Conversion rate depends on your website’s usability, the trust in your brand, the relevance of incoming traffic, and many other factors. To maximize the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts, it’s essential to continuously optimize your website for better conversions.
However, creating a step-by-step conversion rate optimization strategy that produces real results can be challenging. To help you get started, this blog post offers statistically proven tactics that can steadily increase your website’s conversion rate through A/B testing, ultimately boosting your revenue.
Set Clear Goals for Your Website
Before starting a conversion rate optimization journey, it’s important to set specific website goals that you want to measure and optimize. These goals represent actions you want visitors to take on your site that provide value to your business. After setting these goals, you need to evaluate visitor behavior in relation to them to make your conversion rate strategy effective.
Some objectives to enhance conversion optimization for a web page are listed below:
- Page visits
- Form submits
- Click on links
- Clicks on elements
- Custom conversions
Collect and Interpret User Behavior Data
In conversion rate optimization, it’s necessary to avoid assumptions and base decisions entirely on data.
A proven CRO technique is to continuously track and analyze website data to understand visitor behavior and preferences. This data should guide where to focus your conversion optimization efforts.
Here are some key data points you need to track to understand your visitors:
- Traffic data and sources
- User behavior on your landing page
- Bounce and abandonment rates for web pages and forms
- Click-through rates for ads and marketing campaigns
- Information on return customers and average order values
- Net promoter scores (NPS) or other customer feedback
Once you’ve collected this data, use it to create a user persona—a representation of your ideal user. This persona should highlight important details about your target audience, including their interests, likes, dislikes, goals, and pain points.
You may create hypotheses and conduct insightful tests in order to clarify what works and what doesn’t on your website by combining quantitative data with your ideal user persona.
Review Competitor Strategies
To gain an advantage over your competitors, it’s important to understand their strengths and weaknesses. You can use this information to emphasize your unique selling points and strengths where your competitors are weak. This is an effective way to boost website conversions.
Remember, people research their options before making a purchase. They will compare you to your competitors. By analyzing your competitors, you can see things from your customers’ perspective and compare yourself just as they would. This allows you to optimize your website for conversions and ensure your product range stands out as the best option.
Assess Your Funnel Performance
Before attempting to fix any issues, it’s important to thoroughly understand the typical user journey and conversion funnel on your website. This will help you identify where visitors hesitate or drop off and why that might be happening.
You can use tools to track conversion rates across your funnels and pinpoint specific stages where users lose interest. This allows you to optimize those stages.
Each stage of the funnel will naturally have some drop-off as people fail to take the next step for various reasons. By identifying and addressing these reasons, you can reduce the drop-off and improve your website’s conversion rate.
For instance, eCommerce sites often focus their conversion efforts on the checkout stage, where an average of 69.23% of shoppers abandon their carts. Even a small increase in the conversion rate at this stage can significantly impact solving this issue.
A well-known example of a site that improved its eCommerce conversion rate by simplifying the checkout process is Amazon with its one-click checkout.
To optimize your funnels, you need to assess how your site guides potential customers through each stage toward conversion. Where do you lose the most visitors? Understanding this will help you focus your efforts on increasing your conversion rate.
Visitors spend time exploring your site and are eager to make a purchase. But if the checkout process isn’t smooth, it can feel like hitting a roadblock right before the finish line.
Outline and Highlight Your Unique Selling Points
A value proposition is a brief explanation of why users should choose your products or services over those of your competitors. To increase conversions, the first step is to clearly communicate what sets you apart and why buying from you is a smart choice.
Reinforcing your value proposition through various elements on your site can significantly enhance your conversion rate optimization strategies.
Your value proposition should be evident in your headlines, images, and copy, with a strong focus on your Unique Selling Point. Marketing experts suggest summarizing your USP in 10 words or less.
For example, Evernote revised its value proposition to highlight its product’s USP better. Their original tagline, “Remember Everything,” conveyed the benefit but didn’t explain the tool’s functionality. They then added three product features below the tagline to show how the tool works.
Improve the Structure of Your Important Pages
It’s a concise tagline that better explains the tool’s functionality, while the text beneath it reinforces the value proposition. Before deciding on a final version, create multiple headlines and A/B test them to see which one resonates most with your target audience and boosts conversions.
If your conversion rates aren’t improving despite repeated efforts, it may be time to make a significant change to your landing pages. Consider redesigning and adjusting the layout based on insights from visitor data and best practices to see if it improves conversions.
The principles of high-converting page design are supported by research and case studies on how people interact with websites. Tools like eye tracking, scroll maps, mouse tracking, and clickmaps can give you valuable insights into how visitors navigate your site. Use this information to design a page that visitors enjoy and engage with.
Utilize Effective Strategies for Sales Copy
One essential tip to enhance conversion optimization for your website is to make your sales copy more persuasive. Case studies have shown that even small tweaks to your copy can boost your conversion rate.
There are many elements of sales copy to test, but the headline is the most important. Start by testing your headline to see if it leads to a significant improvement in your conversion rate.
Build Confidence with Authentic Reviews and Testimonials
Without your audience’s trust, no conversion rate strategies will succeed. To build trust and encourage visitors to convert, a simple yet effective approach is to showcase reviews and testimonials. This strategy can significantly increase conversions and enhance credibility.
Take a testing product page as an example. It features customer success stories along with photos, conversion uplift, and company logos. These elements work together to build trust and confidence in the brand’s credibility.
Research and case studies have shown that visitors who engage with reviews are 58% more likely to become paying customers. That’s a huge benefit from simply adding customer testimonials to your landing page.
When experimenting with testimonials, consider their placement carefully. A case study on a sales page shows how changing the location of a testimonial can boost conversion rates.
The way you use testimonials should align with your goals. By using a testimonial as the headline, you can see an increase in conversions.
Design Clear and Seamless Navigation Paths
When visitors come to a website, they have a specific goal in mind. It’s important to make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for. A user-friendly and intuitive site helps visitors navigate easily, which can lead to higher conversions.
The main aim of CRO should be to remove any obstacles in user experience (UX) optimization, making it easy for visitors to understand how to make a purchase or take action quickly.
Adding a search feature can also boost conversions. Visitors who use site search are more likely to convert because they often know what they want and are ready to buy. If they can’t easily find what they’re looking for, they might leave the site, which reduces conversion rates.
Boost Page Loading Efficiency
Page load times also play a crucial role in conversions. Slow-loading pages are quickly abandoned, which can hurt conversion rates. Ideally, pages should load within four seconds or less. The faster the load time, the better the chances of converting visitors. To speed up page loading, consider removing large images and using Accelerated Mobile Pages.
Run Final Tests Before Launching
One of the best ways to optimize conversion rates while minimizing risk is through testing. When making changes to a website, it’s important to track and evaluate their impact to see if they actually improve conversion rates. A/B testing is a useful method for this. It allows you to compare a new version of a web page with the original to see which one performs better. The version that leads to more conversions can then be implemented across the site.
By using A/B testing, you let your visitors decide which version works best for them, avoiding the need to make decisions based on assumptions.
Incorporate Live Chat
Imagine visitors arriving on your website but having trouble finding what they need. They might leave and explore other sites instead, risking a loss to competitors. To prevent this, consider using a website conversion rate optimization technique that guides visitors through your site with a live chat feature.
If visitors have questions or can’t find what they’re looking for, they should be able to easily reach out to your team for help. This immediate support can keep them engaged and help increase conversions by making them feel heard and supported.
In addition to browsing help articles and videos, visitors can use the chat option to ask questions or send messages. By committing to reply within 5 minutes, this feature enhances transparency and provides timely assistance, keeping visitors on your site.
Reduce Distractions for Focus
It’s important for websites to avoid including irrelevant details. However, it’s easy to overlook this and end up cluttering pages with unnecessary information that visitors don’t find useful. This can reduce the site’s effectiveness and hurt conversions.
To address this, it’s recommended to analyze visitor behavior data to identify which elements resonate with your audience and which do not. With these insights, you can remove distractions and keep the focus on what matters.
For example, PearlsOnly, an online jewelry brand, faced similar challenges. Using session recordings and heatmaps, they discovered that visitors were disengaging and leaving the checkout page. They ran a test to solve this, removing unnecessary details and emphasizing key information like product details and calls to action. This change led to a 10% increase in revenue, demonstrating the power of decluttering a website.
Streamline Your Forms for Optimal Outcomes
A form that’s difficult to fill out can frustrate visitors and lead them to abandon a website. To avoid this, consider implementing best practices such as reducing the number of form fields, using inline form validation, displaying helpful error messages, and enabling autocomplete.
For instance, Qualicorp, a finance website that manages healthcare plans, noticed that many visitors were dropping off when trying to fill out a form to find a healthcare plan. To address this, the team conducted two tests: one where they removed repeated form fields and another where they made selecting a profession mandatory. These changes led to a nearly 17% increase in form sign-ups.
Design Eye-Catching CTA Buttons
Optimizing CTA buttons is a key aspect of improving conversion rates. Calls to action guide visitors on what action to take on a website.
It’s important not to assume that visitors will automatically know what to do. As of 2023, the average website conversion rate is 3.68%. If all CTAs were optimized effectively, this number could be higher.
For example, Morningstar, a real estate company, aimed to increase the number of inquiries from their mobile website form. They decided to test a change in their CTA text, switching from “Contact us” to “Inquire now.” This simple tweak resulted in a 44.11% increase in clicks on the CTA.
The word “inquire” clearly tells users what action to take, reducing any confusion and encouraging engagement. The word “now” adds a sense of urgency, prompting users to act immediately.
Reclaim Lost Sales and Lower Cart Abandonment
Shopping cart abandonment is a common problem that hits almost every website in online retail. When visitors put items in their carts but leave without buying, your business misses out on a sale. You’re not the only one dealing with this issue, but it’s key to tackle it head-on.
If you’re not working to bring back these lost visitors—maybe through follow-up emails personalized deals, or reminders—you might be losing out on a lot of money. Also putting plans in place to stop cart abandonment such as making checkout easier, giving more ways to pay, or showing clear shipping details, can cut down on people leaving without buying. When you focus on both getting people back and stopping them from leaving, you can save potential sales and increase your overall conversion rate.
Familiarize Yourself with Psychological Concepts
To improve conversion rate optimization, it’s helpful to understand how people think and act. For instance, when we leave a cluttered website or hesitate to buy without seeing proof, we may not realize the psychology behind it, but we still react that way.
Understanding why we behave in certain ways and the psychological principles that influence us is key. By optimizing your website based on this understanding, you can arrange elements to meet visitors’ expectations, which can greatly benefit your business.
New AI-driven features can generate test ideas for every webpage, backed by scientific principles. Just enter the page URL, and you’ll get numerous relevant conversion rate optimization ideas. This helps you choose test ideas that align with your goals and improve conversion rates.
Create Customized User Experiences
Wondering how to optimize your website for conversions? Never overlook personalization! It’s not just another tactic; it’s central to creating a customer-focused experience that builds trust. Consider the spot-on product recommendations on fashion sites or how Netflix suggests movies based on your location or watch history—these are perfect examples of effective personalization.
Utilize Surveys to Gather Actionable Feedback
When visitors arrive on your website, they’re assessing how easy or difficult it is to take action. They might easily find product suggestions but struggle to locate top brands. Or they might see the form but have trouble finding the pricing page on a SaaS website.
At this stage, visitors can share their experiences, letting you know what’s working well and where improvements are needed. Their feedback provides valuable insights, which is why using on-page surveys is so beneficial.
When visitors express appreciation, it’s a sign you’re on the right track. If they suggest improvements, take their feedback seriously and address the issues using proven conversion rate strategies.
Conclusion
Improving your conversion rate directly enhances your digital marketing ROI. The more visitors you convert, the greater the impact on your revenue from your existing traffic. To excel in conversion rate optimization, you need more than just tactics or quick fixes. The CRO strategies mentioned above are a solid starting point for strategically boosting your conversion rates.
However, remember that some methods may yield better results for your business than others. The key is to set clear goals, collect data, and continuously run tests to discover what resonates with your target audience. Applying these strategies can significantly increase your website’s average conversion rate and help you stand out in your industry.