Anybody can build a site, but not everybody has one that actually brings revenue. Do you want your website to generate more traffic and convert it into leads, sales, and customers?
The obvious answer is positive, so you need to put some effort into conversion rate optimisation. It’s a crucial strategy to grow your business and fuel your brand.
But first things first…
What is Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)?
According to Hotjar:
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the practice of increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired action on a website. Desired actions can include purchasing a product, clicking ‘add to cart’, signing up for a service, filling out a form, or clicking on a link.
Moz states:
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action — be that filling out a form, becoming customers, or otherwise. The CRO process involves understanding how users move through your site, what actions they take, and what’s stopping them from completing your goals.
and Hubspot:
Conversion rate optimisation, or CRO, is the process of enhancing your website and content to boost conversions. A high conversion rate means your website is well-designed, formatted effectively, and appealing to your target audience.
Why is CRO so Important?
It helps a website to produce the highest amount of sales and become your best salesperson. As different situations correspond to different best practices, all you need to do is to tweak and test to find your optimal solution.
In this article, we will unpack 10 tips to help you increase your website’s conversion rate.
How to Increase your Website’s Conversion Rate?
Check Your Site Speed
Page loading speed is not just a technical detail, but also an important factor in online success. Customers crave a continuous, well-thought-out process that starts with loading the site.
For instance, if you feel like your eCommerce website is a little slow, you are probably missing out on a lot of potential orders. Almost half (47% and 43%, respectively) of customers are willing to wait 2-3 seconds for the page to load until they hit the “Back” button, and 80% of those who left will be lost to you forever.
In addition to the dissatisfaction of visitors, page load speed affects your position in Google and the work of algorithms. If you don’t meet the criteria, they will go to the next page without even indexing yours. Accordingly, your traffic slows down, visitors stop converting, and your revenue drops.
If you don’t want your business to die slowly, you need to seriously consider accelerating your page load speed and improve your page experience.
One of the possible solutions is switching to progressive web applications. PWAs like the ones highlighted in this Magento 2 PWA tutorial provide split-second page downloading due to caching as well as lots of perks for CRO such as elegant UX and UI. Consequently, you profit with higher conversions and delighted customers.
Tweak Calls to Action (CTAs)
CTAs answer a simple query:
What is the next step you would like to see from visitors after they land on your site or specific page?
To avoid relying on their intuition, stimulate them to take the desired action. Use different calls to action depending on the goal you set for the page.
For example, on a product page, you can encourage people to add a product to their cart or buy now. If you implement calls to action in your blog, then you will most likely want your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter or download something.
Make sure your call to action is at the top of the page on a mobile version. It’s important that when someone loads your home page, they don’t have to scroll down to see this information, it should be there right away.
For CRO, the main goal is the clearest CTA wording and the right colour. According to the research, you can get amazing results from even small changes in the wording or colour presentation of the CTA button.
You can always run A/B tests to experimentally find out which option works best for you.
As you can see in the screenshot, the original CTA was “Schedule a Demo Today!” The development team achieved better conversion by changing the wording into a “FREE 5-Min Demo Video.”
The goal was to motivate the leads to schedule a demo. An analysis was carried out and it was noticed that scheduling and planning can mean the need to find free time and adjust this time to the company’s possibility to present the demo. For the convenience of converting, the team created a video available for downloading and viewing at any time.
The company ensured not only the affordability of the video in terms of money (the free video), but also indicated the exact time it would take to watch it. With this little effort, conversions have increased by more than 738%, and it has become even more favourable to users.
Opinions Matter
To study your visitors, you can select a few people from your target audience and follow them as they complete different stages on your website. This process is called user testing and shows what steps visitors take and what difficulties they encounter.
Direct conversations can help you see how visitors are reacting to your site. You can use this information for CRO. Ask them for their opinion on their experience.
What was convenient? What colour appeals to them? What actions required a disproportionate amount of effort to achieve the goal?
Case in point, multiple-choice surveys are data sources for further analysis. Add the ability to leave comments to get more detailed feedback on why your visitors are behaving this way.
After collecting the data, analyse the trends and what catches your audience. This knowledge can then be used in the way you design the rest of your website and conduct your marketing campaigns.
Ensure a Smooth and Simple Experience
As the saying runs, less is more. Make sure you provide an enjoyable and simple user experience. The best option is when it takes two and a half seconds to make it very clear who you are, how to contact you, and what you do.
So, take a quick look at your website and see if you can come up with the answer to the problem you need to address.
Let your visitors enjoy an intuitive site where they can do whatever they need to. First of all, you need to remove the barriers. Ease of use and speed are a natural part of surfing the Internet.
For instance, when shopping, you have to fill out a lot of shipping fields, which can be stressful for your visitors. Therefore, you must make sure that this information needs to be entered only during the first time of registration and then let customers create an account so that the system automatically fills in the data for the next orders.
You can also reduce the number of fields in the form, for example, remove information about age, gender, company name, and company size. Don’t be too verbose and don’t delay the desired action. The wordier you are, the more people leave your site and the lower your conversion rate is.
Choose What Is Right for You
We are often tempted to look at the websites of our competitors to compare them with ourselves. It’s certainly helpful to flip through five, six, seven, maybe ten, or more of your competitors’ websites and then honestly answer the question of whether yours looks better. Think, would you choose yourself in contrast to other similar services?
You can see what solutions your rivals choose to emotionally hook users. Our visual sensations and instincts can help us determine various details:
- whether the site is performing the task of increasing conversions or not;
- whether users get what they came to the site for;
- or maybe the bounce rate may cause concern.
However, don’t blindly copy others, as you don’t know if this or that solution will work for your visitors. You cannot predict what problem the competitors were trying to solve, and whether they are testing something new at the moment.
Therefore, it is important to brainstorm on your own, identify problems and opportunities for their elimination, and then put them into practice.
If you decide to use an existing solution of the competitors that you find suitable, you need to make sure that it solves your problem and test it before starting implementation.
One of the examples, when copying is not the best bet, is choosing the colour of CTAs. Often the choice of green is based on the connection with nature, naturalness, and permission of the road crossing. That is, by logic, it is intuitively worth adding green calls to action.
However, the research proved that the red color, which is associated with energy, attention, and stop signs, led to a 21% increase in conversions.
Provide Easy Navigation
Pay attention to navigation and a well-thought-out conversion funnel. It is important for visitors to understand how to get where they want. If they encounter difficulties, you can lose them.
Navigation needs to be tweaked to align with the conversion funnel. Where should visitors go after they land on the home page? And where after that? If you have a clear idea of the conversion path, the conversion rate will be higher.
It’s also worth considering the need for links on landing pages. The screenshot shows the results of VWO tests with an online retailer of kitchen and homeware products, Yuppiechef.
The removal of seemingly useful navigation links resulted in an unprecedented increase in conversions from 3% to 6%, which means a 100% increase in conversion rates!
After you optimise your site and ensure that it looks amazing on the desktop, remember to test and run your site on a mobile phone. It needs to look stunning and download seamlessly from different devices.
Build Trust
Another important part of your conversion strategy is building trust. One way to build trust is to use trust badges that highlight some of your awards, maybe some accomplishments you’ve had, or how many years you’ve been in the business. These logos show that your site is safe and reliable.
Another way is to get approval from an official organisation. And also show some of your reviews. By using social proof on your site, customers won’t feel like they have to leave your site to find reviews elsewhere.
Another way to increase trust is to use the magic of numbers. For example, show how much of your product is being bought or used. All this is an effective way to increase conversion.
So, by displaying these things on your site, you instill confidence in your users that the experience on your website is admired and converted.
On the screenshot, you can see one of the variants of trusted symbols that the Currys online retailer implements.
Strong Ad Copy and Retargeting
It is estimated that 97% of people do not convert on their first visit, however, that does not mean that this is bad traffic. In most cases, this means people are researching different options and companies and are not ready to convert right now.
Various platforms like Google, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook can be a great opportunity to convince them to come back and take the desired action. It’s a place to pop up before their eyes, so when they’re ready to convert, they’ll come back to your site.
Using a reliable ad is the key to high conversion rates. Naturally, you want very targeted traffic to your site that needs what you provide. Display a clear ad copy of what users will receive.
So that when they click on it and go to your site, they would get the same information they just saw. If you post things that are not relevant to your business, and this traffic comes to your site, it won’t convert, which degrades your conversion rate.
Employ Heatmaps and Session Recordings as a Source of Insights
When creating a website, you can assume what visitors will pay attention to first. But at this stage, these assumptions cannot be supported by any analysis, they are rather based on your behavior. In such a case, you can use CRO tools like heatmaps.
They provide insights into how your website visitors actually interact with it. Today, heatmaps are used to present complex statistics. Engineers, marketers, social scientists, and researchers all use heatmaps to analyse complex, comparative data.
A site heatmap uses a colour palette to visualise data in a graph. Let’s say you are looking at a web page and want to know which elements are getting the most attention. A heatmap will display that information based on user data from visitors to that page.
Heatmaps can be especially useful for discovering which links are of the most interest to visitors and what areas attract their attention, even if there are no links there. In the future, this information can be used when deciding to add some important features to these areas.
Take this screenshot of the Brothers Leather Supply product page as an example. Using the heatmap, they found out that the most frequent visitor clicks were on the product photos.
It’s no secret that images can replace a thousand words and give a clear idea of the appearance of a product from all angles. People are also interested in how the product looks on other people. So, the company took advantage of this discovery and added even more photos.
Session records are the second powerful tool for understanding how well your website is performing. They show the specific interaction of users on the website, their actions, the order of steps, and after what time they moved to a particular block. This is a nice addition to the heatmap data.
Create a Sense of Urgency
As it is commonly known, fear is the most primal and powerful human motivator. Make it your goal to shorten the time it takes a person to decide. Chances are that the more visitors think, the less likely they are to choose you and not go to competitors.
Create a sense of urgency or supply limit. One of the successful ways is to set a discount or free shipping, which expires in a short period of time.
Having a limited supply is like being limited in time by creating a sense of scarcity.
For fear of loss, people may decide to buy an item faster, as the last one can be quickly picked up. Get creative and use calls to action next to the remaining amount.
Amazon is reaping the benefits of its successful optimisation strategies and has achieved a 13% conversion rate, which is 7 times the industry average.
The king of eCommerce, Amazon, uses a time-limited approach on a product page as well as indicating that the quantity of products is limited. It clearly shows how many days and number of products are left when the product is no longer available.
According to empirical research conducted over the past 50 years, messages with high levels of fear motivate people more than those with low levels. In marketing, an appeal to fear is used to induce people to use a product and the consequences of rejecting an offer.
What happens if a customer doesn’t select your item right now? Will they lose the gift or coupon? Will they have to pay for shipping?
At the same time, don’t overuse the trick of scarcity and urgency. Always be honest, otherwise, you run the risk of being branded as crafty.
CRO Best Practices – Final Words
To crown it all, hopefully, the 10 tips in this article help you to understand CRO better and to convert more traffic into leads.
Maybe you can take a couple of those back to the bank and cash that in on your website to enjoy your better overall conversion rate.
