Declining attention spans is one of the biggest threats to your website.

In fact, a Microsoft study found that the average human attention span is shorter than that of a goldfish. More surprisingly, a recent Jampp study found that most mobile app users suffer an 88 percent decrease in attention span on an annual basis.

As a webmaster, it is important to pay special attention to these statistics. We, as humans, are becoming increasingly impatient, and this can have great implications for your business. In fact, the following statistics show just how dangerous having a slow website can be:

• Slow loading websites cost the U.S. ecommerce market more than $500 billion annually
• A one second delay in your site load time can cost you 7 percent in conversions
• 40 percent of web users will abandon a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load
• A site speed increase from 8 to 2 seconds can boost your conversion rate by 74 percent
• Google now uses site speed as a ranking factor

What a Slow Website Means for Your Business

If you have a slow website, here’s the impact it will have on your business:

It will cost you visitors: If you feel you’ve been doing your best but can’t seem to retain visitors to your website, perhaps it is time to address your website speed. As highlighted in the statistics above, at least 40 percent of visitors to your website will stop visiting if your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

It will cost you sales: Improving your website speed can dramatically boost sales on your website, even by as much as 74 percent as revealed in one of the statistics earlier referenced. It has also been established that a one second improvement in site speed can boost conversions by 7 percent.

It will cost you search engine rankings: Google has announced that they use site speed as a ranking factor and that faster sites will always outrank sites that are slow. If you’re not experiencing an improvement in your search engine rankings despite all your SEO efforts, then perhaps site speed is a culprit.

Thankfully, all hope is not lost. If your website is not fast enough, here are 9 practical tips guaranteed to insulate your website from declining attention spans:

1. Get a Good Web Host

Your web host is the foundation of all your site optimization efforts; your web host controls the server infrastructure and configuration — and these are factors that impact your website speed more than anything else. I’ve had great experience with both Bluehost and Hostgator, and I did a comparison here.

2. Get a Better Theme

You’ll be amazed to find out that many websites are ridiculously slow due to bloated code and poorly-constructed themes. More often than not, outside your web host, your website theme will determine your website speed.

3. Enable GZIP Compression for your Website

In an article for Smashing Magazine, Marcus Taylor reported being able to reduce the size of his client website from 63kb to 13kb. That’s basically around 400 percent reduction in the site size, resulting in a massive boost in site load time since a user’s browser has to download much less. What did he do differently? He enabled GZIP compression on his client’s website.

GZIP works in a similar way to ZIP compression on computers, but for websites; a group of files that will ordinarily be big when their individual size is added together can instantly be reduced to one small ZIP file, resulting in a faster site load time and an increase in site speed for your site visitors.

4. Optimize and Compress Your Images

Images alone can make your site a lot more slower; often, a site could be seven to ten times or more heavier due to images used on the website. The solution to this is to compress the images used on your website drastically; thankfully, there’s a way to do this without the quality of your images suffering much. If you use WordPress, the plugins Smush.it and/or EWWW Image Optimizer can help with compressing your images. If you don’t use WordPress you should check out the image compression tool offered by Kraken.io.

5. Combine Your Images into CSS Sprites

Often times the number of requests a user’s browser sends to your server will influence how long it takes to load your website; the more requests sent, the slower your website will be for visitors. Background images can result in a lot of server requests, especially if they are hosted individually and have to be requested individually from your server — this eventually results in a much slower website. The solution to this is to combine your images into Sprites; basically, when several individual images are combined into one main image, the end result is a Sprite. Once your Sprite is ready, you can use CSS commands to tell your user’s browser to interpret various parts of that image individually.

6. Use a CDN to Ensure Consistently Fast Access to Your Site Across All Locations

A CDN is a network of proxy servers in multiple locations that automatically serve users a version of your website closest to their location; for example, with a CDN, it isn’t unusual to have a version of your website hosted in all continents. So, someone trying to visit your website from India will be served a version of your website hosted in Asia instead of a version hosted in North America.

Two great CDN options are CloudFlare (both free and paid) and MaxCDN (paid).

7. Focus on Creating a Better User Experience

While making your website faster will solve some of the problems, ensuring you’re better able to retain people on your site goes beyond that. It is essential to also work on creating a better user experience for your audience; when people visit your website, what happens? Your goal should be to ensure they easily find what they want, and that their experience with your website is satisfactory. Here are a few tips:

• Pay special attention to your design; an appealing design won’t just make people love visiting your website, it will also make them likely to take the desired action you want them to.
• Besides having clean design, user experience matters; let your users inform the direction of your site. Embrace usability best practices to ensure your site is easy to use.

8. Introduce Elements of Social Proof

Thanks to technology and increasingly declining attention spans, we no longer have the patience to waste time with meaningless tasks. How do you then convince people to pay more attention to your website? By letting them know that they are not alone; research has shown that social proof is one of the biggest factors that influence human decisions; when we see that other people, like us, are doing something, we are more likely to do the same thing.

If you have a major achievement, or if you have a record number of people using your products, do not hesitate to indicate it on your website.

9. Don’t Waste People’s Time; Create a Point of Focus

This is especially important if your goal is to get people to take action. Don’t waste their time by rambling around and beating about the bush; it also won’t help to present them with too many options than is necessary. Instead, create a focus point; make it clear what you want them to do, and ensure that’s your focus. Conversion optimization experts recommend focusing on one goal for one page; do that, and – by preventing distractions – you’ll be able to get people to focus more on your offer.

“Advertising is dead.”

Simply typing that phrase into the Google search engine will reveal over 240,000 results.

However, is advertising indeed dead?

Not really. However, when you realize that the average banner ad today has a clickthrough rate of 0.1 percent — compared to the 44 percent clickthrough rate the first banner advertisement had — it’s easy to lose hope as a publisher hoping to rely on advertising revenue.

It is important to realize a few things whenever you look at statistics claiming that advertising is dead:

• Most of the rates are average — in other words, they combine statistics from both low-performers and high-performers to come up with an average. As the number of advertisements increase (resulting in more ads competing for user attention) and attention spans decrease (which happens every year now), the average rate will keep going down. It is worth noting, though, that some publishers are doing extraordinarily well; and this article will be revealing most of their secrets.
• Facebook really started taking its advertising game seriously when most of the “experts” began to declare advertising dead, yet it reported a massive $8.6 billion in advertising revenue in the fourth quarter of 2016 alone. This number was an improvement from the previous year.

Simply put, you can keep complaining and worrying about declining advertising revenue, or you can sit tight, find out what those who advertising is working for are doing and then make necessary design changes to seriously boost your ad revenue. If you choose the latter, as long as every other thing is in place – a good offer, a reliable website hosting that doesn’t keep your visitors waiting, and a well-optimized checkout process – here are some super effective design tweaks you should consider.

1. Redesign Your Ads

Banner blindness is indeed a thing, but people do not ignore banner just because — and contrary to what most people would like you to believe, the reason people ignore banners isn’t because there are a lot of ads.

Sometimes, poor banner design — created by the advertiser you’re featuring — could cost you a lot of ad revenue. Research on banner blindness found that as far back as 2006, during elections in Florida, a massive 13 percent of voters couldn’t cast their votes for their preferred candidate due to a poorly-designed ballot. The same principle holds true for ads.

Ask yourself, would you click on the banner featured on your site if you were a reader? If no, will your advertiser allow you to use your own custom designed banner? If yes, go ahead and create something else. You’d be amazed at how much of a boost in ad revenue this can result in.

2. Understand the Sensory Adaptation Phenomenon and How it Can Lead to Banner Blindness

Often, the so-called “banner blindness” that people talk about is not necessarily due to the fact that people are increasingly hating ads. Instead, it boils down to a psychological phenomenon called “sensory adaptation,” something every human being exhibit, that explains how we all tend to tune out certain signals after constant exposure.

For example, if you hear a loud ringing sound in your new home; initially, you will find it highly irritating, probably to the point of frustration. Over time, though, especially if it is not going away, you get very used to it and won’t even notice it unless someone new to the stimulus brings it to your notice. This same phenomenon explains why we don’t feel our clothes or shoes, or why we don’t feel our buttocks on a chair after sitting on it for a while — everything just seems as if they are a part of us, and we ignore them.

In the same way, sensory adaptation explains why we ignore ads; if we’ve been visiting a website regularly that has a green color scheme, we’re highly unlikely to pay much attention to a green ad on the site since it blends with the design. This changes, however, if it is a red ad. In other words, it isn’t necessarily about a certain ad color per se — it is that having an ad that conforms to the design of your site is very bad for conversions.

3. Focus on Mobile Ad Optimization

Right now, mobile traffic is a lot more than desktop traffic — in fact, there is a great probability that the majority of your website visitors are visiting from a mobile device.

While mobile web usage keeps increasing, very few people have their ads optimized for mobile devices; it’s a different thing to have your website optimized for mobile users. You also need to have your ads optimized.

If your ads are currently not optimized for mobile devices, then you might need to get back to the drawing board – when you realize that over half of all internet users use the internet primarily on their mobile device, the consequences of alienating more than half of your potential customers becomes clear.

Creating a mobile-optimized ad isn’t hard at all; simply switching to responsive ads, which automatically adjusts to any device, will do the trick. Google recently primarily put a focus on this kind of ad, even making it impossible to create or edit standard texts. You can easily use HTML5 to create your own responsive ads.

The work of a web designer goes beyond just aesthetics. Usability and user experience is an equally, if not more, important part of a good web design.

While your business could probably survive with an ugly design that gets all of the UX principles right, it most certainly won’t survive with a beautiful design that breaks all of the UX principles. In this article, I explain how we can use Weber’s Law of Just Noticeable Difference, the Psychology principle of Sensory Adaptation, lessons from a recent Microsoft study as well as research on font usage, to have a more solid, conversion-optimized design:

Sensory Adaptation: The Phenomenon that Reveals What Color Converts Best

Let’s play a guessing game: what color converts best? Is it blue, green or red?

If you are like most people who have spent a good deal of time reading articles about conversion optimization, you are likely to say that it is the color red or the color orange. You might even start to bring up examples. But just pause a bit.

Amazon uses the color orange CTA button:

Facebook uses the color green CTA button:

Twitter uses the color blue CTA button:

Wait? “Green? Who doesn’t know that that color sucks for conversion?!” The fact remains that Facebook is a major brand that has spent billions on data science and conversion experience, and there’s no doubt that they know what they are doing. While Twitter, Facebook and Amazon act apparently differently, they are actually following a similar, proven Psychology principle that underlie why certain CTAs convert better than others: the Sensory Adaptation phenomenon.

In reality, there’s no best color to use for your CTA or key elements — heck, Twitter uses the white CTA color on their homepage (screenshot below).

Instead, there is a principle to follow: let your CTA stand out. A red CTA on a red design color scheme will perform worse compared to a white, blue or green CTA, and a blue CTA on a blue color scheme will perform worse compared to other colors.

In essence, the CTA that stands out the most will convert the most.

Sensory adaptation in Psychology explains our natural tendency to tune out stimulus we are familiar with after a while. That’s how we are biologically wired; once we’ve seen it for a while, we stop noticing it. A different CTA color, however, switches things up and breaks up familiarity, making you take notice. And that’s what boosts conversions.

The Microsoft Study: How Declining Attention Spans Influence Web Design

In a recent study to observe human attention span, in which it surveyed 2,000 people and monitored the brain activity of 112 more people with electroencephalograms (EEGs), Microsoft came to the conclusion that our attention span is rapidly declining. According to the study, we went from having an attention span of 12 seconds in the year 2000 to having an attention span of eight seconds now.

To many web designers, this has no real implication for their work until they consider the following statistics:

• A one second delay in site load time can cause a 7 percent loss in conversion.
• A three-second delay in site load time can cause 40 percent of people to abandon a website.
• 51 percent of shoppers cite a site’s slow loading times as the major reason they abandon a purchase.

While there are so many factors that influence website load speed, which is what I address when reviewing various web hosts on my site, the fact remains that web design plays a key role in how fast a website loads. Even if you have the best web host with the most powerful server configuration, a poorly designed website with the bloated code could result in users having to wait minutes to access a website.

Speed is one of the most important factors to consider when working on usability. Make speed a core consideration when designing your websites and you will have happier clients.

Weber’s Law: Let Changes be Incremental

There’s always an outrage over every major redesign. Just think about it, and no matter how good it is or how good it later turned out to be, people initially complained seriously about every major redesign. Why is this so? Because we are naturally averse to change.

Research has shown that people prefer an older, more familiar structure even if the newer one is better. For example, students who were given a newer curriculum that will make work much easier for them protested it because it is unfamiliar to them. This is revealing, and a critical factor to consider in your web design.

Weber’s Law of Just Noticeable Difference gives insights into how to deal with people’s natural aversion to change as a web designer. Since people naturally despise change, what if you can make changes without them knowing? Weber’s Law states that the slightest, tiniest changes are not easily noticeable. However, the difference has to reach a stage before it is noticed. Similarly, as a web designer, you can use this principle to make people more responsive to your design changes by making those changes gradual and iterative. They can’t protest what they don’t really notice. And when they finally notice, they’ve become accustomed to the completely new redesign. It will take more time but it will cease the protests.

Font Research: Is There a Best Font?

Some fonts are more appealing than others, and as designers, we all have our natural preferences and quirks when it comes to fonts. But is there really a best font? Not really, at least if we are to purely rely on research.

Research shows that people prefer simpler fonts, and they want these fonts large. That’s all that matter for all they could care about. In fact, when you actually consider this there’s a huge probability that it will indicate that your personal font preference makes your design more complicated.

During your next redesign, focus on a simple font type that is at least 16px in size. It probably won’t make your design very fancy, but people would love it and find it very usable!

According to data from the Direct Marketing Association, you can expect a ROI of $38 for every $1 you invest in email marketing. This fact is further established by statistics from Monetate — based on an analysis of over 500 million shopping experiences — that found that email is the highest converting source of traffic… converting more than search and social traffic combined.

In fact, email is so powerful that it consistently accounts for the most holidays sales — in Black Friday 2015, email accounted for 25.1 percent of all sales. That’s the highest of every traffic source, and much more significant compared to the 1.6 percent of sales generated by social media.

With all these facts established, it is important to realize that there’s a right and wrong way to go about email marketing. Statistics from Microsoft reveal that the inbox of the average email user is made up of 50 percent newsletters and 20 percent social network updates. To help you get the best from your email marketing efforts, I digged into research to present you some proven ways to do more effective email marketing.

Incentivize People to Join Your List

If you ask many people what the fastest way to build an email list, they will give a variety of answers ranging from investing in social media to having neatly designed forms and a clear message encouraging people to sign up. But, what indeed is the fastest way to build an email list? Offering an incentive!

By offering an incentive, many people have been able to quadruple the number of subscribers they get on a regular basis, permanently. In fact, offering incentives is so effective that Flyte New Media was able to increase their monthly subscriptions by 5,000 percent simply by offering an incentive. The initial message they used to try to get people to sign up was “Join Our Mailing List.” By changing this and offering an incentive, however, they were able to massively boost opt ins.

Segment Subscribers from the Get-Go

The traditional way of building an email list is to have the same sign up form on all pages of your site, lumping all users together and sending them the same messages. With this traditional approach, if you run a marketing blog someone who is interested in getting more traffic and someone who is interested in improving conversions will be getting the same message. Of course there must be a better way to go about this!

By segmenting your subscribers — right from when they sign up to your email list — you can ensure that you’re able to send only relevant, targeted messages to subscribers. In fact, segmentation is so powerful that, in a study, MarketingSherpa found that it is possible to boost conversion rates by up to 208 percent simply by sending targeted emails to segmented subscribers instead of sending the usual batch-and-blast messages. Data from Mailchimp also shows that segmented email campaigns usually result in 14.64 percent higher open rates and 60 percent higher click through rates.

Send More Frequent Emails

Most people email their list infrequently — perhaps once a week or once a month, based on the assumption that they do not want to “disturb subscribers.” But how effective is that? If you are sending an email once a month or once every few months, there’s a high likelihood that most of your subscribers won’t even remember you.

In marketing, there is a rule of 7 that says that the average customer needs to see your offer at least seven times before really noticing it. In the same way, more emails is always usually a good thing — especially if you have been very infrequent with your emailings. UK insurance company Aviva was able to record massive gains simply by increasing send frequency. By increasing send frequency, Aviva was able to increase unique clicks by 304 percent, email revenue by 45 percent and requested insurance quotes by 48 percent.

Of course, this should be done artfully — too many emails is one of the top reasons people cite for unsubscribing from email lists. However, if done properly, sending more emails will always improve conversions, revenue and traffic.

Run Giveaways

Exactly how many subscribers can you get from a properly run giveaway? For Josh Earl, a giveaway resulted in almost 200,000 subscribers and a massive 3,418 percent increase in email list size in just 11 days.

If you’re experiencing slow email list growth and want to give things a boost, running a giveaway can really turbocharge your list growth. Here are some tips:

• Start by preparing something special you can offer to subscribers. It could be a paid product you own, a popular paid product in your niche or a widely recognized gadget. Web Design Ledger constantly offer top gadgets in their giveaways with massive success.
• Make it a condition that people share your giveaway and sign up to your email list to participate in your giveaway. Give people bonus points for inviting their friends to participate in your giveaway.
• Automate your giveaway; you can use a plugin like KingSumo Giveaways.
• Notify top blogs, publications and influencers in your niche about your giveaway and get them to share it.

Optimize Your Email for Mobile Devices

A lot of emails are not optimized for mobile devices, and the result is that they end up being ignored or deleted. Research shows that a whopping 65 percent of all emails get opened first on mobile devices, and more shocking is the fact that 75 percent of emails will be deleted if they can’t be read on a smartphone. If as much as 75 percent of your emails are deleted, what’s the point of email marketing?

Here are some tips to optimize your emails for mobile devices:

• If possible, send your emails in plain text.
• If you have to use a template, try to use a responsive email template.
• Effective mobile email goes beyond just sending mobile compatible emails — also make sure the links in your emails are properly optimized for mobile devices.

Automate Your Email Marketing Efforts

To do email right today the importance of automation cannot be overstated. Automation is so powerful that research shows that it can boost email opens by 8 times, result in 6 times more revenue and boost conversions by as much as 50 percent.

Right now, email marketing is much more complicated than sending the same email to everybody at the same time — with some email service providers, you can automate emails to be sent to people based on what they click, based on their time zone, based on which of your emails they open and based on other factors. In fact, some email service providers are already experimenting with Artificial Intelligence to monitor people’s habits and optimize your emails for them accordingly.

It is important to make effective use of the automation features offered by your email service provider, or switch to a more sophisticated service if your current email service provider doesn’t offer automation features.

Send to Unopens and Unclicks

Data from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering that analyzed 16 billion emails has found that 90 percent of people who don’t open your emails within 48 hours will never open it again. There are many reasons for this, but it’s especially worth noting that people are overwhelmed — over 2.5 million emails are sent every second.

When a good portion of subscribers are not opening your email, it can be because people are especially busy or because your email subject line is very busy. Regardless, it doesn’t end there — resending your email to those who did not open it at first can significantly improve your open and clickthrough rates — seven-figure blogger Pat Flynn reports an extra 10 to 15 percent increase in open rates simply by re-sending emails to people who failed to open his first email. Entrepreneur Neal Taparia records an increase in open rate of up to 54.7 percent by re-sending to subscribers who did not open his emails. Here are some tips:

• Wait a few days before resending emails to those who have yet to open — since 90 percent of people will open their email within 48 hours, you can wait three to four days to resend.
• Change the subject line of the email you’re resending — if you use the same subject line, some email clients will simply merge it with the old email, giving it less visibility.
• Let people know that you’re re-sending the email to them because they didn’t open your first email.

Did you know that 99 percent of people who visit your eCommerce store won’t buy on their first visit and that many won’t return again after that? Or did you know that for every $92 spent on attracting visitors, the average online business spends just $1 on converting them? These statistics and people’s ignorance on how to boost conversions, explain why many eCommerce businesses struggle.

You don’t need specialized knowledge to boost sales on your eCommerce store. Likewise, you don’t need to fork out money to pay conversion experts. Instead, these simple — really, super simple — tips that are grounded in research, will boost sales on your eCommerce store significantly.

Attune Your Usage of Color to Your Demographics

From a design perspective, we tend to underestimate the role that color plays on conversion rates. For many people, the choice of what color to use in their products and design is left to personal preference and desire, when in reality using the right color combinations can boost sales.

According to a study that analyzed 100 brands and studied 450 non-color blind participants, it has been proven that color can influence the likability and familiarity of people to feel toward a brand. Another study that observed the role that color played in marketing and decision-making found that people make up their minds within 90 seconds of interacting with people or products, and that up to 90 percent of their assessment is influenced by colors.

What’s more important to note, however, is that the colors that work best for men might not be welcomed by women — so it is important to attune your colors to your demographics. Colors can also influence how your brand is perceived, and as a result boost sales — a good example of a company that gets color right is Cadbury, who successfully uses the purple color to communicate luxury. You can use the color blue to communicate trust and integrity; Facebook and Twitter are major examples of companies that use this color.

Research has shown that both male and female are more likely to prefer the color blue, but while women largely favor the color purple, it won’t work with an audience of men. The graph below shows color preference for both men and women.

Image credit: Helpscout

Anchor Your Offer for Easy Comparison

Often times you try to shop on Amazon and see something like this:

To the untrained eye, there’s nothing special about the above listing. However, take a look at the “List Price” and the “Price” and you’ll notice a difference — including a “list price” creates the impression that you’re getting a bargain, because the main price is automatically anchored to it. What’s especially surprising is that the very same laptop costs $179.99 on Target.com (Yes, it’s cheaper!), yet research points to the fact that the Amazon listing is likely to result in more sales. Why? Anchoring!

Often times, when we want to make a decision, we try to look for a reference point — an anchor — that we can use to judge our decision. In this case, by showing people a list price of “$199.99” and an actual price of “$184.86,” people feel that they are getting a discount and rush to buy — in reality, however, the product is much cheaper elsewhere. By introducing the “list price” option, Amazon is making it the “anchor” instead of having people anchor the product based on the price of their competitors.

Anchoring is a very powerful technique, and if used correctly, it can powerfully boost your ecommerce sales.

Use Security and Trust Seals

Often, the decision of many people not to buy from you has nothing to do with the quality of your products or the persuasiveness of your copy. It’s a trust issue, and this often poses a serious problem compared to others.

If people don’t trust you, they will never buy from you. There’s nothing you can do about that.

According to a study conducted by Econsultancy/Toluna, 48 percent of people are wary of performing online transactions on sites without a trust seal. This makes sense, especially when you consider how often major websites are hacked these days.

If you have no trust seal on your website, add one and you’ll notice a dramatic increase in sales.

Besides using a trust seal, you can also make people trust you more by using testimonials, featuring customer reviews (both positive and negative), having an about page and having your phone number displayed prominently on your website.

Start a Blog

I’m actively involved in the Website Setup project, where we teach people how to set up a blog (for good reasons!), so I can’t resist including this. And this is for two key reasons:

1. 99 percent of people won’t buy on their first visit to your site. Blogging serves as a means to educate, inform and keep your products in the mind of people who choose not to buy immediately.
2. Businesses that blog generate 67 percent more leads than businesses that do not blog. They also experience better search engine rankings, better bonding with users, and are able to more easily inform users about the benefit of their products — all these contribute to more sales.

If you don’t have a blog for your ecommerce store yet, starting one will most certainly boost sales. However, your approach needs to be a bit different from the traditional “blogging” approach. Here are some tips:

• Capitalize on product reviews: due to a blog’s ability to easily rank in the search engines, creating product reviews and publishing them on your blog will ensure better rankings for your product reviews, eventually generating more sales.
• Do comparisons: Do you have an eCommerce store that sells computers? If yes, a simple comparison of “Apple vs Mac computers” on your eCommerce blog can be a great sales driver. People will tend to refer to these comparisons, and it will also rank in search engines. By linking to the products you compare in your store, you’re more likely to experience a sales boost.
• Publish more content: Statistics show that businesses that publish 16 or more blog posts monthly get the most results from blogging — in fact, they get 3.5 times more traffic, and as a result, a lot more sales than businesses that publish less than four blog posts monthly. As an e-commerce store, the volume of content published could be one of your biggest assets.

Limit Choices

As an eCommerce store with hundreds or even thousands of products, it sounds like the best thing to do is showcase relevant products to people at every stage of the buying process. However, research shows that this isn’t effective. In a study conducted at an upscale supermarket, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper found that limiting choices displayed to people from 24 varieties of items to just six varieties was able to boost sales by up to 10 times.

If you have a store with a lot of different variety of products, where it is virtually impossible to limit choices, you can still capitalize on the fact that limited choices boost sales by doing the following:

• Feature your most popular products: What are the five most purchased product in a particular category on your eCommerce store? Showcase these products in a special section and make it easy for users to find them; instead of being confused with possibly thousands of products, they easily see what resonates with others.
• Feature products with the most reviews: By featuring products with the most reviews, you let users decide. Even if there are a thousand products in a certain category, reviews show people which ones people like best. This allows you to use a combo of social proof and limited choices (in terms of what other people think is best) to boost sales.

Showcase your top picks: Sometimes, maybe you feel certain products will do better than others due to some other information you have. Showcase these products in a special section for every category; include no more than three to six products as top picks.

Conclusion

There are many ways to boost eCommerce sales – whether it is through the right use of color to communicate a message about your brand or by using elements of trust to get more people to buy from you. Hopefully, the above tips help you boost eCommerce sales.

Research shows that over 53 million Americans currently work as freelancers, and an estimated half of the American workforce will be freelancers by 2020. However, all is not necessarily rosy for freelancers; it has been revealed that finding work and achieving income stability are the top barriers for freelancers.

If you work as a freelancer, you’re probably struggling to get clients. With over 53 million Americans freelancing, and more expected to join soon, you simply can’t fold your arms and watch and hope to get freelance clients. With the following seven techniques, you can proactively work to get more freelance clients than you can handle.

1. Leverage Your Products to Promote Your Services

Many freelance designers and developers create free themes, plugins, graphic packs and other  useful products for other people to use, and there isn’t much benefit they derive from this.

If you have a plugin that thousands of people are installing and you are not advertising your services in it, you are missing out. For example, if you have a plugin that helps people optimize their database, you can include a note in the plugin page that you offer consulting aimed at helping people boost their site speed. If you have a plugin aimed at helping people make their site mobile responsive, you can also note that you offer web design help.

Even if your products are paid, it doesn’t hurt to include a note to let people know that you are a freelancer that they can hire for their design needs.

2. Partner With Other Freelancers to Get Jobs

If you are a freelance web designer, there’s every probability that your clients will want content for their website when it is finally ready. Since you are not a freelance writer, it is impossible for you to do this job. A mistake most freelancers make is that they let this offer go and forget about it. Instead, you can be creative by partnering with other freelancers and establish a relationship in which you send each other work you cannot do; for example, a freelance designer partners with a freelance writer, and the designer sends his clients to the writer if they have writing jobs. The freelance writer does the same and sends his clients to the designer if they have design jobs.

If done strategically, this alone can serve as a source of more jobs than you can handle for you.

3. Partner With Agencies to Get Jobs

Also in line with partnering with other freelancers is partnering with agencies. The only difference is that agencies are more likely to have more job offers than individual freelancers.

You can identify SEO agencies, writing agencies and other agencies, and convince them to start offering design services to their clients while you do the work; they charge their clients more, they pay you a part of it and both you and the agency win.

4. Leverage Content Marketing to Get Clients by Blogging

Interestingly, many freelance web designers and developers have set up countless blogs for other people but they do not have one of their own.

According to data from Hubspot, businesses that blog generate significantly more leads than businesses that do not blog. It doesn’t take much effort to realize why this is the case; blogging — in essence, publishing content — means search engines have something to index and rank when people ask questions online. In turn, the people who read this content, if impressed, are potential clients that can use your services. Once you start your blog, use the following techniques to leverage your blog to boost your client portfolio:

• Create in-depth tutorials about what your potential clients are struggling with
• Do occasional critiques of some of the major organizations in the industry of your potential clients
• Try to have articles published on other relevant blogs that link back to you
• Make it clear on your blog, and in your bio in your articles, that you are a freelancer looking for work

5. Leverage Freelance Job Boards

Freelance job boards are one of the most popular means freelancers use to get jobs, but a mistake many people make is assuming that you can only get job offers on popular, and often overcrowded, job boards like Upwork.

In reality, there are many popular alternatives to sites like Upwork; not only are these sites less crowded, making it easier for you to get jobs, but they also often result in clients that pay more. They provide opportunities for designers, developers, writers and other freelancers.

Some top sites like this include CloudPeeps and Twago. A simple Google search will reveal many more.

6. Have a Waiting List for Clients

Pretty much every freelancer goes through the “feast or famine cycle.” The feast or famine cycle is a period where you have a lot of client opportunities at a time and little to none at other times; for most freelance writers, it happens every year. Sometimes, they have more work than they can handle and have to turn work down. At other times, however, they barely have enough work to keep food on the table.

The solution to avoiding this and ensuring that you have work all year round is to create a waiting list; whenever you have more work than you can handle, instead of having to turn clients away, you simply ask clients to sign up to your waiting list and tell them that you will reach out to them once you’re available for more work.

By doing this, you are getting permission from the clients you couldn’t work with to reach out to them when you are finally ready. While not all of them will eventually work with you, a good portion will, and this will ensure you have consistent work at all times.

7. Strategic Cold Pitching

Finally, mastering the art of strategic cold pitching will help you get more jobs than you know what to do with, season in and season out.

You will notice my emphasis on “strategic.” We all get those cold pitches that we immediately regard as spam, and our reaction is either to send them to the spam or trash folder. You don’t want to be lumped in the same category as these people.

Here are some tips to help you get results through strategic cold pitching:

• First establish your credibility; if you’ve been featured in a major place, or if you’ve worked for a famous person, start by referencing this fact.
• Make it clear that you know the person you are pitching; through their site, social media or elsewhere. If you’re a stranger, you’ll probably be ignored.
• Tell them about the service you want to offer.
• End by letting them know you’re open to questions/concerns they have.
• If you don’t hear back after a while, follow up.

You’ve heard the saying before, “The money is in the list.” This is true, but exactly how much money is in the list? A lot, apparently: The guys at Monetate analyzed over 500 million shopping experiences and found that email beats search and social media combined as the biggest driver of conversions. Compared to 1.95 percent average conversion rate for search and 0.71 percent average conversion rate for social media, email resulted in an average conversion rate of 3.19 percent. This fact was further bolstered by data from the Direct Marketing Association that revealed that marketers can expect a ROI of $38 for every $1 they invest in email marketing.

Now that it’s been established beyond the shadow of a doubt that email outperforms pretty much every other channel, how do you ensure that email works for you? It is by having the right tools. Here are 15 must use tools for email marketers; these include some less-known tools that are helping people get amazing results, so enjoy.

1. GetResponse

If you want to succeed at email marketing, you need a reliable email service provider; going with the free Feedburner, or a cheap email service provider, is not recommended. GetResponse has the basic features – such as the ability to send an email, view subscriber info, etc – that most email services have, but they take things up a notch with the ability to split test any part of your email. Their “Email Intelligence” feature also lets you see how your emails are performing at a glance, and their “Inbox Preview” feature allows you to see how your emails will look in pretty much any email service (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc.).

2. ConvertKit

Many people are familiar with GetResponse and Mailchimp, and all the popular email service providers out there, but the big boys now have to keep looking over their shoulders; ConvertKit is new to the game, but it is different. ConvertKit separates itself by focusing on two things: Simplicity and automation. It boasts of allowing people to setup their list in five minutes; it is marketed towards professional bloggers, but it can serve anybody that needs a reliable email marketing service.

3. Optin Monster

Optin Monster is probably the most well-rounded plugin out there for capturing more email subscribers; some of their features include a Full Screen Takeover (this takes over your site, putting your optin offer front and center in front of your subscribers – in the process boosting subscriptions), a Popup feature, an Exit Intent popup and, more importantly, the ability to split test your opt in forms. Several big name bloggers rely on this plugin for their list building.

4. SumoMe

SumoMe is one of the most popular, all-around free giveaway plugins available today; unlike most list building apps that only come as WordPress plugins, SumoMe can be used with any website. Their Welcome Mat feature allows you to use full screen takeovers to build your list, and people have reported getting thousands of extra subscribers as a result. They also have scroll triggered opt in forms, popups, and opt in forms that can be inserted directly into your content.

5. Kingsumo Giveaways

You’ve probably witnessed one or more of the WebDesignLedger giveaways? For a more recent example, you can take a look at the Jupiter Business WordPress Theme giveaway to see a WDL giveaway in action. These giveaways are powered by the KingSumo Giveaways app, and if done right they can be a good source of email optins.

For example, a notable example of someone who tapped into the power of the KingSumo app is Josh Earl, who was able to add 200,000 extra subscribers to his email list in just 11 days.

KingSumo Giveaways allow you to turbocharge your list building by running viral giveaways. The plugin has a lot of features, including the ability to schedule the start and end dates of your giveaways and the ability to run unlimited giveaways.

6. AWProTools

If you use AWeber, you’ve probably been frustrated at a point due to their lack of automation features. While they are slowly introducing automation into their service, they are not yet perfect. AWProTools handles automation for AWeber, by giving you the option to move subscribers from one list to another depending on which part of your follow up sequence subscribers are in, by allowing you to segment your list based on clicks, etc.

7. Litmus

It can be frustrating to send emails that look perfectly okay at your end only to start getting emails from people who use different email clients, complaining that your email to them is broken. Litmus helps solve this problem; they let you test and see how your email will look in over 40 different email clients. They also make it easy to know when fans print and forward your messages, as well as how long people spend reading your messages.

8. InterSpire

If you don’t want to pay the expensive monthly subscription fees that most email service providers charge, then you might want to go the self-hosted route: This way, you have the software that manages your email hosted on your servers. InterSpire Email Marketer is one of the best solutions for this; it features includes analytics and tracking, the ability to enable double vs single optins, ability to use an autoresponder, the ability to schedule emails, etc.

9. SendGrid

If you self-host your email platform, it can be risky sending emails directly through your servers; in no time, your IP could be flagged and you’ll find yourself shut down by your hosting provider. The solution to this is to use an email delivery service, and SendGrid does a perfect job of this. More importantly, it offers a lot of basic features for free. SendGrid comes with easy integration via API, real time analytics, and encrypted email delivery.

10. Benchmark

Benchmark is an email service provider with a focus on responsive, mobile-friendly emails. They also offer real-time reports that show you how people are interacting with your emails. More importantly, if you are big on media, they have an email editing tool that allows you to edit images in their dashboard without the need for you to have Photoshop. They have a free plan with limited features.

11. OptinSkin

If you find the default opt in forms of your email service providers ugly, OptinSkin is for you. OptinSkin allows you to create dozens of beautiful optin forms to be strategically placed on your blog, and they make it easy to integrate these forms with any email service provider.

12. MailMunch

MailMunch also allows you to create beautifully-designed forms that you can place on your website to capture leads; this includes pop ups, slide in forms, and header bars. Their forms are mobile optimized, and they make it easy to split test your forms for conversions.

13. Thrive Leads

Similar to OptinSkin and MailMunch, Thrive Leads allows you to have beautiful opt in forms on your website; their drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to customize your optin forms to your look and feel, and their advanced targeting features are second to none. They also offer A/B testing and actionable reporting.

14. Route

Many email service providers are slowly realizing the importance of email automation and are making it a part of their features. Route, however, focuses solely on automation and works in a way where actions trigger reactions. It can be powerful for boosting sales and following up with subscribers depending on what action subscribers take.

15. MailChimp’s HTML to Text Email Converter

If you have HTML email/content that you’d like to convert to plain-text version before sending, MailChimp’s HTML to Text Email Converter is the tool you need. It does exactly what its name implies, and you do not need a MailChimp account to use it.

Conclusion

What other email tools would you like to add to the list? Kindly let us know by commenting below.