A conversion rate is a crucial element in your search strategy. The point of your site is to convert visitors into leads. Your goal is to turn onlookers who are skimming through your site into buyers or subscribers. This determines your conversion rate and is an essential ingredient for PR Agencies and small businesses alike.
Here are 10 easy tips and practical examples to raise your site’s conversion rate.
What is a Conversion Rate?
You now know the purpose of a conversion rate but might be left thinking how exactly this two-letter word works and its significant importance. Let’s jump into what a conversion rate is and its meaning. To put it simply, a site’s conversion rate is the percentage of users who take the desired action. An example of this would be the percentage of visitors who visited your site and ended up buying something from it.
Conversion rates are essential if you want to drive a lot of traffic to your site. Everything from design to a strong advertising campaign will aid in more people interested in your product, leading to a higher conversion rate.
But What is a Good Conversion Rate?
You might be achieving a conversion rate of 3%, 5%, or even 10%. However, it might leave you wondering what those numbers mean and if it’s as high as you want to go?
Across a multitude of industries, the average conversion rate is 2.35%. The top 25 % of these industries or landing pages are converting at 5.31% or much higher. It’s ideal to break into the top 10% of landing pages where the conversion rate is 11.45% or higher.
Don’t be discouraged by these numbers because a 2 to 3% conversion rate is still useful. It means for every 100 visitors, you expect to get two customers, which is a pretty good rate. There are many sites that are not even at a single-digit percentile and only have a 0.1 to 0.2% conversion rate. That means it takes 1000 visitors to get just one customer.
There are ways to improve these rates with these tips below:
- Remove Distraction
- Add testimonials, reviews, and logos
- Strengthen your CTA
- Only Ask for what You Need on forms
- Add live chat
- Offer a money-back guarantee
- Do A/B testing
- Increase trust
- Enhance the purchasing process
- Optimize for mobile
- Remove Distraction:
A cluttered website is not the way to go, and it’s not what you want to present to your visitors. Your landing page should be straightforward and easy to understand. In this case, less is more.
You want your visitors to focus on what you’re giving out, so make it clear. Use a headline and subheadings to make it more organized and concise. Provide them with the benefits and features of the product you’re selling.
Here’s an example of what your landing page shouldn’t look like:
There’s too much going on here, and a first-time visitor may get confused and end up just leaving the site. Rather than presenting too much at once, instead, only include information relevant to your page’s goal and make it concise and simple.
- Add Testimonials, reviews, and logos
Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes. If you’re buying a product for the first time, you’d want to read some reviews from others to learn its effectiveness. Your visitors will enjoy the same so put their minds at ease by providing testimonials and/or reviews from past customers.
To take it even a step further, you can add a series of logos that will instantly build trust with new visitors. Logos are like testimonials but from companies and marketers who have provided a service for or sold to.
A good inclusion of logos would look something like this:
- Strengthen your CTA
A CTA is a call for action and what tells your visitor to take some specified action. It’s typically written as a command or action phrase. “Sign Up” or “Buy Now” are examples of general CTA’s, but they aren’t the best at increasing your conversion rates due to their genericness.
Taking a few minutes to improve your CTA is an easy way to increase conversion rates. Start with the word “Yes” as it is highly effective, then add on your offer. Something like “Yes, I want my discount” will work better than “Buy Now.”
Make sure your CTA stands out in a bold color, so it isn’t hard to miss. This is usually in red.
Check out Airbnbs CTA:
Not only is the page appealing to customers, but the CTA is bright red in a dull background, making it hard to miss.
- Only ask for what you need
Forms are a great what for getting to know your visitors. You might want to ask for as much information as possible, but that’s not the answer. Instead, aim for not too much and not too little. Try and find the perfect balance.
A long form will seem more tedious to a visitor, resulting in them just closing your site and avoiding it together. Though it may seem like the best thing to do at first, it’s important to remember that fewer fields bring a higher conversion rate.
- Add live chat
It’s common for visitors to buy your service, but be on the fence. They may have questions that stop them from completing the purchase, or they might just want to talk to someone about if it’s a good fit for them.
This is where live chat comes. Live chat is the perfect tool for helping these people because it requires no extra work. I am a massive fan of live chat myself because it has saved me many times from purchasing the wrong product.
Like a small pop-up, live chat tools are super easy to add to your site. They’re not hard to spot and are a perfect way to keep people on your site.
- Offer a money-back guarantee
Customers tend to avoid risk and not put their money at stake. They want tobe sure they’re getting what they paid for.
A money-back is that guaranteed assurance that pushes those fears to the back. Once a consumer knows they aren’t losing their money and stuck with a product they might not end up liking, a sense of trust is built.
Money-back guarantees will not lose you money. They are not just an easy way to increase your conversion rate but build a longtime trusting relationship with your visitors.
- Do A/B testing
Conversion optimization is all about testing and then retesting and doing it all over again. Experimenting is the best way to explore new innovative opportunities for your site.
First, you need to decide what you want to test, and headlines are a good place to start. As I mentioned before, a good headline is what makes your landing page. It is your visitors’ first impression of you, and you want to engage them.
When A/B testing your headline experiment with variables such as:
- Length
- Tone
- Statistics
- Use of numbers
Test one thing at a time so you know what change makes a difference. Focus your attention towards the headline as it will have a higher effect than other elements then go from there.
- Increase trust
I already explained how trust is one of the most important things you want from your visitors. Money-back guarantees the start of that relationship, but there is so much more to it.
You want to remove anything that can cause friction between your brand and your visitors. Make sure to update your site regularly and keep it up to date. If you haven’t posted a blog in years, that will cause friction and a lot of distrust.
Avoid using spammy links, so the site is easier to use and doesn’t seem like it has a different agenda. If you want to go the extra mile, include team bios, so your audience knows who they are getting information from. Having these elements is a sure way to impact your conversion rate just as much as not having them.
- Enhance the purchasing process
Making a purchase should be a simple and fast process. This means there shouldn’t be too many steps in the checkout process, and payment buttons should be easy to spot.
Remove any restriction on online forms that are too tedious and could make your visit change their mind.
Add in the option to check out as a guest and use whatever payment they want such as:
- Google Pay
- Apple Pay
- Paypal
This is the end of your visitors journey on your site so make sure the process is easy and pain-free. A less complicated checkout process will increase conversions.
- Optimize for mobile
These days, nearly everything is done on our phones. Therefore, mobile optimization is as vital as ever. It has the power to reduce conversion and bring down your Google ranking.
Mobile and desktop experiences are sometimes vastly different. You can use Google’s mobile testing tool to check if your site is mobile-friendly. This tool will give you recommendations for how to improve the performance of your mobile site.
You might just have to change the font, make some pictures smaller, or improve page speed. Whatever it is, having good mobile optimization is a massive part of increasing the conversion rate.
Conclusion
Now that you know what a conversion rate is and the considerable impact on your site it’s time to start optimizing as quickly as possible. These tips will help you increase your conversion rate, and with a bit of testing here and there, your site’s rate will be sure to increase. Apply what you have learned, don’t be afraid to experiment and tweak different methods, and you will see a boost in conversion rates. Implement these tips by building a trusting relationship between you and your visits and optimizing your conversion funnel.
