of what the end-users think.
Several tools can help you achieve this. A concept testing survey is one of such. You can begin testing your ideas as soon as you have them. This will help you understand the needs of your audience.
This will also help you understand how your audience uses the product and what updates are most important to them. There are ways to ensure that your homepage improvement won’t be a complete failure.
2. Include A Call To Action
There are several things that can either help or hurt the conversion rate on your website. If your audience is leaving your homepage quickly without taking the desired action, something may be wrong with your design. You might want to improve your Call to Action.
What action do you want visitors to your homepage to take? Make sure your visitors know what to do when they land on your homepage. If your website doesn’t have a clear Call to Action, visitors will likely leave as quickly as they came.
Calls to action are what determines whether a user will just leave your website or actually convert into a customer.
The most important thing is to know what action is necessary and make that your only call to action. You want to avoid having multiple CTAs that are asking your audience to do different things as this will only serve to confuse them.
If you want your visitors to sign up for an email list, that should be your only call to action.
Your CTA should also be prominent. It shouldn’t just be a link. Your homepage should be large and noticeable so visitors know what to do next.
Add a CTA to your homepage to encourage your visitors to take action. Some examples of common CTAs are “sign up for our newsletter,” “download our free e-book,” or “request a free consultation.”
- Fill out a lead form
A lead form allows you to get contact information from your visitors, which you can use to follow up with them or remarket to them later on.
- Sign up for an email list
Joining your email list helps visitors stay in touch with you. You will be able to market to them periodically by providing them with content.
- Sign up
By having your visitors sign up for a membership, they will be able to access exclusive content on your website.
3. Make It Lively
Your homepage needs to be interesting if you want people to stay on it. Overloading your homepage with too much information can be overwhelming for visitors and cause them to click away from your website.
Your homepage should contain elements that will grab and keep the attention of your visitors. Although it might seem like a good idea to create a website full of text, it could actually have the opposite effect.
First, your headline should be captivating. If your content is boring, people will stop reading it. You should take care to ensure that your headline attracts the attention you want.
Your headline should communicate the value you’re offering to potential clients. What do I need to know? This text tells visitors what they need to know and answer the question on their minds. This means that if you can get people to land on a page on your website, you are more likely to get them to take an action on that page.
Other interesting content that can be included on your page is an explainer video.
Video content is some of the most engaging content you can find. When you add a video to your homepage, you increase the audience’s chance of engaging with you. The more great content you have, the more likely people will be to do what your CTA asks.
You can present your data in an interesting way by using a creative format. Instead of boring your audience with data, you can use tools like this free line graph maker to transform your data into an interesting story.
You should tell a story that will capture your audience’s attention rather than presenting numbers that may be difficult to understand at first.
4. Optimize For Speed And Responsiveness
Once you have completed creating your content, you will want to publish it. It is important to make sure your website loads quickly and is responsive to user input.
Do you ever visit a website on your phone and find that you can’t do anything until you switch to desktop mode?
You may have clicked a button that didn’t work, or you may not have been able to see some crucial information. If a website is not mobile responsive, it will not display correctly on mobile devices. This can cause problems for users who are trying to access the site on their phone or tablet.
Many people will access your website on their phones. If your homepage does not look good on users’ mobile phones, they are likely to leave the site.
If a website isn’t designed for mobile devices, the user experience is different. If you can’t see your CTA button or important information on your homepage, try repositioning elements on the page.
If your images are too small or too large, they might not make sense.
This means that your homepage must look good on both a mobile phone and a desktop. Make sure that the phone’s content is easy to access and that no data is lost.
It is also important to make sure that your homepage does not take a long time to load. You worked hard to create a website that would attract your audience. It would be a shame if they didn’t see your homepage because it took too long to load.
It is important to test the speed of your website on both desktop and mobile mode. To reduce bounce rates, ensure that your website loads quickly.
5. Include Rich Search Results to Make Personalized Product Recommendations More Effective
Thanks to big data and algorithms, personalized product recommendations are an effective way to convert casual visitors to regular customers. This shows your customers that you are attentive to their individual needs and are willing to cater to their unique experiences.
Technology can help eCommerce businesses learn about customers’ past purchasing behavior and preferences, which is necessary for building a strong relationship with them.
You can improve the potential buyer’s experience by tapping into realms of data based on their previous shopping behavior.
The goal is to make them feel understood so that their needs will be anticipated. One good tactic is to create recommendations that feature products that are complementary to one another.
You can also improve the user experience by integrating products that work well together.
Product recommendations are another opportunity that is often not used that can be included on error or 404 pages. Instead of ending the customer’s journey when they find your product, you can lead them on the path to conversion by guiding them through the rest of the purchase process.
You can also create a product image that links to different product variants. This will encourage customers to look at different options and choose the one that best meets their needs.
This season, shoppers in the U.S. spent $201.32 online during the holidays. This holiday season, offer gifting bundles as product recommendations to take advantage of the increased shopping.
6. Set Up Exclusive Limited Time Offers for Exit Intent Pop-Ups
A principle used in both economics and social psychology affects the way eCommerce works. The scarcity principle is a marketing technique that businesses use to make their products appear more desirable by making them seem hard to obtain.
People want things that are hard to get. This technique can help eCommerce sales improve significantly.
One way you can use the scarcity principle to your advantage in your eCommerce business is by offering seasonal deals. Scarcity marketing is a great way to increase the value of your products in the eyes of consumers.
Here’s a good example from Swiss Watch Expo:
7. Use Numbers To Make Your Nudges Even More Effective
Some websites use terms such as “final,” “now,” and “ends” in their CTAs to create a sense of urgency. What they are doing is making people believe they will be better off if they buy something right away.
This practice is called nudge marketing. The nudges influence buying decisions by using psychological tricks that make the choice feel more comfortable for the buyer.
Some ways you can incorporate urgency to optimize product pages:
- Add countdown timers to avail same day shipping
- Offer limited window shopping cart checkout
- Highlight limited stock messages
- Use product reviews as a nudge
- Add an incentive to highlight the benefits of opting for the upsell
- Use power words like ‘limited deal’, and ‘deal of the day’.
8. Use Charm Pricing to Create a Larger Perceived Value
Psychological pricing is a technique that eCommerce businesses use to get more visitors to convert into buyers. The idea is simple. Price the product in a way that is not a clean, round number.
If something is priced at $99 instead of $100, the subconscious message is that it is not as expensive.
This technique is commonly used by brands like Apple to make the customer feel like they will get a lot of value for what they paid.
Products with a higher price tag tend to have a higher profit margin, but customers are less likely to purchase them if they don’t feel confident in the quality of the product. Here’s how to justify premium-priced products and to let the customer know exactly what they are going to get:
- Outline all the USPs of the product
- Drive profits with bundle pricing by focusing on savings
- Use phrases like ‘limited availability’ along with the price to make customers feel exclusive
9. Make Your Social Proof Look More Authentic By Incorporating Personal Details
The first time social proof was mentioned was in the book “Influence: The Power of Persuasion” by the social psychologist Robert Cialdini. The idea behind social proof is that people tend to follow what others have done when they don’t have any experience or are afraid of making the wrong choice.
In eCommerce, social proof can be shown through reviews, user-generated content, and trust signals.
Customer reviews are important because they provide an opportunity for customers to try a product before they buy it. Put simply, reviews are confidence builders.
They are saying that the product has already been bought and liked without actually saying it in as many words.
Make sure you have a great live chat system in place! A great way to win the trust of new customers in real-time is to make sure you have a great live chat system in place.
Show them what old customers have got to say. The most suggested way to show potential customers that you’re trustworthy and have the loyalty of satisfied customers is to use UGC.
10. Ensure Your Pages Load < 4 Seconds
Most people prefer online shopping over brick-and-mortar stores because they can shop at any time of day or night. Another important reason is that it helps save time.
Your eCommerce product pages need to load fast and properly in order to meet both of these needs. About 40% of shoppers will leave your site if product pages take longer than 4 seconds to load.
To ensure that your product pages load fast enough, there are several steps you can take:
- Test your current page speed
- Optimize your content and images so they load fast
- Resolve backend issues such as minimizing HTTP requests
- Clear caching regularly
The PageSpeeds Insights tool by Google is a great way to analyze your product page load-time. This tool will give you a score from zero to 100 based on the speed of your product page and provide you with tips to improve its speed.
A/B Test And Optimize For Conversions
Don’t forget to A/B test your eCommerce product pages to ensure they are optimised.
A/B testing is a method of comparing two versions of a webpage to see which one performs better.Data is gathered on how users interact with each page, and changes are made to the page based on the results.
Irrespective of which industry your business is, A/B testing product page optimization can transform the traffic to your eCommerce store by:
- Improving the user experience
- Measuring the rate of improvement
- Enhancing marketing measures in desired directions
- Applying learnings across your website
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