Get More Sales From Your Dispensary Website

Boosting Your Website’s Conversion Rate

Getting more sales from your dispensary website is all about boosting your conversion rate. A website’s conversion rate is the rate at which it is able to convert visitors into paying customers.

Not every person that visits your website will be ready to buy. That’s why it’s important to have a website that can effectively drive visitors down the purchase/marketing funnel towards converting.

According to WordStream, roughly 96% of people who visit a website will leave without ever converting into a lead or a sale. If your dispensary website is in a similar boat, it may be time to think about a conversion rate optimization campaign.

How Can You Improve Your Website’s Conversion Rate?

There are a number of things you can do to try and improve your website’s conversion rate. But first and foremost, before you begin tweaking your site you will need to measure your current conversion rate.

Better Understanding Your Current Situation with Google Analytics

Before you begin making improvements, it’s important to understand just where you stand.

How can you figure out your website’s current conversion rate? Just divide the number of successful conversions by the number of total visitors to your website. Multiply that number by 100 and you will have your website’s conversion rate percentage.

While this simple back of the napkin calculation can give you a basic idea of what’s going on, you need to go further in order to really understand where your site is failing.

To do this, use Google Analytics to access your site’s metrics in order to gain a better understanding of how visitors are interacting with your website. Google Analytics can provide you with valuable insights that you can use to create actionable plans for improving your website in a variety of ways, including by optimizing its conversion rate.

Take a look at your website’s traffic, where it’s coming from, and how often it is converting. This information will provide you with a baseline conversion rate for each traffic source so that you can get a good idea of just how well your site is turning leads into paying customers.

If it looks like a weak conversion rate is holding your website back and hindering your revenues, then you should begin taking the necessary steps to improve your site with an eye towards converting more traffic.  

Re-Design Your Website for Enhanced Functionality and Mobile Browsing

A poorly built website is one of the most common culprits behind a bad conversion rate.

Take some time to go over your website and closely inspect its flow and layout for traffic bottlenecks or poor functionality. A website that is difficult to navigate, non-functional or just plain overwhelming will frustrate visitors and make them want to leave, resulting in fewer conversions and a higher bounce rate.

Additionally, make sure that your site works well on mobile. It’s estimated that mobile accounts for nearly half of all web traffic worldwide and having a site that makes mobile browsing difficult will undoubtedly hurt your conversion rate.

Speed Up Your Dispensary Website

Your site shouldn’t just be functional. It should also be fast.

Just like a poorly designed site, a slow site can result in lost traffic and fewer conversions. As such, having a super-fast website that loads quickly and has good flow is crucial to securing more conversions and generating more online revenue. In a recent survey, 79% of respondents said that they would not return to a site with poor performance and that a one-second delay can reduce customer satisfaction by roughly 16%.

Use a tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Pingdom to check your website’s current speed. Ideally, you want your site’s pages to load in under 3 seconds, although Google has previously indicated that 2 seconds is their preferred threshold for e-commerce.

If your site isn’t loading as fast as you would want it to there are a few things you can do.

A slow loading speed can usually be attributed to a slow host or problematic on-page elements. Take a look at each individual element on any page that is loading slowly. You may find that oversized elements are slowing down the entire page’s loading speed. The usual culprits are oversized images and java scripts that can be a pain to load.

Optimizing, combining, or removing these elements can quickly result in improved site speed. Images can be minimized to load more quickly, and javascript files can be combined and set to load asynchronously (one after the other instead of all at the same time), and after all of the other on-page elements have already loaded.

If you think your site is loading slowly because of server or hosting issues, it may be time to think about finding a new web host.

Create Effective Calls-To-Action (CTAs)

A call-to-action is a written device that tells your audience what they should do next. Your dispensary website should be equipped with calls to action that guide and direct your visitors around your network of pages, with conversion as the ultimate goal.

If your site’s conversion rate is low, it’s possible that your CTA’s just aren’t getting the job done. Look at the traffic numbers of each individual page and try to spot any bottlenecks or spots where traffic is suddenly bouncing from your site. It’s possible that this is occurring due to the ineffectiveness of your CTAs.

What does an effective CTA look like? A good CTA should be clear and concise. Keep your CTAs short and sweet, saying what you need to, and nothing more.

Furthermore, make sure that your CTAs are prominently displayed on each page. A single CTA at the bottom of the page likely won’t be very effective. Instead, place your CTAs in places where you think people are most likely to see them.

Doing a heat map analysis on each page can give you a better idea of where you should place your CTAs. A heat map is an analytical method that shows you which part of a page visitors are spending the most time viewing. Consider placing your CTAs on the hottest parts of the page to ensure visibility.

Can’t decide which CTA to use? Some A/B testing can help you to figure out which CTAs people respond to better.

Leverage Customer Reviews and Social Proof

Customer reviews and social media engagement can be leveraged to create social proof for your dispensary. Positive customer reviews and a strong social media presence builds trust and credibility with potential customers, increasing the likelihood that they will do business with your dispensary.

It’s well known that customer reviews contribute to a site’s SEO performance. But they can also help your site’s performance by encouraging transactions. Displaying customer reviews and testimonials will show visitors that they others trust you and that they should too.

In addition, consider using on-site plugins and tools that build social proof. For example, some plugins will inform site visitors when someone else purchases a specific item, while others can show how many times an item has been purchased or a service has been signed up for. These tools can build trust, drive action, and work wonders for promoting specific products.

Keep an Eye on Things

Give these conversion rate optimization strategies a try and wait a few months before coming back to Google Analytics to check out your site’s metrics and measure your site’s conversion rate once more.

Now that you know how to optimize your website to achieve a higher conversion rate, it’s important to keep an eye on your site’s performance in case you need to make further tweaks down the road. Don’t think that conversion rate optimization is a one-and-done deal. While your site may be optimized right now, it’s easy to lose sight of conversion rates as you continue to build and expand your site.