According to the latest stats, about 9 out of 10 people who add products to online shopping carts leave the websites without placing the orders. That’s insane! Think about it: 90% of the people who are interested enough on your products to add them to their carts never end up buying them.

Luckily, there is a lot you can do to decrease your shopping cart abandonment rate. These are some of the most powerful tactics to make it happen.

Isolate Every Step of the Checkout Process
The only way to understand what’s causing people to leave is to isolate every step of the checkout process to figure out where people are dropping out. Google Analytics lets you track events and page loads. This way you can see what’s the last thing people do before leaving. Is 50% of your traffic leaving when you ask how they found you? Then get rid of that question. The only way to understand the real reasons for shopping cart abandonment is to track every step of the process.


Provide a Summary of the Checkout Information
These are some of the things people want to see on the checkout page:

• What they’re about to buy (don’t forget to include a photo).
• Price (including taxes, shipping and handling, etc.)
• When the order will be processed and delivered.
• The Order Summary page should have all the information entered so far (including billing and shipping address, last four digits of the credit card that will be charged and the customer’s contact information).
• Having a progress bar showing what step of the process people are on also decreases the abandonment rate.
  

Avoid Loss of Information Entered by the Customers
Have you noticed how annoying it is when you enter your name and email address, click the continue button and on the next page you have to enter that information again? Don’t ask your customers for the same piece of information twice.

Don’t Ask for More Information than You Really Need
Do you really need your customer’s birth date, job title, and marital status? If you won’t send mail to your customers, don’t ask for a physical address. You can condense First Name and Last Name into one field: Name. Go through your process and eliminate everything you don’t really need.

Include Trust Logos
Is your business a member of the BBB? Are you VeriSign-verified? How about PayPal-verified? Your checkout area is the perfect place to show your customers that placing an order with you is safe and secure.


Don’t Forget About Social Proof
Every transaction has some level of risk. By showing your customers that other people just like them bought and are really happy with your products, you eliminate a big part of that risk. Use testimonials, case studies, “before and after” photos, or any other proof that your product really works and your customers love it. Don’t even think that once people enter your checkout funnel you have to stop selling to them.


Allow Your Customers to Call and Chat
Some people will feel frustrated with your checkout process. Give them the option to call you or live chat with you. Not only will you save a lot of sales that otherwise would have been lost, but you’ll also understand what areas of your checkout process are frustrating and you should improve.


Test the Heck Out of Everything
Test, test, and test some more. That’s the only way you’ll get it right. Test different calls to action, layouts, trust logos, testimonials, and checkout steps (one long form vs. two short forms, for example). Google Website Optimizer is a great tool for split testing and it’s free.

About six weeks ago, one of my blog readers told me something that really pissed me off: “you don’t put your actions were your mouth is. You write all these great articles on how to create effective websites but your own site doesn’t follow the advice you give.”

She was right. We’ve been so busy helping clients grow their companies that for the last 5 years we didn’t update our website at all. Most of our clients come from word-of-mouth anyway, so I figured it didn’t really matter. But Tanya (my blog reader) was right. We needed a website that reflects all the marketing principles we preach. That’s exactly what we did.

Last week we launched our new site and I want to share with you all the marketing tactics we’re using so you can get an idea or two for your own business.

We Re-Wrote Our Copy
This is what we did:

• We made our headlines bigger and red to attract people’s attention.
• We showed our prospects that we understand their problem and we have a solution for them.
• We made our text easy to read by using short sentences, short paragraphs, bold subheads and bullets.

We Included Case Studies
We asked ourselves, “how can we show our prospects we’re really good at what we do?” The answer was obvious. We added case studies to the website so we could show our prospects the results we got for our clients. There’s no stronger selling point than evidence showing that you are as good as you say you are.

We Included Testimonials
Testimonials are extremely powerful. Pay attention to the way we formatted them. We put the testimonials right next to our contact forms to encourage people to write us with their questions.

We Included a List of Some of Our Clients
This is another way to show prospects that we are very experienced and other companies just like them trust us with their business.

We Used Effective Contact Forms
This is why our contact forms are effective:

• We kept them short. We didn’t ask for unnecessary information.
• We used a checkmark and a very attractive call to action (take a look at the first sentence in the image).
• We used an animated arrow that shows people where they need to click. This is a great attention-grabber.
• We included a privacy policy “in plain English”.

We Added Links to My Social Media Profiles
When prospects aren’t ready to buy but they want to learn more about me, they can follow me on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

We Added Our “Google Certified” Logo
Last year I got certified by Google AdWords. We always include this logo in our proposals but there was no reason not to put it on our website too.

“As Seen On”
I’ve been featured as an Internet Marketing expert on several websites and I wanted to use this as a major selling point.

Free Reports
I wrote five reports on different Internet marketing topics. I put a lot of time into these and I think they’re a must-read for any business owner who’s serious about using the Internet to grow their businesses.

Blog Subscription
We made subscribing to our blog much easier. Our subscription rate tripled since last week!

“Have Questions?”
A lot of people have online marketing questions but they’re a little shy. We added this form to every page of our blog to encourage people to ask us their questions.

Multiple Calls to Action
We added forms at the end of each blog post and a slide-up script to encourage people to ask their questions. This way, communicating with us is a lot easier.

Funnels
We used InfusionSoft to create automatic email follow-up sequences. These are the funnels we set up:

• People fill out a quote request form > Prospect gets assigned to online marketing expert > If the prospect isn’t ready to move forward we send them case studies and testimonials and we invite them to schedule a phone call with an online marketing specialist > If the prospect isn’t interested, we invite them to subscribe to our blog.
• People get one of our free reports > We send them the report > We ask them if they have questions > If we don’t get an answer, we send them some case studies and testimonials > We invite them to schedule a phone call with an online marketing specialist > If the prospect isn’t interested, we invite them to subscribe to our blog.

I hope you learned a thing or two from this blog post. If you have questions, let me know and I’ll be happy to help you.

One of the most common mistakes I see when I review websites is weak calls to action. Actually, I spent the whole morning going through some of the calls to actions on our clients’ websites and I re-wrote them. Here is what I did for them:

Takeaways:

• The word “Get” rocks!
• Get as specific as you can. Call to actions need to explain what people will get if they decide to take action. “Start My FREE Trial” is a great example of a specific call to action.
• Move away from standard and boring calls to action. Nobody wants to subscribe to anything. People hate subscribing (but they love being “the first one to know”).
• Some power words: free, get, instant, easy, fast, simple, now.
• The word “now” increases conversion rate by about 25% in average.
• The word “FREE”, when capitalized, converts 86% better than its small caps counterpart.
• Capitalizing the first letter of each word increases conversion rates by about 22% in average.

Just so you see that I practice what I preach, here’s my call to action: Please Tweet this Post (Your Followers Will Thank You).

This reminds me of one last thing: giving a reason WHY people should to do what you ask them to drastically increases conversion rates. Explain why they’ll benefit from taking action.

BTW, we added a new WordPress plugin that I absolutely love. It’s called Sexy Bookmarks and it’s awesome to allow your readers to share your content. Play with it (it’s right below this sentence) and please share this post on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Let me know if it works OK. Thank you!

Social proof is showing your potential clients that other people think that what you want them to do is smart. When you say something, what you say is obviously biased. But, if someone else is saying it, it’s much more credible.

Although this is extremely powerful, very few business owners actually use social proof. My goal here is to show you the different kinds of social proof and how you can use them to skyrocket your sales.

Testimonials
This one is a classic. However, most testimonials out there are really bad. This is my formula for getting killer testimonials every time:

1. Find the most common objections your potential clients have. If you have salespeople, have them write down all the reasons why people don’t buy (”too expensive”, “what if it doesn’t work?”, “a friend of mine tried that and his ear came off”, whatever)
2. Send your happiest clients guiding questions (not “what do you think about us?” but “how did our customer service handled your complaint? Were they fast? Did they solve your problem? How?”)
3. The idea is to tie testimonials to the main objections. If one of the main objections of your prospects is your high price, include a few testimonials from clients that address the issue of why you’re more expensive than your competition. Remember the “loaded” questions: “what did you think of our price before making the purchase? How do you feel about hiring us? Were we worth the extra $50?”

A few extra tips on getting killer testimonials:

• Don’t ever make them up. Your customers are smarter than you think, you can get in trouble and you won’t feel very proud about yourself.
• Consider “third-party testimonials”. This is when someone other than the product user gives the testimonial. This works very well in B2C markets. An example: “Since my husband started using StopSnoring Pro I sleep a lot better and he wakes up full of energy.”
• Try to get VIDEO testimonials if you can. They’re extremely powerful! The second best kind of testimonials is the audio/photo testimonial. Regular “text” testimonials are OK, just make sure they’re not signed by “C.M., New York”; include real names and cities/company names/websites.

Celebrity Endorsements
If you’re a small business owner, chances are you can’t afford to pay a celebrity to endorse your product. So, here’s a way you can do it for free: just mention what celebrities do and say. Some examples:

• “Oprah and Larry King talk about the law of attraction and believe in it” (your reader thinks: “I admire Larry and Oprah; if they believe in this, this might be a good thing”.
• “This tuxedo is the same style Pierce Brosnan wore to the Oscar Awards last year”

You get the idea, right? The good news is that the celebrities don’t need to be talking about YOUR specific product. If Oprah says she eats 4 eggs each morning and you sell eggs, profit from that, even if Oprah doesn’t buy the eggs from you.

Expert Reviews
Again, you don’t need an expert to review YOUR product. If you sell a weight loss supplement that contains Vitamin X and the Mayo Clinic and WebMD.com said that Vitamin X has been successfully used for years to lose weight, use that in your copy!

Find the authorities in your industry and borrow their credibility by quoting them.

As Seen On…
Once again, if CBS features a news on a special kind of massage technique that you happen to offer, add an “As Seen On” badge to your site. (Note: talk to your lawyer before doing this; make sure you’re not breaking any law. Most of the time, if you give credit when credit is due, it’ll be fine.)

Case Studies
Case studies are very powerful because you’re not just showing what other people are saying; you’re showing actual results. Show before and after photos, charts, screenshots or present your evidence in the best way possible.

If you say something, it might be true. If someone else says it, it’s likely to be true. If you SHOW EVIDENCE, it IS true.

Our Clients
Consider having a list of your clients on your site. By showing people that others trust you with their business, you’re removing a lot of the risk, which is your ultimate goal.

Awards and Seals
These don’t really fall in the category of social proof, but can be very effective. If you’re certified in something, a member of the Better Business Bureau or even PayPal verified, put the seals on your site. Most of your competitors are too lazy to do this, so profit from their laziness.

Did you enjoy this post? Please Tweet It. Your followers will thank you.

If you asked me what’s the main reason most companies don’t have as many customers as they want, I’d say that they don’t understand their customers.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, how in the world can you sell something to someone you don’t understand? You can’t.

So, how do you get to know your customers? By creating an ideal customer profile.

The first thing you need to keep in mind is that not all your customers are the same, but you still need to create a persona that represents 70% of your customers. If you try to talk to a group of people on your website, you’ll most likely fail. But if you talk to that persona whose profile you created, your visitors will feel that you’re talking to them and they’ll be a lot more responsive.

So, how can you create an ideal client profile?

The first step is to create a document describing their ideal day. Make it as detailed as possible. These are some questions that will help you know your ideal customer better:

-    How old is she?
-    Where does she live?
-    Is she married? Divorced?
-    How many kids does she have?
-    How much does she make?
-    What does she spend her money on?
-    What is her average day like?
-    What does she have for breakfast?
-    Who does she have breakfast with?
-    What are her friends like?
-    What does her husband look like?
-    What movies does she like?
-    What kind of books does she read?
-    What does she do before going to bed at night?
-    Who does she admire? Why?

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. This exercise is so powerful that I wouldn’t even consider starting a marketing campaign without doing this first.

After you’re done with this exercise, I have another one for you. Do a profile explaining how this person makes buying decisions.

-    Does she buy online?
-    How does she do it? Does she use Google? Does she go to forums?
-    Is she an emotional or a logical buyer?
-    How will she use my product?
-    Does she do research before buying stuff? How does she do it? Does she use the Internet? How?
-    Who does the research? Who makes the final decision? Who has to approve that decision? Who influences in her decisions? Who does she justify her purchases with?
-    How important is price to her?
-    How important is quality to her?
-    Does she like getting products shipped to her or does she prefer to pick them up?
-    What would she use my product for? How often would she use it? Where would she use it? Who with?

By now you should have a very clear idea of who your ideal client is and it should be a lot easier to sell your products to her. Remember: identify what her hot buttons are (what motivates her to take action) and push them!

One last thing, when you write the copy for your site, write for Marie (don’t forget to name your ideal customer), not for a group of people. Use sentences like “our product will help you lose weight and feel more energized than ever before” instead of “our product helps people lose weight”.

Don’t Forget to Subscribe by RSS or Email:

When creating SEO content, stuffing your content with keywords won’t work (keyword stuffing is also an unethical SEO tactic). Not only does your content have to sound unique and exceptional, keywords need to be placed strategically within your content.

When you write articles, keep your keyword list handy and insert keywords as you write. Your goal is to create quality content that adds value to your readers.  If your article sounds like nonsense with strings of keywords crammed into paragraphs, you’re not utilizing correct SEO practices. It’s fairly simple to add a few primary and secondary words within articles without jeopardizing your entire content quality.

How to Optimize Your Blog
There are three main reasons WHY you want to create QUALITY content on your blogs:

•    MORE pages indexed – Search engine spiders crawl content (quality content equals more page indexing!)

•    Provide visitors with GREAT information – When visitors find you on Google, the rapport with your readers begin right there! When you provide valuable, quality content you engage your readers. Great content gives you a competitive edge over every other business floating around on cyberspace.

•    Links – When visitors read an informative, helpful article, they write about it on their blogs/sites and link to it. They also share with their friends and they tell their friends, etc.

Calls to Action
Visitors read your blog posts because they want to learn more information or are interested in what you have to say/share.

At the end of each blog post, you need to add a call to action. A call to action is a specific task that you ask your visitor to do. You can’t just “assume” that after reading your great post that your visitor will know what to do. You need to push them in the right direction.

•    Subscribe - Visitors can subscribe to your blog by RSS feeds and email. WordPress provides a useful plug-in, Subscribe2

•    Tell a Friend – You’ll receive a better response if you remind people to spread the word about your blog. Tell a Friend is an effective WordPress plugin that makes it easy to remind/email people about your blog post

•    ShareThis – Allows visitors to share content with friends through social bookmarking platforms such as Facebook, Digg, Twitter, etc.
•    TweetMeMe – Invites readers to “re-tweet” your posts (i.e. share your article on Twitter)

How to Write Great Content – Best Practices

•    Brand your own writing style – Stand out amongst other bloggers by creating your own unique voice and style. Don’t try to copy other writer’s styles.

•    Write in a conversational style – Keep language simple and easy to understand. You don’t have to be a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist to create winning content.

•    Write UNIQUE content – Do not copy content from other sites and create content that solves a person’s problem or makes life/business easier.

•    Plan posts strategically and add “teasers” about upcoming posts/content – keep readers engaged so they’ll come back and read more!

•    Always encourage comments from readers and answer comments quickly. Include related posts at the end of each post.

•    Include guest bloggers on your site – You’ll add free content to your site and create new relationships within your industry/niche.

Content Examples
•    “How To” articles –  How To Lose Weight on The Flat Belly Diet

•    Lists – Top Ten Family Vacation Spots

•    Demonstrations – A video demonstrating yoga poses

•    Case Studies – How I Built a Worm Farm from Scratch

•    News – Write about late-breaking news that affects your business/industry

•    Humor – Add a personal touch and humor to your content. People love it when you share practical advice.

Don’t Forget to Subscribe by RSS or Email:

Google Website Optimizer is one of the most accurate website optimizing tools out there. If your sites suffer from low conversion rates, then it’s time to use Google Website Optimizer to test your sites and increase conversion rates.

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to websites who take desired actions. A sites’s desired action is based on your online marketing goals (sell more products, increase membership, etc.)

How Does Google Website Optimizer Work?
The program creates dynamic, high-converting pages. It also tests and optimizes design and content for websites, and uses Google Analytics for tracking.

It uses two types of testing: A/B and multivariate.

•    A/B Testing – Tests two or more entirely different versions of web pages

•    Multivariate Testing – Simultaneously tests multiple page variables /elements (headline, content, images, etc.)

Best Testing Practices
When setting up experiments in Google Website Optimizer, use these practices when you test your web pages. Remember to test, test, and test to achieve the BEST results!

•    Test pages with high traffic – High traffic pages usually optimize faster than low traffic pages

•    Test only a few variables at a time – The more elements you test, the longer it’ll take to run: for your initial test, start with 2 titles and 2 images

•    Pay attention to testing combinations – Make sure combinations are readable and are a good fit.

•    Choose high conversion goals – For example, if you’re an e-commerce site you’ll want to pick a common high conversion goal such as adding items to a shopping cart. Lower conversion goals take longer to find effective content that works.

•    You know what works best for your site – Google Website Optimizers gives you basic guidelines but you are the best judge when it comes to your site – test and re-test and find what works best.

How to Set up Experiments
•    Choose test page – This is the page that you’ll be optimizing by making changes with Google Website Optimizer. This page needs to offer an action to customers (landing pages, sign-up forms, etc.) The action can be found in the form or links to another page.

•    Choose conversion page – This page represents your business results (where users make a purchase, etc.)

•    Pick tests that work best for your site – A/B tests are simple to run and produce results quickly – test entirely different layouts or change look of pages. Multivariate tests are more complex and take longer to run, but are more flexible. Test out two different headlines, three different images and three different sale prices at the same time.

•    Select the type of content you want to test – This applies to multivariate testing (in A/B testing, you don’t need to pick specific content)

•    Create content variations – When you figure out the test page headline and image you want to use, you need to create a few variations: the original content or the new variation is shown to visitors. Variations are used to determine what content leads them to take action and reach conversion pages. You can also limit the amount of traffic who views new variations.

Report Results
Google Website Optimizer runs reports with helpful data lined up in columns– use this information to analyze your conversion rates.

•    Estimated conversion rate range – Shows how well variations/combinations are performing compared to your original content

•    Chance to Beat Original – Gives a percentage probability that combination/variation will be more successful than original content

•    Improvement – Displays percentage improvement over original combinations/variation

•    Conversions/Visitors – Total number of conversions per visitors that variations generated

•    Relevance Rating – Impact of page section on your experiment

I review websites every day. The flaws that I find are almost always the same. So I decided that it would be a good idea to write an article on the most common usability flaws and how to avoid them.

Lack of Funnel Planning
It’s a fact: people won’t do anything unless you ask them to, which means that you need to use calls to action on your site. But you also need to plan the process your visitors will go through to complete the desired action.

Let’s say that you sell t-shirts and your desired action is for your visitors to place an order. Let’s assume that you sell red and blue t-shirts. You should use the home page to get people’s attention and tell them why your t-shirts are so great. Then, at the end of the home page, invite them to visit you red t-shirts page or your blue t-shirts page. They will click on either one and then tell them about your red t-shirts and their benefits. At the end of that page, invite them to add the item to the shopping cart. In the shopping cart page invite them to start the checkout process.

Always take your visitors to the next step, don’t just have the information on your site and hope that people will find it. Plan the process and have appropriate calls to action.

Less is More
The first thing I do when I review a website is looking for elements that I can remove. The more I get rid of, the better the website looks. If you have a feature that 0.01% of your visitors use, get rid of it; it’s confusing the other 99.99% of your visitors.

Start taking things away until you only have the essentials. Resist the temptation of having a lot of stuff in your pages.

Group Similar Sections Together
Organize the information on your site in a way that you only have a few sections and several sub-sections. This is called vertical architecture and it’s the opposite of horizontal architecture (which allows you to access pretty much every page on the site from the home page).

Make Text Easy to Read
Use every-day words for your website. Impress your visitors with your content, not with fancy words. Use short sentences and short paragraphs. Get your point across with as few words as you can.

Use bullet-points, bold text and subheads to make the text easier to read.

Easy-to-read text is the difference between a successful website and a failure.

Say What You Offer Right Away
Every day I see websites that fail at telling their visitors what they are about in less than 30 seconds. Why are these companies putting their visitors through this kind of torture? If you are McDonalds, you don’t really need to explain that you sell burgers. But if your brand isn’t that popular, use a tag line or a headline to let your visitors know what they can find on your website. This is a great way to express your competitive advantage. If you sell dresses and what makes your company unique is that they are imported from Italy, make your tag line “Luxury Italian Dresses”.

If you liked this post, subscribe by RSS or email to receive our articles:

I am an Internet marketing specialist and website designer. People ask me how to make more money online every day.

If your website is not making enough money, it might be for one of these two reasons (or both of them):

• You are not getting enough traffic
• You are getting a lot of traffic but your visitors don’t become paying customers

More traffic
If not getting enough traffic is the problem, there are a lot of ways of buying traffic. I use the word “buying” because that’s exactly what it is. Don’t fool yourself thinking that there is such thing as free traffic. If it doesn’t cost money, it takes time. And time is money.

A lot of people freak out when it comes to investing money to get traffic. Those are the people who aren’t serious about having a successful business. I’ve come across many people who think that owning an online business is a great way of making a quick buck without much effort. An online business is very similar to any other kind of business. You need to have a great product, price it right, and market it to the right people.

Many of these people get really happy when they get a $20 commission for an affiliate sale because they spent no money promoting this product. They only spent 3 days of their lives. Now, if you are happy being paid $20 for 24 hours of work, great. I am not here to judge you.

But don’t you wish sometimes that you owned one of those websites that make $10,000-$100,000 a month? If you do, you need to start thinking as a real entrepreneur. You need to forget about making a quick buck overnight and realize that great results come from hard work and doing the right things.

More conversions
Once you start thinking as a real business owner and not like a wannabe Internet marketer you will realize that there is nothing wrong with buying traffic as long as your return on that investment is higher than the investment itself. How many people would you be willing to pay $5 to visit your website? None? What if I told you that for each one of them you will make $6? Then your answer should be “as many as I can!”

The reason why most people are afraid of spending money promoting their websites is because their websites don’t convert visitors into paying customers.

There are many reasons why this happens, but these are the most common ones:

Poor copy
A lot of online business owners don’t realize that the copy they write will have a major influence in the buying decision of their visitors, so they really don’t spend enough time writing good copy.

Unprofessional website
There is no bigger turnoff that an unprofessional website. People don’t know you. They don’t know your brand. All they see is a tacky website done by a high school kid. Why should they trust you?

No USP, poor USP, or USP not well displayed
USP stands for Unique Selling Proposition. It is a fancy way of saying “what makes you different (better) than the competition”. Your USP should not be based on what you want it to be, but on what your prospects would like it to be. In other words, don’t highlight your great prices too much if people are looking for quality instead of price. And vice versa.

Not testing the product and business model
Several people spend months getting a website, negotiating with vendors, getting a fancy office with a brand new coffee machine, and then they throw a huge launch party. The day after, they don’t get one single sale. One month later, two sales only. The business is not working out.

We should never assume that we know all the answers and just because we think that a business is going to work, it will. We need to test the business model and the product as soon as we possibly can and spending as little as possible.

Not being persistent
A few businesses start making tons of money from day one. But that is the exception, not the rule. Chances are that you will test four or five things that don’t work before you find something that does. Don’t use all your money for one marketing campaign. Start small. Test it out and if it has a high ROI you can always invest more in it. If it doesn’t, then your business will not be upside down. Forget about the magic bullet that will make you rich overnight. Persistence is more important than intelligence.