The hope of every digital marketer is having heaps of traffic to your site. However, if the traffic doesn’t inspire the user to make a transaction, such as making a purchase, subscribing to your email list, or downloading an eBook, then all that traffic is for naught.
If you want your business to be successful, you need to have a website with a good conversion rate. Since your website represents your brand, it is necessary to strengthen its backbone through CRO. This is especially important today to support your digital marketing efforts. Businesses today thrive on the back of a strong brand communication strategy. Taking the fact that consistent presentation of a brand can increase its revenue by 23%. So, it is imperative for businesses to have a website that builds and boosts brand credibility.
As a result of these factors, CRO has quickly become one of the most popular marketing tactics this year. A website’s typical conversion rate is 2.35%. However, the top 10% of brands this year have seen 3-5x higher conversion rates than average. It begs us to wonder what is achieving this higher conversion rate.
We’ll take a look at eight actionable measures that businesses can take to improve their website’s conversion rate and keep it.
1. Improve Your Website’s Loading Speed
Your website’s page loading speed is the most important factor affecting your site’s conversion rates. So much so, that a delay of even a second can cause a 7% reduction in conversions. The instant gratification culture and economy today show that customers aren’t patient anymore. Their expectations from technology and user experience keep soaring to new heights. To ensure users don’t bounce from your website, it is crucial to have one hand on the loading speed at all times.
The loading speed can be affected by several factors. In a study of over 18,639 pages, oversized images were found to be the most common loading speed offender. While images add great value, it’s necessary that websites pay attention to size. The same study also revealed that pages without oversized images saw an average rise of 11.4% in conversion rates. As opposed to the 9.8% conversion rates for websites containing them.
Just like a slow loading speed can hamper your prospects, faster loading speed can enhance them, as Mozilla found out. The software company increased the page loading speed of its flagship browser, Firefox, by 2.2 seconds and saw its downloads rise by 15.4% year-over-year. Another successful example, Walmart saw their conversion rates rise by 2% for every 1-second improvement in the page load time.
2. Focus on One Call to Action (CTA)
Every landing page serves a purpose – that of acquiring something valuable from your audience. Be it their email or contact information for lead generation or building an email subscriber list, you want to promote your purpose in such a way that they feel compelled to convert.t. More often than not, this is done through a short phrase known as the CTA (call to action).
By using a CTA, you induce a sense of urgency about your product or service. CTAs inspire your customers to act in a particular manner. It is, therefore, evident that utilizing strategic CTA(s) appropriately will define how well you convert.
Although CTA(s) is an important factor in determining the success of your conversion rate, many websites make the folly of using a variety of CTA(s) to promote one product. Through the user’s perspective, competing CTA(s) create confusion in their minds. It tells them that the website isn’t many itself aware of its offerings and naturally shies them away. Every landing page should have only one CTA that tells visitors their next course of action. This practice is clear for the customer and leads to an average conversion rate of 13.5%.
3. Provide Authentic Proof Of Value
Many customers are still digitally hesitant and not overly enthusiastic when it comes to trusting websites, especially with sensitive information. This is where trust signals come into the picture. They help you build rapport and trust with the customer. A time-tested way of improving conversion rates and is done by displaying verified seals and images of payment systems.
Apart from helping you improve your website’s conversion rate, trust signals also further your SEO efforts. For example, Google only wants to show websites that it trusts, so adding trust signals helps you in more ways than one. Additionally, ensure that you build your blog as well and keep it updated. A well-maintained blog is a trust signal in itself and shows the visitor that your website is active.
If you are an e-commerce website, consider showing trust badges like Symantec SSLs and VeriSign as well. You can position them strategically by your CTAs. These changes can increase conversions simply by people seeing them and feeling more secure. A real-life example of this, Blue Fountain Media used the VeriSign seal to their checkout page and saw a 42% increase in their sales.
4. Add a Chatbot
By using a chatbot, your company now has a 24/7 companion that assists customers with any queries at any time of the day. With the help of these bots, you can take customer service up a few notches by automating simple service requests. Chatbots are immensely helpful and can answer 80% of regular queries.
Chatbots are much more than just that. These bots can also help you figure out why your website or landing page is not converting. When site visitors leave a shopping cart, chatbots can appear in a popup window and ask them the reason behind their abandonment.
This information can be used to remodel your offerings and marketing efforts. By requesting user opinions at important touchpoints, you can gain an insight into their satisfaction level and their demands. This will help you change your offerings to suit customer expectations. It will also give you the chance to increase sales by pitching another service or product.
5. Create a Compelling and Clear Value Proposition
Your website’s true potential is determined by your unique value proposition. thus When done right, it can give you a massive boost in website conversions and improve the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.
Your unique value proposition is your road to creating a great first impression. Impressions convey the value of your product or website to your customers. To create a unique value proposition, you will have to undertake substantial reflection on the significant features of your services and products. After creating it, you should move to refining it and communicating it effectively to achieve optimal results.
After, you’ll want to test it to see its effectiveness and to know how prospects resonate with it. Optimizing the UVP is a continuous process and includes recognizing, expressing, and A/B testing.
6. Cut the Jargon
In website copy, simple is always better. The reason behind this is that irrespective of what your target audience might be, your product could appeal to a large user base. However, most of the time, these users turn away from the product because the web copy is full of industry jargon.
Web copywriters would do well to remember Paul Graham when he said, “Write as you talk.” This is because clarity will always beat persuasion. Trying to woo people with fancy psychobabble will never do you too much good. Remember that it’s the people who are going to use your product and buy it. Write for them, and not for the companies they belong to.
7. Use Gated and Ungated Content Carefully
For most marketers, not knowing how and when to use gated and ungated content often makes or breaks their CRO efforts. Because of the large amounts of information available today, clients are more knowledgeable than ever before. They will typically view more than five content pieces before making a decision.
Creating gated content by understanding what your audience is interested in. Additionally, it will help you improve upon your offerings and use the solicited information from customers to provide them with more valuable content. Gated content like eBooks, newsletters, case studies, etc. will provide your clients with valuable insights and give you a chance to engage them in the future. Remember, keep the number of form fields to a minimum so that clients actually undertake the process to access your gated content.
On the other hand, ungated content is something that clients don’t have to provide information to access. Thus it is downloaded 20-50 times more than gated content. The trick here is to do a balancing act between the two. Provide sufficient but not enough value with your ungated content, to drive users to the signup form. You’ll want to ensure that the number of fields is at a minimum so that people register on it.
8. A/B Test
In conversion optimization, it’s all about testing. Testing is the best way to find loopholes in the UX and alleviate risks. All while also providing your creative teams with more inspiration and ideas to refine things. In fact, testing is so lucrative that websites that conducted 50% more tests, on average, noticed increased conversion rates in the previous year.
Your CRO hinges on every little detail on your website because all of them, in some way or the other, impact the user experience. That’s why it’s vital to conduct A/B testing of your landing pages as often as possible. Businesses that take heed of this and use several (nine or more) optimization methods are highly likely to see enhanced conversion rates.
Conclusion
There are a host of measures you can undertake to improve your website’s conversion rates and positively impact your landing pages. Along with the tips mentioned above and implementing a few tweaks with your SEO efforts can massively boost your CRO and lead to improved revenue and sales.
