Is Your Website Holding Your Brand Back?

July 23, 2021

What is the difference between an under-performing website and a high-performing website? And what is the difference between $500k in sales and $1m in sales?

The same difference between a 1% conversion rate and a 2% conversion rate!

All too often brands are struggling to grow their sales profitably and they are finding it nearly impossible to even break even on their advertising efforts.

When looking at these brands from a holistic perspective, we can see that their website is often a pinch point and it’s actually the reason for their lack of profitability.

In this article we will break down a few of the key website aspects to look at to see if your website is hurting your brand.


Conversion Rate

Perhaps the most important website performance indicator is your conversion rate. If you don’t already know, your conversion rate is calculated with the formula: 

Number of purchases / total website sessions. For example, if you have 34 purchases out of 1000 user sessions, your conversion rate is 34/1000=3.4%.

To give you some industry numbers, according to LittleData.io, the Shopify conversion rate benchmark is 1.75%. That being said, there are numerous factors that can influence that (premium pricing, inventory levels, sales, etc…) so take the benchmarks with a grain of salt.

At the end of the day, your conversion rate is relative to your brand, however, if your conversion rate is low and you know you’re driving good quality traffic, you’re going to:

  1. Have a hard time scaling profitably
  2. Leave a lot of money on the table that could be going into your pocket

Because customer acquisition can be very expensive, improving your initial conversion rate can literally be the difference between growing your brand and running out of money and having to close your door.

Lifetime Value / Returning Customer Rate

Two often overlooked metrics for brands are the lifetime value (LTV) of your customer and the returning customer rate. Although these are two separate metrics, they go hand in hand so we will be talking about them together.

According to LittleStream Software, a 27% returning customer is considered a “good baseline.”

A big factor in these metrics is giving your customers a reason to come back and how you’re staying front of mind (email, sms, paid ads, organic posts, etc…), so if you aren’t doing much to stay in touch with them, your returning customer rate will most likely be pretty low.

If you are pushing content to your existing customers and your LTV and returning customer rate is still low, then you have a problem. Here are a few things that might be causing these numbers to be low:

  • Poor customer experience
  • Slow load times
  • No complimentary products
  • Not building value in having multiple products
  • No real reason to come back to the site

Naturally, people who have purchased products from you in the past should be the easiest to sell moving forward, so give them a good reason to come back and buy again and most importantly, make it easy for them to buy. 

Here are a few things you can do to improve your LTV:

  • Regular product launches
  • Add a blog to encourage people to come back
  • Create a loyalty program
  • Saved customer info for faster checkouts
  • Create value-packed subscriptions


SEO Optimization

Aside from onsite-efficiency measurements on your site, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an often overlooked area of your website that can lead to a lot of long-term lost revenue.

If you’re new to SEO, then it’s important to understand that SEO is a long-term, labor-intensive, process that can take months or even years to make a real impact on your bottom line. However, just like with a tree, the best time to plant your seed was 20 years ago, and the second best time is today.

Getting started with your SEO campaign doesn’t need to be tricky! In fact, you can actually use this resource that we published earlier this year to learn How To Get Found Online In 2021 With An SEO Strategy.

If your brand hasn’t implemented an SEO strategy into your marketing, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity with organic traffic that is literally searching for what you’re selling.

In addition to moving products, SEO is a great way to build brand awareness and improve your overall brand positioning because you can publish content that positions your brand as a true industry leader.

Lastly, SEO is crucial for brands because it can help lower overall customer acquisition costs. Advertising can be expensive and every brand has bad months. SEO can act as a lifeline during those months because you can get in front of your customer organically without any ad spend.


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