Your website is up and running. Check. Your website traffic is in good shape. Check. Now, the conversion rate…. is a bit off the mark. What could be wrong?
Conversions are a great way to assess your marketing strategy. It tells you how prospects are responding to the conversation with the brand and if they’re engaging with its promotional tactics. In a recent report by Econsultancy, “50% of companies say conversion rate optimization is a crucial part of their digital marketing strategy”.
So, let’s start from the beginning. What is conversion? Essentially, conversion means a website visitor has completed the desired action. So depending on the business goal, it could be sales-related, such as purchasing a product or lead generation-related, such as starting a free trial, filling out a contact form, etc.
A good metric to show that your conversion strategy needs help is a considerable gap between your website visitors and conversion numbers. This gap means something along the way is preventing prospects from taking the next step in the conversion funnel. As a marketer, you should understand the importance of investing in conversion rate optimization (CRO) to build credibility and close sales.
So how can you improve your conversion strategy and implement the right tactics for a higher conversion rate? Data gathering. By constantly tracking and analyzing the business’ website and social media data, you learn more about visitors’ behavior and preferences. This data provides valuable consumer insights to focus your optimization efforts in a way that will increase conversions. In short, conversion strategies should add value, strive to deliver a good customer experience, and turn “window-shoppers” into repeat buyers.
Once you’ve got that data, you’ll have a good understanding of where your website might need some optimization. In addition, these insights about your prospects can help you remove the friction that’s making prospects hesitant to fulfill the website’s goal.
Time to check out five insightful conversion tactics that can boost your website conversions.
Track how people interact with your site
Tomer Hen, CEO of Mobco Media, analyzed many well-established eCommerce companies to find the one common denominator for their success. What did he find? They all had a clear picture of their consumers and understood their needs. Hen advocates that every business starting point should be gathering insights on their prospects’ behavior to develop an effective and personalized way to serve their ideal buyer.
By deeply knowing your buyer persona, you can optimize your website to better resonate with your audience. I mean, think about it, how could you improve your conversion rate if you don’t understand how your audience interacts with your site?
Luckily, there are many website analysis tools to help with that. For example, Google Analytics provides some good insights about your website visitors. But if you want to dive deeper, Crazy Egg or HubSpot’s website grader can take you to the next level.
For example, these platforms offer screen recordings so you can view how visitors interact with your website. These allow marketers to almost enter into the prospects’ minds as you can see what they click on or skip over an offer, for example. These tools also offer heat maps of your site, which highlight the most appealing areas of your website to visitors.
With these insights, you can remove distractions, highlight valuable information your prospects care about and quickly take steps through the conversion funnel. Finally, by improving the user experience on your website, your conversion rates should reflect that.
Add a landing page
What is the primary goal of a landing page? Capture leads and encourages conversions. The landing page is usually straight-to-the-point. It should have a straightforward offering and be presented in a way that provides prospects with adequate information to take the desired action.
You can use Unbounce to quickly create and test different landing pages before you settle on a design that works best for your business.
Unbounce is the industry’s leading page builder and conversion optimization platform, trusted by over 15,000+ businesses worldwide. With Unbounce, you can build high-converting landing pages, popups, and sticky bars in just minutes, without touching a line of code.
And with powerful tools like DTR (dynamic text replacement), A/B testing, and integrations with all the major marketing platforms, you can be sure that your pages are always optimized for maximum conversions. So if you’re looking to take your marketing to the next level, there’s no better platform than Unbounce.
What kind of information should businesses prioritize on a landing page? Invest in copywriting that explains the product and details how it addresses the audience’s goals, motivations, and pain points. Mentioning your buyer’s fears and pain points and demonstrating how the product helps solve them on landing pages can increase conversion rates by 80%.
Also, crafting your landing page copy in a way that resonates with your target audience and communicates your value proposition shows you have a solid understanding of your audience and positions you as an expert.
Including testimonials is essential to building credibility. It’s known that prospects usually feel more comfortable buying a product that has a positive review. Finally, including images or videos of the product helps consumers visualize its use. Graphs can also be helpful to visually demonstrate the product’s benefits to the audience and can positively impact your conversion rates.
Landing pages are a powerful tool to increase conversions, driving a higher conversion rate of around 9.7% across all industries.
Ready to try out Unbounce?. Here’s an exclusive Unbounce discount link that gives you 14-day of free access and 20% off the discounted price.
Optimize your CTA buttons
After optimizing and personalizing your website to cater to your audience, it’s time to define the placement of your CTA buttons that will best resonate with your brand’s ideal public.
Hubspot gives a great example of how companies should optimize their content and CTA buttons throughout the website to generate as many leads and conversions as possible. On their website, prospects find valuable content that builds their interests up.
Then, they finalize it with a well-crafted CTA button that converts. HubSpot uses many anchor text CTAs throughout its blog posts and articles, complementing conversions through CTA buttons. As a result, anchor text CTAs have increased Hubspot’s conversion rates by 121%.
Did you know that ‘Personalized CTAs convert 202% better than default versions? With consumers’ behavior rapidly changing in a crowded digital world, have CTAs on your website that will stand out to your audience. Also, it’s important to create a few versions of your CTA and run some tests, so you have the best-performing option on your website. Test the CTA text and icons, the button’s color and appearance (they should look ‘clickable’), and the buttons’ placement.
Add chatbots to your website.
Chatbots are incredibly effective for businesses’ lead generation and website conversion rates. Recent studies have shown that the increase in website conversion rate can range from 10-100%, depending on the company’s industry.
How do chatbots make such a difference in a website’s conversion rate? What kind of benefits does this technology offer? Essentially, it provides consumers with 24/7 support and answers to general or product-related questions. Also, chatbots can conduct surveys that provide valuable insights for businesses to optimize their website, communication, and customer experience and make prospects and buyers feel heard.
This technology offers fast response times and can resolve simple requests without making the consumer wait for a human agent. However, consumers still prefer human agents over chatbots for more complex issues.
Essentially, chatbots can help businesses reduce service costs significantly while increasing customer engagement, gathering insights, and providing immediate feedback to their questions.
Make your website mobile-friendly
Everyone has a phone nowadays—most of us, a smartphone. So, optimizing your website, landing page, or eCommerce store to be mobile responsive is a great way to boost your conversion rates.
But making your website mobile-friendly doesn’t mean just optimizing the page response to a smaller screen. It should also make it easier for them to purchase online, fill out forms, and do other things as if they were using their desktop. Did you know that, in a recent survey, 61% of consumers reported they’re more likely to buy from mobile-optimized sites? So, make sure your business is not missing out on that. How? Reduce the checkout steps and make mobile-friendly payment options available, such as Google Pay, Apple Pay, or PayPal.
Keep in mind that when potential buyers are on their phones, they’re usually on the go. So, ultimately, your prospects are looking for this process to be as easy and frictionless as possible so you can secure those mobile conversions.
Using videos
By making short, engaging videos with CTA buttons at the end of them, you can increase your product or service sales. According to studies, including video on landing pages increases conversions by 80%. Plus, businesses can also gain insights from video viewers’ behavior, connect with the audience on an emotional level, and make their website more visible to Google’s search engine.
How can you use videos for business? First, create a short video that describes your product or service value proposition—the solution you offer to your audience’s problem or need. Then, include CTA buttons within the first 5-10 seconds of the video and at the end. In this case, you can use a powerful social media video marketing platform to help you optimize your videos for more conversions.
Be sure to follow some best practices when using videos on landing pages: Keep it short—the optimal length is 90-120 seconds. Make the viewer’s life easier by providing them with a transcript. This will make the content more accessible and increase your conversions. Make it mobile-friendly. The page should render well on various devices and screen sizes to help you boost your conversion rates.
Offer your prospects free content
You can’t expect people to give you their email addresses when they don’t know anything about your brand. So, offer them valuable content for free instead—whether it’s an ebook, coupon, guide, or another type of resource. It could also be a webinar or a demo.
Don’t make this content look like an annoying form or something they have to give out their email address for. Your free content should be the path of least resistance to show them how your company can help them achieve their goals, solve their problems, and boost their businesses.
Feature consumer FAQs and testimonials
Answering consumers’ questions before they ask them is an excellent way to boost your website’s conversion rate. If you’re wondering how businesses are doing that, here’s how: They create FAQ sections below the product/service that outline consumers’ most common queries about the products and services, and feature them on their websites, landing pages, or email newsletters.
By doing so, prospects avoid the hassle of reaching out for answers and can quickly find the information they need—giving them more reasons to complete your call-to-action or buy on your site.
Here is an example of Unbounce’s SmartCopy. It is an AI copywriting assistant that helps marketers to write high-quality copy fast and save time. What can you do?. It will help you write, rewrite, summarize or expand paragraphs for your marketing copy. They also offer a free Chrome extension, which you can use anywhere in your email, documents, or even directly on a website.
People often have a lot of questions when considering an investment. Luckily, the team at SmartCopy has compiled some answers for their visitors in their FAQs section and testimonials.
Why not create your own FAQs and testimonials for the brand? You can take a look at Jasper’s and write some that are just right.
Offer free shipping
It seems like offering free shipping isn’t a big deal nowadays, especially when everyone else is doing it. But, did you know that offering this incentive could double your conversion rates?
According to the Baymard Institute’s findings, if eCommerce stores offered free shipping for orders over $100, or $50, for instance, they’d increase their conversions by 42%. All these extra sales would result in huge profits.
In fact, let’s not forget that shipping costs are usually a big deal for consumers because they take up a decent chunk of the total purchase price. So, if you remove these costs from the equation, it could be a great way to boost your conversions.
Price match guarantee
Consumers have become more aware of the prices of the products they are buying. Most are comparing prices online before making a purchase, so offering price-match guarantees can give you an excellent competitive edge.
For example, if your competitor is selling the same product at a lower price, then it’s only fair that you match it or beat it—it’s guaranteeing customers that they’ll get the best deal. This is an easy way to boost your conversions because it qualifies more prospects who are seriously looking for bargains.
Offer free returns
If you want to boost your eCommerce store’s conversion rate, then it would be wise of you to offer free returns along with great customer service. Customers who worry about the return policy of a brand won’t be willing to buy from them. However, if you offer free returns for any reason at all, they’ll have more reasons to complete the transaction and buy from your site.
Free shipping is a great incentive in improving conversions, but it’s not enough in some cases. If that’s the case with you, then this is one of the best ways to boost your conversions.
These are just some of the ways to improve eCommerce store conversions. If you want more information, feel free to contact us for help with any aspect of your business. Have a nice day.
Summary
Do any of those ideas seem like your golden ticket to taking your website conversion to the next level? Hopefully, yes. To recap, the first step when working to improve your website conversion rate is to invest in gathering insightful data about your ideal buyer. When you understand your audience, you can easily craft content pieces and CTAs that resonate with them.
In addition, understand there will be continuous tweaks in your conversion-rate strategy. As you get better equipped to target your audience, optimize your website, create a landing page, and build positive conversion experiences for your audience on other devices. Make sure you provide them with tools that will offer support 24/7 and not only during work hours. Many conversions happen because prospects had their questions answered.
To summarize, these five ideas should give you a starting point to assess your website and conversion-rate strategy. By applying them, you should improve your website’s user experience, make it easier for prospects to go down the conversion funnel, and, ultimately, increase your website’s conversion rate.