Your website is ready, you’re blogging about topics your customers care about, your marketing campaigns are targeting the right people and traffic to your website is increasing by the day. However, if this traffic isn’t converting to something, such as a sale or signup to your email list, it is simply a waste of time and effort.
You can change this by following these seven conversion rate optimization tips:
1. Be clear about what you offer: On any landing page, you need to clearly state your value proposition by understanding who your audience is and your buyer persona. Write your copy keeping in mind your target audience and communicating how your product or service can solve your customer’s problem. Spend most of the time on a good headline and include a simple video on the page to humanize your brand.
If you are directing customers to your website through a marketing campaign or a paid search ad, landing pages are a must.
2. Pick your CTAs wisely: One of the main components to ensure conversions is your call-to-action (CTA), which tells visitors why they need to do exactly what you want them to do. Your CTA should not only be clear and accessible so visitors are not confused about what they should do, but it should also contain value and urgency to drive them to act instantly.
3. Include reviews: A consumer survey published recently stated that 97% of customers consider reviews before they make a decision to buy. Testimonials and reviews are vital when it comes to gaining credibility in the eyes of your visitors, especially for those visiting your site for the first time.
4. Page speed/Mobile optimization: Recent statistics highlighted that some 40% of people abandon sites that take more than 3 seconds to load. On mobile specifically, a one-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
Today, with technology and automation making our lives simpler, visitors to your website, too, come with expectations. If it takes time to load, it’s likely they’re going to abandon the idea of buying from you. To put it simply, in most cases, the faster your website, the better your conversion rate.
More importantly, with over 50% of internet users surfing the internet on their mobile phones, it’s more important than ever to optimize for mobile.
5. Track everything: The most effective way to understand what’s working on your website and what’s keeping conversions at bay is tracking how users are interacting with it. Using an analytics tool to track your online conversions allows you to identify the strongest and weakest areas of your website, as well as the individual performance of your marketing campaigns.
6. Live chat: When a web visitor doesn’t convert, he/she might have a question or concern about your product or service. Via live chat, customer service or sales employees can alleviate the concerns and answer the queries of prospective customers who are on the fence, and convert them.
7. Remove distractions: Most companies make the mistake of including too many things on their websites, pulling visitors in various directions and leaving them confused. The trick is to include only items that are going to contribute to converting your website traffic and to make doing business with you as easy as possible.
Ultimately, what works for one website, audience or niche may not work for another. So, it’s important to keep testing and improving. Figure out what works best for your business, and then run with it.