Do I need more traffic or better sales conversions?

Hello ~

I looked at your site and have a couple of thoughts

- granted it is not an IM related site, but it took me a while to really focus in on your product and message. There are a lot of words and things all over the site in different columns etc. On suggestion would be to clean the site up (and modernize) so it's a bit more to the point and streamlined. A lot of people think of a sales funnel in terms of multiple pages on a site and an email list, but event just having a clearer and more directed call to action and information sharing can be very helpful. I already knew what you where trying to do from this post and it still took me a while to grasp the site.

- There's not obvious way to find how to order and buy from you right away. And correct me if I'm wrong, but you have to invoice the person via email. A lot of people would probably prefer just to click on something and to order. You are adding an extra step and thus, possibly losing sales.

- Related to the idea of a list, I don't see any call to action or offer for some sort of freebie or incentive where you can get people on a list. You may only be able to convert 1 - 5% of your visitors, but if you could grab say 10 - 20% and then follow up and develop a relationship with them via an email list, guaranteed your sales would go up.

To sum it up, at first glance (i only spent about 2 min on your site) it seems that your site isn't really optimized for sales ! I would do some reading and research on site design, copy, and layout as well as other marketing strategies and see what makes sense to integrate with your business. Yes, it is not an IM site so you don't want or need flashy red headlines and bolded print everywhere, but you could definitely improve the overall sales optimization. I don't know about pageviews, but if you had 5K uniques per month, you should be looking at a minimum of 50 sales per month with a properly optimized sales funnel - assuming your product is what people are looking for.

Yeah, I'm sure.

Analytics stats:
For wedding-favor-bookmarks.com
2,600 Visits
2,359 Unique Visitors
4,518 Pageviews
1.74 Pages/Visit
00:01:06 Avg. Time on Site
75.46% Bounce Rate
89.35% % New Visits

For memorial-bookmarks.com (launched Nov 2011)
779 Unique Visitors
1,308 Pageviews
1.52 Pages/Visit
00:01:28 Avg. Time on Site
72.21% Bounce Rate
88.72% % New Visits

So a combined less than 4,000 unique visitors between the two sites in the last three years. Pretty FKN dismal.

Okay, so what do I do, other than what I've already done/am doing? That is, besides updating both entire sites?

I'm open to suggestions because ya think after three years I'd be doing a hell of a lot better.

There are 2900 searches per month for 'wedding bookmarks;' 3600 for 'bookmark favors,' and 1300 for 'bookmark wedding favors.' That's not including the searches for specific themes like 9900 searches for 'beach wedding favors' where I'm #11 and #12 on Google. And it doesn't include the searches for non-wedding themes either.

But yeah, I need some huge boosts in both traffic and conversions. I mean, I'm making a profit; the site pays for itself, both of them, but it's just not enough!

As long as something relies on sales the more targeted the traffic is the better in my opinion.

Let's say you have a website.And your competitor has another site, similar to yours.

Your site might get 10.000 visitors per month and makes 100 sales.

Your competitor's site gets 2000 visitors per month and makes 100 sales too.

Your site's conversion is 1% and your competitors site has a conversion of 5 %.

As you can see, improving your conversion rate is a big factor for all the websites.

And i keep saying that to all of my customers who think that if they pay for PPC, they will make millions although their site needs a total reconstrustion!

Cheers!

Dimitris

hey I already said this in another post but the best site so you can track your copy is www.visualwebsiteoptimizer.com then you can also use a service called clicktale.com these sites will let you know what people are doing when they get to your site you can track test and tweek until you are making the most bang for your buck.

Well, I don't know much about your site. I would advise though you make conversion your top priority. Even if you are getting 1000 people a day, if your set is not setup to make them do what you want, they will leave, and all that work will come to nought. Set this as a priority first, and then concentrate on driving more visitors, chhers

I took at look at your site. I think it's great, but it could use a little tweeking to make it more sales-ready. Also, I think the wedding industry is always a bit of feast or famine. I guess the key for you will be to get the "feast" portion of that up to perhaps 10 sales during a busy period so when they fall off you have something to work with. Good Luck!

OH wow! You know, I would never even have thought of that! Thanks for that tip!

I did a rush order for a family when the funeral home wasn't able to get them done in time.

When I first launched the memorial division, I did some post card mailings to local funeral directors. No response. I'd be cutting in on their business because a lot of funeral homes already do that kind of stuff.

But I never thought of doing what you're suggesting. Something I should look into!

It seems like a good niche. With those traffic numbers it should be capable of yielding higher conversions.

I'm a bit confused over some of the layout/design features - I'm not a fan of links opening new tabs on the same site, and there needs to be some consistency in how the products are presented from page to page. Opening images in a lightbox is a better and more professional option than showing them in a new tab. I can see how that would confuse people, they go from the home page to a category then click on an image. Now they have three browser tabs open. To get from the image back to the order page they need to X a tab, the back-button isn't an option.

The site images load slow. That top banner text is a transparent PNG file at 146K. It needn't be a PNG, a JPG would be better. I'd also loose the text and go for a more conventional header which is more visually appealing, perhaps a collage of wedding / anniversary images that fit into the 'pink' theme. (or a collage of whatever categories sell best).

I'd have a simple logo designed to give your site a name/identity. It isn't until I get to the footer that I see you are a legit business with a trading name. That's a no-no for an eCommerce website, you need to brand yourself with a name and logo.

You need some people images. Weddings, anniversaries, people happy and smiling, then drop in a few testimonials around the images. Your site is flat with not enough personality.

I'd have some testimonials knitted into my sales pages. That's the place to see happy smiling faces, not by having to click a button.

There are better ways in which to integrate your PayPal payments form. Yours is simple enough but you could make the experience more in keeping with what people expect from a commerce site by adding a simple (free) shopping cart. That way people get to create an account with you and they can come back to check order status and get shipping/tracking info. Then just integrate PayPal on the order checkout page.

If you have a US credit card you can also signup for Amazon payments. That gives people another payment option. Using a shopping cart they simply select their preferred option on the final checkout page Paypal or Amazon. With amazon, it can be integrated so people don't have to leave your website to pay.

If you qualify for upgrading your PP account to a Web Payments Pro account then it functions like a merchant account with seamless checkout (the entire checkout process takes place on your website).

On your articles and SEO work, be careful with some of that stuff as you may be sailing too close to the sun. A quick look at the first article Top Five Ways to Give Perfectly Memorable Anniversary Party Favors and you've got 16 reps of your 'party favors' 3.69KD and 45 reps of 'favors' at 5.05KD. It doesn't read naturally, it's obviously an SEO article.
Are you using your articles effectively? I don't think so. Assuming that you're getting the article pages used as landing pages, they don't pull me into the rest of the site. Again, there's no personality, no warm fuzzy feeling, just static textual content. You need to pull people into your offer pages from the landing pages (articles).

I don't think these are big issues, just basic design and visual things which if fixed could help a lot.
I think you're on a precipice with some of your SEO work and you're not utilizing the landing pages to convert people to customers. You seem to provide comprehensive information on how to deal with you and what to expect, so that's good.
Just my 2 penneth.

Buy some books on page optimization,
or hire a consultant.

There's lots wrong with your page - it
looks old fashioned (which means people
won't trust it), and it's not immediately
clear to a visitor what they should do or
what they're looking at.

Either the books or advice from an expert
will help you improve it.

Good luck.

-David Raybould

simple answer both