Jul 22, 2019 
Getting traffic to your store is one thing, but getting them to convert is another. Many online marketers often experience this dilemma when their traffic is quite solid but their sales remain stagnant.
Although traffic holds a deciding role in your store’s conversion rate, many other factors also come into play they marketers often overlook. In this article, we take the opportunity to share 5 main reasons why your sales are stagnating even though your traffic keeps coming.
Content Development
Content is the key determinant behind every conversion. Without enticing content your conversion funnel is worthless. Throughout the stages, from awareness and gaining interest, to desire and action, content plays an imperative part in the customer’s conversion journey.
A good web copy allows the seller to relay their unique selling proposition, brand message, and product value effectively to their visitor.
This increases their conversion potential and improves your brand image between the target customer. You can use attractive catchphrases, stunning punchlines, verbal ornamentation and a bit of adjectival fireworks to juice up your copy. When your content is rich, compelling and structures, a visitor that lands on your homepage, product page or any other CMS page, they will spend more time to understand what you have to offer.
Navigation
It’s a common mistake among designers and marketers. In attempts to stand out from the competition, designers develop a unique style of navigation menus that ultimately do more harm than good. These menus lack usability, intuitiveness and other key elements that determine user experience. Menus that solely focus on aesthetic leverage often fall behind on their functional points and become a leading cause for bounce rate. From a usability report by KoMarketing, 37% of respondents claimed poor navigation menus was the main reason that made them leave the website.
In the following example, Portland Trail Blazers website was experiencing a decline in sales while their traffic remained constant. The image below, their navigation was not optimized from the user experience and lacked from several areas such as textual orientation, color depth, mobile responsiveness, and vertical layout.
Image Source
After a revamp in the navigation menu, the site experienced a 62% increase in revenue and their traffic increased exponentially.
Image source
Navigation takes up an important role in the visitor’s onsite experience and it certainly is something you cannot afford to mess up.
Design
If the content is what engages your customers, page design is what retains them. Your page design is responsible for many key performance indicators of the conversion funnel. From aesthetics and negative spacing to formatting and textual elements, good web design can help you stay ahead of your competition and engender a positive user experience for the user.
Ideally, your design should advocate what your company stands for, its corporate identity, value proposition and how effectively it can communicate its message to the visitor. Websites that invest in good web design have always cultivated a higher conversion rate than those that neglect this crucial aspect.
In the example below, a Magento extension development company FME extensions did some major changes to its design layout and transformed it into more user-friendly and intuitive web design.
Previous design
FME used above the fold approach to position its product description on the top of the page, followed by key points that set its products apart from competitors in bullet format. This helped the company increase its conversions by 22% in just a few months.
New Design
CTAs
Call to action or CTA is the most underrated graphical elements in digital marketing. Surprisingly they are also the most important ones when it comes to traffic and conversions. A CTA can be anything that contains a link to the conversion page/form. It can be a catchphrase, a button, an image, video or even an animation.
CTAs have the power to effectively prompt action from the user and score a leads for the merchant. But creating lead scoring CTA takes a very carefully vetted approach that involves several factors such as color psychology, technical writing, graphic design and a little bit of development. It’s a team effort and has to be very specific to your target niche.
What may work for one online store may not necessarily work for you so a good understanding of your target market is important.
Page Loading Speed
Page loading speed accounts for a major part of your conversion success. Studies have consistently shown how a fast performing page results in better conversions and helps the website get ranked better. When the page loads faster, it naturally increases the likeliness of the customer to complete the targeted action.
According to a survey by skilled.co, 47% of customers expect a webpage to load within 2 seconds or they leave the website. From a test conducted by mPulse Mobile, pages that loaded within 2.4 seconds had 1.94% conversion rate while those that loaded after 5.7 seconds had a conversion rate of 0.6%. Walmart experienced a 2% improvement in conversion rate for every 1 second that they reduced in their page loading time.
Although seemingly small, these increases hugely impact on the website’s conversion rate that can translate to millions of dollars in revenue. For example, if a website produces sales worth $10 million each year, an increase of 2% can mean a $200,000 increase in its revenue.
Final Takeaway
Conversion rate is an entirely different measurement and has a vast disparity from web traffic. If your conversion rate experiences a downfall, the traffic may remain the same but the number of users converting on your website will go down.
This is why you must treat it differently from in your digital marketing stratagem and allocate dedicated practices to improve it.
Reworking on these 5 key areas has helped the world’s leading online retailers and e-commerce giants to recover their leads and boost their revenue generation.
They will certainly work for you as well.
Author Bio
Mirza Irfan is a Lead Writer at FME Extensions. He has a passion for helping people find innovative solutions in online marketing and has written numerous blogs on science, technology, digital marketing and business strategy. A writer by day and a reader by night, you can find him on LinkedIn.
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