How to boost the conversion rate of your e-commerce website in the manufacturing industry

Published: 30-Apr-2018

Fifty three per cent of businesses spend less than 5% of their total marketing budget on boosting their conversion rates, and 35% of businesses have a conversion rate of less than 1%

There’s a clear correlation between businesses who continually optimise their marketing efforts, compared with those who have higher conversion rates.

Here, Valves Direct discuss five key ways in which your manufacturing business can boost the conversion rate of your e-commerce site, helping you to stay one step ahead of your competition.

Manufacturing is big business: the UK industry has climbed the rankings to be the 8th largest producer in the whole world, employing 2.6 million people.

With so many companies operating in the UK manufacturing industry, it’s crucial that your business concentrates on boosting the conversion rate of your e-commerce site.

But first, it’s important to remember that there is no “magic” number or figure you should be hitting. Benchmark your conversion rate against the manufacturing industry’s average, and focus on continually increasing yours. After all, you want more sales than your competitors – and here’s how.

A/B split testing

Ever heard of A/B split testing? It’s one of the key ways to measure and increase conversion rates on your e-commerce website.

Essentially, A/B split testing allows you to compare two slight variations of a single page, to see which performs most successfully. From the data gathered, you can then start to implement changes that should help to increase your conversion rate.

When performing these tests, you should only make one small change at a time. Think of it this way: if you created a test page that had five major changes and massively increased conversion rates, how would you know which change played the biggest part in that?

Edits like moving or changing the size of CTAs (call to actions), replacing an image or amending fonts, text size and colours can all be tested.

Your two pages will each be shown to 50% of visitors to your website, and data will be gathered to see which page performs the best.

Bear in mind that A/B testing isn’t a quick fix: if your website has low traffic, then it can take a while to gain a substantial amount of data.

Instead, view this as something you should be continually doing, making one small change at a time to increase your manufacturing business’ website conversion rates.

High quality images

No matter what industry you’re operating in, if you want to increase the conversion rate of your e-commerce site, then you need to accurately convey your products or services.

That’s where high quality images come in. If you don’t have any product pictures on your e-commerce website – or worse: grainy, blurry pictures – then you need to do something about it.

After all, why would anyone trust in the quality of your products if they can’t even see them properly?

Your product pictures should be high quality, showing off their features and benefits. Shooting them against a white backdrop will ensure viewers’ focus is on the product. To get the best results, you may decide to invest in a professional photographer.

You could also add in a zoom feature on your website, so viewers can see your products more closely, and view the features in depth.

Although you want to upload high resolution images, make sure file sizes aren’t too big, as that will slow down your page load speeds; 32.3% of visitors will bounce off a page if it takes more than 7 seconds to load, and on average, users will visit 5.6 more pages of a website if the page load speed is 2 seconds compared to 8.

Regularly publish blog articles

To increase conversion rates, you want to be seen as an expert in your area of manufacturing, and one way you can do this is by writing targeted blog articles.

Start off by conducting keyword research to see what people are searching for – Ahrefs and SEMrush are both great tools to use, and Answer the Public can identify potential questions.

From there, you can create a blog content plan. Rather than posting blogs sporadically, try to put a schedule in place – for instance every Wednesday afternoon – to encourage readers to revisit on a regular basis.

By creating content that targets specific keywords, your website can start to rank for a range of phrases, and encourage new visitors to click through.

Those who find your website by searching for a query that one of your blog article answers, may well purchase your products. Not only will this bring you new customers that may not have otherwise found you, but your conversion rates will increase too.

Obtain testimonials and case studies

A study has shown that 93% of consumers admit to testimonials impacting their purchasing decisions, and 82% of people read reviews before committing to making a purchase.

Therefore, it’s imperative that you gain testimonials and case studies, if you want to increase your e-commerce site’s conversion rate.

Ask happy customers to review your products and services – you can either do this through Google reviews, a paid third-party site such as TrustPilot, or upload them directly to your website.

Have you won any contracts with well-known businesses? Why not ask them to write a case study, which you can then upload to your site?

The key is to have a range of recent glowing reviews from past customers, that potential new customers can easily access.

To increase your manufacturing business’ conversion rate online, you must first convince consumers that you’re reliable and trusted, in order for them to purchase from you.

Incorporate videos

It’s a proven fact that videos increase conversion rates on e-commerce sites, and if you haven’t already added video to your manufacturing business’ marketing strategy, then you need to.

Viewers remember 95% of content they consumed in a video, compared with just 10% in a chunk of text; and shoppers are 174% more likely to purchase a product once they’ve watched a video.

Don’t worry about producing lengthy videos though - viewer attention spans are just 9%, so you need to engage them straight away. Videos that are under 30 seconds are the ones that have the highest engagement rates.

Create product videos that you can post on YouTube and embed in your e-commerce site.

Show your products in action, and highlight their features. You could also incorporate testimonials, with customers explaining how they’ve benefitted from your products.

If you do decide to add videos to your website (which we’d recommend), then make sure they’re good quality, natural and engaging.

To conclude, there are many ways in which you can increase your conversion rates – much of which are free. To effectively compete with other manufacturing businesses, you should continually be striving to improve your e-commerce’s conversion rates; attracting new customers whilst retaining loyal ones.

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