Get more customers for your Gallery…
Do you want to get more customers buying from your gallery?
Do you get lots of traffic but nobody buys your pictures?
Are you wracking your brains trying to figure out how to make money from an online gallery?
If any of those questions resonate with you, this series of articles will help — but only if you take action.
The first two parts to this series explored how improving your gross margin and average sales value will increase your earnings from your online gallery.
This time we’re going to look at what you can do upstream in your sales pipeline (yes, you do have a sales pipeline even if you’re not aware of it) with the emphasis on…
How to get more customers from your existing visitors
First let’s clear one thing up:
Visitors are NOT customers. They BECOME customers when, and only when, they actually buy something from you.
Visitors come to your gallery, browse for a bit and then disappear. Customers come to your gallery, browse for a bit, put something in their shopping cart, pay for it and then leave.
Unfortunately you can’t simply get more customers. Nobody can just magically produce customers from thin air. Instead they’re converted from your gallery’s visitors:
No. customers = No. visitors * conversion rate
The good news is you can improve your conversion rate and increase the number of visitors. Our next strategy for earning more money from your gallery is to look at what you can do to improve your conversion rate.
(BTW, In the next article in this series we’ll look at how to attract more visitors. Why aren’t we looking at that first? Because there’s little advantage in driving traffic to a gallery that doesn’t convert.)
Strategy 3: Improve your gallery’s conversion rate
Conversion rate is a measure of how effective your gallery is at converting visitors into clients and is calculated thus:
Conversion rate (%) = 100 * no. customers / no. visitors
Don’t get bogged down with whether the number you calculated is good or bad. That doesn’t matter. What’s important is how much you can improve on it. Also, the lower the figure, the easier it will be to improve it and the greater your sales potential without increasing traffic.
Increasing your conversion rate means you’ll earn more without having to drive extra traffic to your gallery
Ultimately, improving your conversion rate is wholly dependent on the visitor’s experience of your gallery. Why visitor and not customer? Because a visitor is not a customer until they’ve bought from you. It’s affected by many, many things:
- the look and feel or aesthetics of your gallery
- page and image load times
- how easy it is to use or find what they’re looking for
- how painful is it to navigate or buy using your checkout
- the image and product product descriptions
- Grammatical and spiling orrors on the page
- The language you use on the page
And a lot more besides. What you need to do, as the vendor, is build confidence and credibility in the client’s mind that you can and will deliver the goods they want to buy.
Your gallery needs to build confidence and credibility in the supplier if you want them to buy from you
Identify the customer’s pain points…
Take a critical look at your offering from your future customer’s perspective and see what you really think. Place a test order and work your way through the payment workflow to discover how easy or painful it is for the customer. If the phrase “that’ll do” crops up you’ve just lost potential customers.
Remember: the easier it is for someone to buy from you, the more likely it is for them to buy.
As the gallery owner, it’s your responsibility to do all the hard work that makes the buying easy. Your reward for investing your time doing this? An increase in earnings because you’ve made it easy for someone to become your customer.
Try to keep them on-board for longer…
Another area to look at is what you can do to increase the amount of time and the number of pages a visitor looks at. Most retailers know the longer someone spends in their shop, the more money they’re likely to spend. It’s the same with your gallery too. Try adding interesting content to the description such as the story behind the image, why you made it or the history of the subject and anything else that will help the visitor linger on the page.
BTW if someone is buying your photograph as a piece of art to hang on their wall, they probably don’t really care which f/ number you used or how you dealt with the second order distortion of the lens.
Find and fix your leaks…
Google Analytics is extremely useful for investigating your conversion rates. (It’s a major time-suck too so you need to limit your time using it.) Look for leaks – exit pages that often cause visitors to leave your gallery without buying – and fix them.
Conclusion
Finding out where the leaks are and plugging them is essential to improving your conversion rate.
Note: Avoid the temptation to make any changes without first calculating your current conversion rate. Some changes will have an adverse effect and you won’t see this without something to compare against.
Only change one thing at a time then re-calculate it at the end of the period or you won’t be able to see the impact each change has had.
Next time we’re going to look at how to increase the visitors to your gallery, specifically the right kind of visitors who are more likely to buy than casual browsers. When combined with the work you’re doing on improving your conversion rate should bring another boost to your sales.
In the meantime if you’ve found this article helpful please leave a comment and let me know or share it with your friends on your favourite social media network.
