Your website’s conversion rate is critical for your success. For many businesses, it represents total sales; every time you land a conversion, you have a new customer. For others, it’s a gateway to more sales; every new conversion is a new lead you can follow up with. In any case, a higher conversion rate will lead to more revenue from each website visitor you receive.
However, as most webmasters and entrepreneurs can attest, increasing conversion rate isn’t exactly intuitive or straightforward. There are some general best practices you can follow to increase conversions initially, but trying to increase your conversion rate over time can be a confusing and frustrating process.
Increasing Your Conversion Rate
These tactics should be able to help you increase your conversion rate:
Refine Traffic and Increase Relevance
Your first job is increasing the relevance and quality of your incoming traffic. If you’re selling a product that’s specifically targeted to middle-aged women, but all your traffic is comprised of young men, you aren’t going to win many conversions. Integrate your sales and marketing strategies to choose the right channels for traffic generation, establish a sales funnel, and ultimately attract the “right” type of people to your site.
Personalize Your Content
Next, take the time to personalize your content and CTAs. People are much more likely to convert if you provide them with headlines, descriptions, and other factors that speak directly to their personal experience; in other words, the more relevant your content is, the better. And one of the best ways to provide more relevant content is to customize it for different types of visitors. For example, you could set up multiple landing pages, or code your site to display different types of content depending on the detected qualities of the user.
Improve Your Offer
Most conversions are a kind of exchange. For example, your visitors might be spending money in exchange for a product you’re selling, or they might be providing their name and email address in exchange for a free whitepaper. In any case, you should be able to increase conversions by improving this offer in some way. For example, you can make your product or whitepaper more attractive, or you can add in another freebie, or you can reduce what you’re demanding from the user (like less information or less money).
Make the CTA Obvious
Some conversion strategies fail simply because the CTA isn’t glaringly obvious. If customers aren’t sure where they should be clicking, or if there’s no clear opportunity to move the process forward, you’re not going to make any progress. Call out the CTA with bold colors, and make it easy to find on your site.
State the Benefits
You may already have some baseline descriptors of your product, your premium content, or whatever else you’re offering, but it’s important to speak directly to the benefits of this conversion. What does your visitor have to gain by moving forward? How is their life going to improve? In many cases, a succinct bulleted list of benefits the user will receive can greatly increase your conversion rate.
Add Social Proof
Most people want some kind of social proof before they move forward with an online purchase, serving as reassurance that they’re doing something valuable, or that they’re working with a brand they can trust. There are many forms of social proof you can work with, like providing testimonials from past clients or displaying some of the trustworthy brands you’ve partnered with in the past—just make sure you have some kind of social proof available near your CTA.
Make Conversions Easier
People are generally impatient, and they don’t want to spend any more time than necessary following through with a conversion. You can therefore increase conversions by making the conversion process easier. For many brands, this means shortening the forms you’re using to collect customer information. For others, it means accepting more forms of payment and optimizing for a one-click purchase. For nearly all brands, it means making sure your website is running optimally, and as quickly as possible.
Provide the Right Visuals
Visual elements can be identified and considered at a glance—much faster and more intuitively than text—so make sure your landing page, CTA, or other conversion opportunity has the right visuals. If you’re selling something, include photos and/or videos of the product in action. Otherwise, make sure you have images of individuals or teams of people to increase trust and improve the positive perception of your brand.
Imply Urgency
Many customers and would-be leads leave your website before they finish converting. They’re interested in what you have to offer, but they think to themselves, “this will be here tomorrow. I might as well wait.” The problem is, they often forget about the offer and never return. You can fight against this procrastination problem by implying a degree of urgency. State that this is a limited time offer and/or feature a clock ticking down near the CTA; this should increase your conversion rate even further.
Experiment and Measure
Finally, make sure you’re experimenting with many different variables relating to your design, copy, and placement. Sometimes, tiny changes are capable of significantly (and inexplicably) increasing your conversion rate. The only way to know for sure is to test and measure the results.
Issuing Ongoing Conversion Opportunities
If you’re looking for more conversions, one of the best strategies you can use is simply providing your customers with more opportunities to convert. If there’s only one point of sale on your site, it may be difficult for visitors to find. If your CTAs are only on your site, your brand won’t remain top of mind with your customers. Use a variety of CTAs throughout your site, and a variety of CTAs in your marketing campaign (like in a drip email campaign) to maintain a steady stream of new opportunities for conversion.
conversion rate increase concept -DepositPhotos
