Start Conversion Rate Optimization Today!
Little changes in these 5 areas can help you optimize your conversion rate in a short amount of time.
Successful conversion is the desired goal you want once visitors reach your website. It is the last step for your visitor, but first one of your customer. Not only do you gather revenue from conversions but every completed action is a success for your business. Sometimes it doesn’t seem easy to lead your visitors to this final destination, but don’t fret, it’s easier than you might think. Just follow these tips and start your conversion rate optimization.
In this post we’re going to cover these areas:
- What is conversion rate optimization, how it works
- How to succeed in increasing it
- The biggest obstacles and barriers and how to break them
You’ve surely heard many times about why you should care about your conversion rate, but let’s learn about some tips in detail.
What is conversion rate and how does it work?
The conversion basically means the action you want someone to take on your website, whether it is subscribing to a newsletter, filling out a form or making a purchase. Conversions usually have some sort of engaging or commercial purpose.
Conversion rate is then the percentage of visitors who take the desired action — that means the ratio between people that actually made a conversion versus those visited your site but who did not. So, if you have 1,000 visitors on your website and 10 of them buy a product (if that’s the desired activity), then 1% of your traffic converted.
One of the most desired conversion is having higher traffic. It usually takes a lot of effort but it’s still just the starting point for generating the revenue. Unfortunately, high traffic will not automatically bring you the profit.
If you don’t follow the right steps in the customer acquisition process, you may get thousands of visitors without a single conversion. That’s where conversion rate optimization comes in to help you make more conversions with the same traffic. Your first step is to set conversion goals — the desired actions you want your customers to take.
- Newsletter subscriptions
- Completing the contact form
- Clicks to social accounts (like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest)
- Engagement goals like time on site or pages per visit
- Watching product videos, demo, tutorials
- Downloads of ebooks
- Asking your customer service repeatedly
How to get your visitors close to conversion?
There are many factors that need to be combined properly to get the right cocktail for customer acquisition.
1. Optimize for search engines
Firstly, you need an absolutely incredible SEO and produce enough relevant content to be visible and to get in front of your prospects’ eyes. You need to think like the people you want to attract. Write about appealing topics that will lead them back to you and your product. Spread the word via different channels as many of them can be beneficial for you in different ways.
2. Optimize your content
Another essential thing to become the winner among your online business competitors is your website. It has to be understandable, visually appealing and easy to use with a clear call to action (CTA). You should be able to get visitors to do the desired action by keeping the website simple and the graphic design sleek.
The best way to make your message clear is to say it directly. Visitors have no time to unravel the mystery of your amazing content. If you want them to download your ebook, subscribe for a newsletter, buy a product or leave a comment — put it in a CTA button. Don’t build the conversational barriers between you and your visitors.
In case you want them to fill in some form, don’t ask for any data you are not actually going to use. If you ask for phone number, will you ever call them? This is rather sensitive data which when compulsory may discourage your visitors to finish the order. In case you really need info like this, it’s better to explain in your microcopy why you need that information. Check out the example below.
Adding the smallest bit of text may have a huge impact on conversion. It’s as easy as that. See the picture above — assure your visitor by the short copy you’re not going to harass him with telemarketing to increase his trust level with you.
3. Optimize important details in testing
Here is where split or A/B testing comes. Get inspired by your bigger and more successful competitors and see what their landing pages look like — you can be pretty sure that they’ve already invested some money in both developing and testing their websites. Don’t just copy the nice looking elements — always keep testing.
For each (eCommerce) website, different things will work, that’s for sure. Run various versions of one page and then evaluate which one of them had the highest rate of conversions. You can repeat the process over and over to get the optimal results based on a 95% confidence level.
Create different variations of your website and send a certain amount of traffic to each variation. This allows you to test different versions of your website at the same time. Say, for instance, you want to test pricing.
Test two versions of your product page — one with a price of $100 and the other with a price of $120 and see how they convert. You can also test two different variables at the same time (just try not to test too many things at once, or else your test will become messy and you will be splitting your traffic between so many versions of the page that you might not have enough traffic to see statistically significant results). See what combination works best.
Let’s say if you want to test price and the color of the buy now button — you can set up a test with 4 different test groups. In the above example, you could test $100 versus $120 pricing and a blue versus red BUY NOW button at the same time. Your test would have four different groups:
- group 1: blue button, $100 price (control)
- group 2: blue button, $120 price
- group 3: red button, $100 price
- group 4: red button, $120 price
Be careful with this multivariate testing and ensure that you can read in your results what change caused the conversion. E.g. if you test the conversion of buying the recommended product through more channels, don’t test different versions of your newsletter at the same time.
4. Optimize the paths on your site
Track your visitors’ behavior. You may have a wonderful product and still find out that people leave your store before completing the purchase because of unclear logistics pricing, long address forms or just because of the absence of a clear call to action on your product page.
Every single step of your customer journey will impact your conversion rate — keep that in mind and make their journey through your online store seamless.
You don’t need any special tools to test the simplicity of your customer’s journey. Ask your friends as well as your prospects to browse your store. Create a list of tasks they will complete. Make notes on what seemed problematic for them and then change it.
5. Optimize your communication
Another key to a business owner’s happiness is: whether a visitor is converted or not, to remember to stay in touch with them. Send them email offers with similar products to which they had in the cart. Provide them with special time-limited offers.
Once they get on board, don’t let them go. Get them engaged in your loyalty programs and make them feel important to you by sending them birthday cards with discount coupons or special gifts. Well-managed email marketing is a great tool for maintaining close relationships with your customers.
Follow the best guide — your own data analytics
There are various methods and techniques to optimize your conversion rate. First, you need a bit of a regular supply of data to be able to make informed decisions in order to turn your website and your marketing behavior in the right direction. There is no better source of information than your own data.
All the answers for the best way to increase your conversion rate shows up in your analytics. Google analytics, Facebook ads, email marketing tools, Amazon and eBay analytics…well the database is huge. How can you get a clear picture of your business as a unit? Find an eCommerce analytics tool that collects all your data in one place and gives you clear interpretations of your data. Save your time and make life easier.
Summary
Successful conversion rate optimization can be a whole life-long science to study. But there are more interesting things in life than optimization, aren’t there? Use the tools that make your business easier. Focus on your passion, understand your customers and make your products and services irresistible for them. Break the barriers that successful entrepreneurs have to face, increase your conversion rate and make your business grow.
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