Understanding where your leads are, how to reach them, and then how to convert them is crucial for successful businesses. The key is to focus on how you can optimize and improve your end-to-end process.
This could be:
- Creating multiple lead magnets for different target audiences.
- Maximising Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) by conducting split tests on every aspect of your advertisements.
- Developing follow-up email sequences.
- Simplifying your contact forms and landing pages.
12 ways to increase your conversion rate:
1. Establish your site’s objectives
Before embarking on your journey to optimize the conversion rate, it is important to define the website goals that you want to measure conversions for and optimise. These goals can include specific actions you want visitors to take on your site. Once you’ve established these goals, monitor visitor behaviour against them.
Common conversion goals for various web pages include:
- Page visits
- Form submits
- Click on links
- Clicks on elements
- Custom conversions
2. Collect and analyse visitor data integrate with your CRM
When it comes to Conversion rate optimisation (CRO), it’s best to avoid assumptions and estimations, and rely solely on data for all decision-making.
Following are some key data points that you absolutely must track to understand your visitors:
- Data on traffic and traffic sources
- Details of user behaviour on your landing pages
- Bounce and abandonment rates for web pages and forms
- Click-through rates of adverts and marketing campaigns
- Information on return customers and average order values
- Net promoter scores (NPS) or other customer feedback
Once you have collected quantifiable data, use it to create your user persona, which is a representation of your ideal user. This must highlight all valuable information about your target prospects and users, including their interests, likes, dislikes, goals, and pain points.
3. Perform competitor analysis
To have a competitive edge over your rivals, you need to know what their strengths and weaknesses are. You can then use that information to highlight your USPs and strengths over your competitors’ weaknesses.
Also, keep in mind that people research their options before making a purchase. They’re going to check out your competitors and how you measure up to them. By performing competitor analysis, you also get to step into your customers’ shoes and pit yourself against your competitor just the way your potential customers would. You can then focus your efforts on ensuring yours is the best site and product range they’re going to find.
4. Assess your current conversion funnel
Before you set out to fix what’s broken, be sure to understand in detail what a typical user journey and conversion funnel on your website looks like. To understand and optimise your funnels, you need to assess what your site does to move potential customers through the set stages.
How are you leading them to a conversion?
Where do you lose most visitors?
By learning these answers, you know where to focus your efforts to increase conversion rate.
5. Define and clearly highlight your value proposition
Your value proposition is a concise explanation of why a user should buy from or subscribe to your products/services over your competitors. Therefore, the first step towards getting visitors to convert is to clearly convey to them what sets you apart and why buying from you is a good decision. Clearly stating and reinforcing your value proposition through multiple site elements can work wonders for your conversion rate.
Your value proposition should come across through your headlines, images, and copy and should primarily feature your Unique Selling Point (USP). Repeated marketing experiments recommend that your USP should be summarised in 10 words or less.
6. Optimise layouts of your critical pages
If your conversion rates aren’t improving despite repeated efforts, it’s a sign that you need to introduce a radical change in your page. Try altering its design and layout based on insights from visitor data and best practices to see if your conversions get impacted.
The principles of high-converting page design are based on a body of material and case studies that reveal how people use websites. Tools like eye tracking, scroll maps, mouse tracking, and clickmaps can provide you with insights on how visitors are browsing through your website. Use these to create a page that visitors love to engage with.
7. Apply sales copy best practices
Improving conversion rate is often about making your website sales copy more persuasive. Repeated case studies have shown that making even small improvements or tweaks to your copy can influence your conversion rate.
There are many elements of sales copy you can and should test; the most important one being the headline. David Ogilvy, the founder of the global marketing firm Ogilvy, was famously quoted as saying,
Five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents of your dollar.
Therefore, start by testing your headline and see if you can drive a noteworthy improvement in your conversion metrics.
8. Build trust with reviews and testimonials
If your potential customers don’t trust you, they’re not going to convert. To build trust, the low hanging fruit you can target is showcasing customer reviews and testimonials to increase your credibility. Reviews, testimonials, regular updates, humanising your brand with your team and strong brand identity and message all contribute to trust
Research and multiple case studies have shown that visitors who interact with a review are 58% more likely to convert.
9. Make site navigation simple and seamless
Visitors land on your site with a purpose and your job is to make it as easy as possible for them to find what they are looking for. Make sure that navigating your website is intuitive and user-friendly to increase its usability, thereby nudging visitors to convert. You want to remove all friction in user experience and make it seamless for visitors to understand how to buy from you or otherwise convert immediately.
You may also want to consider adding a search feature to your site. Visitors who use an internal site search tend to convert at a much higher rate than those who don’t. That’s because the users of the feature are often people who already know the product or service that they want and have a much higher purchase intent. You don’t want these visitors to bounce from your site because finding that product wasn’t as easy as it could be.
10. Improve page load time
Pages that take too long to load get abandoned by potential visitors in short order. Such immediate abandonments can hit your conversion rates hard.
Research shows that you should shoot for page load times of no longer than four seconds. Even within that range, the shorter the time, the better for your conversions. Reducing your page load time will ensure fewer and fewer impatient visitors bounce before the site has loaded. Some ways to improve the speed of your pages include eliminating large images and leveraging AMPs.
11. Test everything before deployment
One of the most methodical ways to make data-backed optimisations to your pages and reduce risk is testing. When you make changes to your pages, you must track and assess their impact before deciding if they actually work well for your conversion rate.
12. Consistent, well placed calls to action (CTAs)
Well placed calls to action that improve the customer journey and direct and steer them towards interacting with your brand throughout your website, will benefit response rates to your website. Don’t just add them with no messaging, place them where they will work best and add thought to the messaging to achieve your goals.
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