Do you want more conversion, increased sales, and revenue on your website? Of course, you do, and you’re not alone.
Many companies are looking for ways to increase conversion rates and generate more revenue from their business. Unfortunately, not many companies think about conversion rate optimization and continue to pour money into marketing tactics without a return. Luckily, conversion rate optimization is a solution that can help improve your conversion rates!
This blog post will discuss conversion rate optimization and some of the significant factors that will help increase your conversion rate and improve your bottom line.
What is conversion rate optimization, and why should you care
Conversion rate optimization is taking a website and figuring out what can be done to improve the conversion rates.
Typically, conversion rate optimizers will examine the design, layout, copywriting, and other factors that affect how well your pages convert visitors into customers. Conversion rates are significant because they tell you something about whether or not people want to buy products on your site – if conversion rates are low, this indicates that there might be a problem with your website’s ability to generate sales leads. In short: conversion rate optimization helps boost conversions!
How to increase conversions with CRO
Conversion rate optimizers examine design, layout, copywriting, and other elements that affect how well your pages convert visitors into customers. Whether you are selling a product or service, conversion rate optimization can help your business.
Some ways you can quickly improve conversion rates are:
- Simplifying your pages’ design for conversion rate optimization – removing clutter and features that are not necessary to conversion.
- Have clear and defined calls to action.
- Be sure your site is optimized for mobile devices.
- Increase the number of products listed on each page, but don’t overcrowd your site with too many links or take up too much space. Your goal is a simple, easy navigation structure that will help visitors find what they’re looking for quickly and easily.
- Make sure you have at least one clear call to action per landing page: this tells people exactly how you want them to navigate your website!
- Add live chat features, so potential customers have a way to contact you quickly.
- Be sure to list your phone number all over your website in case your customers prefer to chat over the phone.
- Build trust with your clients by being honest about your products.
- Display reviews and testimonials in the right areas of your website. If you are an e-commerce website, have reviews for each individual item. If you are a service, be sure you list testimonials from previous clients. This will give your potential customers social proof.
- Be sure the checkout process on your website is quick and easy. No customer wants to go through a painful checkout process.
- Offer free shipping
- Offer a free trial for software or services.
- Be sure any ads or other marketing campaigns that you are running are being sent to the right customer profile.
- Add comparisons with your product or service vs. your competitors.
- Offer a money-back guarantee.
- Play with different colors for buttons, images, etc
- Be sure customers don’t have issues when filling out a form.
- Create FAQ pages
- Create blog posts explaining your product and its benefits.
- Have a clear and defined value proposition.
- Leverage social media for marketing.
- Ask visitors and clients for feedback.
- Test, test, and test pages with A/B testing, more on this below.
What is a Conversion Rate Optimization Expert?
When conversion rates start going down, or you are receiving potential customers to your website, but you are not able to make sales, it might be time to consider hiring conversion rate optimizers. CRO experts can examine all aspects of your website’s design in order to improve conversions.
It’s best if these experts can spend time with your team and learn about the conversion process in order to make better recommendations. Conversion rate optimization experts can examine all aspects of your website’s design in order to improve conversions. This is a process that is not done quickly, but in the end, with the right CRO team, you should see an increased conversion rate.
What is a conversion sales funnel?
The conversion sales funnel a metaphor for what leads people from initial curiosity about an offer (the top) through various stages and into making a purchase decision: it reflects the way marketers think about customers’ paths as they pass gradually down towards the conversion point.
The wider you set up this funnel, the more prospects will be lost at any given stage – meaning that you’ll need more traffic or marketing investment to compensate. Conversely, the narrower you set up this conversion funnel, the more qualified prospects will be lost at any given stage – meaning that you’ll need less traffic or marketing investment to compensate.
By narrowing down your conversion funnel, it’s likely that fewer people will initially see your offer as a result of not being exposed to it enough times by marketing channels. But those who do see and take action on what they’ve seen are far more valuable than ones in whose minds were only pricked with curiosity briefly before moving off onto something else.
The conversion process can also be likened to an iceberg: most of its mass is hidden below the surface where customers’ attention goes after clicking through from another page (which would represent ‘above-the-waterline’), while only a small proportion actually hits your conversion form. So it’s important you take care in designing and testing your landing pages thoroughly, paying attention to all elements that could influence your conversion rate such as layout, copywriting style, images used, color scheme, etc. Remember this conversion funnel analogy for a quick reminder on how a conversion rate happens at every stage of the customer journey:
*Awareness & consideration -> researching/evaluating alternatives -> decision making-> clicking or tapping “buy” button -> transaction complete *
Stage one of a sales funnel: Create awareness
The first step of a sales funnel is to create awareness for your product or service. You want your potential customers to know what you’re offering, so they can make a decision on whether or not to purchase.
You can do this with many different tactics such as social media, blogging, paid ads, leveraging press releases, or any other marketing tactics you can think of.
Stage two of the sales funnel: Consideration stage – Researching and Evaluating Alternatives
In the consideration stage of the sales funnel, the potential customer is evaluating your product against other offers, looking for social proof, and evaluating your company.
This stage of the conversion funnel has a lot to do with how you present your offer and what words you use in order to get them interested enough to want more information about it.
You can make this conversion stage easier by using things like persuasive copywriting techniques that play on their emotions – for example, telling a story or including an eye-catching headline will increase the chance they’ll click through at least once just out of curiosity.
Once there, explore ways you could increase your conversion rate even further: Use testimonials from high profile customers who have had success with your company; provide detailed descriptions, so people know exactly what they’re getting before committing; include clear calls to action, provide support, etc.
Stage three of the sales funnel: Preference stage – Decision Making
Stage three of the sales funnel is the preference stage. This is where conversion rates are most important.
In this stage, conversion rate optimization techniques like A/B testing come in handy because they allow you to measure the effectiveness of your content by comparing conversion rates with one another.
If the customer has not already purchased from you, hopefully, you have collected the emails of your potential customers. Email marketing will be essential with techniques such as drip marketing, which is a series of emails sent out over time to customers based on the customer’s preferences.
Stage four of the sales funnel: Purchase stage – Clicking the “Buy” Button
in the purchase stage of the sales funnel, conversion rate optimization is heavily reliant on the quality and content of your website.
– make sure that conversion rates are high, which means that there are not any dead ends or error pages
– offer a variety of payment methods to better accommodate different customer needs
– include live chat so you can provide quick responses when customers have questions about their purchase.
Some common conversion rate optimizations strategies for this stage would be making potential buyers feel confident in themselves by offering detailed product descriptions along with reviews from other people who purchased the products before them. Another strategy could be discounts for first-time buyers as it can encourage new customers to buy more than one item because they know they will save money if they do so.
Stage five of the sales funnel: Purchase stage – Creating Loyalty – Transaction Compete
You made a sale and converted a potential client into a customer. Congrats! You are not done, however! You need to keep these customers coming back and recommending you to their friends, family, and colleagues. You can do this by offering them rewards like discounts and points for purchasing from you again. This is called loyalty marketing, which can have a significant impact on conversion rates.
Creating loyal customers will boost your sales conversion rate in the long run because they are more likely to buy something else from you when they need it than from a company that they do not have a history with.
What are landing pages?
Landing pages are a website’s sales pages that have been designed specifically for conversion. It is typically the first impression a visitor has of your business, and, if well-designed, it can help convert visitors into customers.
A landing page should have no more than one or two calls to action (CTA). Include only what you need for this conversion! The goal is not just conversion: it’s conversion without distraction.
Avoid using too many colors on your landing pages or distracting graphics; instead, use images & typography color combinations that are easy on the eyes–for example, black text with white background–which will allow users to read content faster and easier.
Don’t overload the user with information either in copywriting style or visual design because people won’t take any of it seriously enough to buy anything from your company.
How to create a landing page
The ideal landing pages for website conversion can be created in a few ways:
Use conversion optimization software that will automatically create conversion-friendly landing pages for you and your team. If this is not an option, there are still some strategic changes to be made in order to increase conversion rates.
Identify the key drivers of conversion — what needs to happen before someone buys from you — and optimize those elements on your site page accordingly; these may include adding testimonials mentioning specific benefits or addressing customer concerns with FAQs
Ensure consistency throughout all aspects of design (copywriting style, visual design, etc.) so users don’t get distracted as they browse through different areas of your site
Supply the potential client or customer with exactly what they are looking for—nothing more, nothing less.
The importance of testing your landing page design
Testing landing page design is one of the most important conversion rate optimization techniques. By testing conversion rates for different variations of your landing page design, you can find out which elements to focus on and eliminate others that are dragging down conversion rates.
Testing a variety of landing pages for usability will help determine what layout works best, what copywriting style attracts more buyers, and also identify weaknesses in conversion funnels by eliminating unnecessary steps like having too many form fields to fill out.
A/B Testing – what it is, how it works, and how to do it
A/B testing is a conversion rate optimization technique that tests two versions of a web page, A and B. Version A is the original version while version B is an edited or changed design to test for effectiveness. The conversion rates will be measured by the use of analytics software such as Google Analytics so you can see which design converts more visitors into leads or customers.
A/B testing works best when you have at least 100+ conversions per week on your website from each variation (ease). You need this high volume in order to measure conversion rates accurately with statistical significance levels because anything less than 200 conversions would not provide accurate data due to fluctuations in conversion rates based on factors like traffic sources, geo-location, etc., thereby making it difficult to determine whether the conversion difference is due to conversion rate optimization or a different conversion factor.
OK, I’ve done A/B testing. What now?
After you conduct your conversion rate analysis, experiment with the following:
– Add content (article) on pages that did not change significantly in design and format but have lower conversion rates than other pages. Content should be relevant to the product category, for example, if you are selling shoes then it might help to include shoe care tips.
– Remove irrelevant content from the home page since visitors who come there after reading about products elsewhere will only leave again without purchasing anything because they do not see what they came for; this also helps improve customer engagement by presenting them with more of the items they need as soon as possible instead of making them go through many steps before finding what they were after.
– Add more conversion opportunities to the purchase process by including a search bar on product pages. Search bars make it possible for customers who do not know what they are looking for but would like something similar enough to settle with one of them anyway.
– If your conversion rates have been suffering, then set up conversion rate optimization, which allows you to find out why people are leaving without purchases and fix those problem areas; this will help boost your conversion rate in the long run since there will be less money lost from abandoned carts or incomplete orders.
Are there conversion rate optimization techniques that have been proven not to work?
There are some conversion rate optimization techniques that can prove to be detrimental. One such example is using popups on your landing page design which will likely cause visitors to leave the site because of them being annoying or intrusive.
some other CRO techniques that should be avoided are:
Entry and exit popups are designed to try and get you back on the site at a later time.
Confusing conversion funnels that don’t give clear direction or seem legitimate. This can cause confusion among those viewing your websites, leading them to leave without converting due to not knowing what they need in order to complete the conversion process.
Negative feedback loops where visitors have negative experiences with website design elements such as being blocked from certain pages of your sites after clicking an advertisement (or coming up for empty searches) and then leaving because of it.
These are a few types of conversion rate optimization techniques that will typically result in more lost revenue rather than increased conversion rates so it’s important not to use these when planning out CRO strategies on your site. However, you may find that some techniques work for you that may not have worked for others in the past, hence the need for testing!
How to track conversion rate optimization
Tracking conversion rates can seem difficult, but there are a variety of conversion tracking tools that you can use to track conversion rates like Hotjar, Google Analytics, and Visual Website Optimizer.
Some conversion optimization software even offers live chat solutions which will allow your team members to have conversations with site visitors who might not be ready (yet) to make a purchase or have questions. (remember this from the tips above?)
When not to test your landing page design
You may not need to test all of your landing pages if conversion rates are already high.
Don’t spend money on conversion rate optimization if you have a conversion rate of over 20%. This applies even to customers who abandon their shopping carts before checking out, which is usually about 80% of your website traffic!
A good rule of thumb is that you should focus conversion testing efforts on pages with conversion rates below 15% and don’t waste time trying to boost the conversion rates for pages where they’re above this level.
If one test fails, try another form or message until it succeeds in improving conversions. Once you identify what’s working best for visitors, keep using those tactics across more parts of your site!
Instead of creating new content every day (or week), think about how you can improve the user experience of your website, including making the website faster.
What is a good conversion rate?
As stated above, a 15-20% conversion rate is optimal. You cannot expect every visitor on your website to purchase from you.
At this conversion rate, you will be able to make a profit off of your product.
If the conversion rate is too low, it may not be worthwhile for certain products and could result in losses. On the other hand, if conversion rates are incredibly high, like over 50%, then there can also be negative impacts on profits as well because typically, companies need to manufacture more inventory due to demand since they’re selling so many items per day or week that their conversion rates might not stay at these levels forever.
The key here is finding that sweet spot between 15-20%, which allows them to maintain profitability and still meet customer needs by keeping production costs down.
Ecommerce specific CRO
An online store is definitely harder to handle when it comes to CRO. A few tips for eCommerce conversion rate optimizations are to consider email marketing campaigns, live chat as mentioned above, and follow up with customers on their purchases after they’ve left your website.
Email marketing can be done through an automated sequence of emails that offer relevant information (such as how to care for clothing) about what they purchased so you’re not just blasting them with messages about other products like many sites are doing now.
Think personalization!
It’ll have much more impact than sending generic ‘Dear Customer’ type emails every week or two. There are even email marketing companies that can help with more personalized emailing tasks.
Conclusion
If you want to increase a conversion rate, make sure you have a clear goal in mind before starting any conversion testing. Keep in mind that you need to make it easy and quick to buy something by them not having to ask too many questions about what they want (this should help with clarity). Just make sure you don’t overwhelm potential buyers! Keep testing your landing pages and improving your website
