How to increase your conversion rate? – Most effective ways to increase website’s conversion rate

In a nutshell, conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of improving the percentage of visitors to a website who take a desired action. The desired action could be anything from making a purchase to subscribing to a newsletter or filling out a form. While there are many factors that can affect conversion rates, CRO is all about making small changes that can have a big impact. Even a small increase in conversion rates can make a significant difference in overall sales and leads.

There are several ways to improve conversion rates, but it’s important to start by identifying the key areas that need improvement. Once you’ve identified these areas, you can begin testing different tactics to see what works best. Some common tactics include A/B testing, customer surveys, and heat mapping. Test different tactics and track your results to see what works best for your business. With a little effort, you can significantly improve your website’s conversion rate and generating more leads and sales.

Conversion Rate Optimization Tips

Converting the online visitors that come to your website into clicks is something that online marketers aim at. Every click on your web page matters because it registers across as an interest in your website, your brand and your products and services. However, many SEO teams are struggling to bring about a conversion rate that satisfies them or their business curve. Here are some effective tips to increase your conversion rate:

Related reading: How to generate more traffic to your website? & How to engage your website visitors

Competition Counts:

Look at your competitors and find out what they are doing to increase their conversion rates. It does not mean that you replicate their methods because it might not work out that way. Instead of imitating structural or procedural changes, try to pick up the idea that is working for them. Moreover, you must know the ceiling of conversion rates in your domain. You may think 2% is good enough and anything more is not achievable. Studying the competition may tell you that your main business rival is hitting 5%!

Accept and Fix Loose Ends:

There is no point in arguing that your website is working for you when clearly the conversion rate is far from desirable. Instead of reasoning why you need to stick to your guns, be pragmatic and make changes. Test these changes and check if there is any effect on the conversion rate. You cannot find out what you are doing wrong unless you tinker around with the web design or content. In this process, make sure you fix the loose ends lying around, like broken links or complicated navigation.

Don’t Replicate:

When talking about the point of imitating ideas in the first bullet, it was mentioned not to replicate finer aspects of a successful website. For example, there is a particular framework on the ebay.com site and that is giving them a very high conversion rate. You cannot expect the same design to work for your website because you are not a strong brand like ebay.com! You need something different and unique to your business and brand. This is an area where you have to trust the experts and allow them to take over. Ensure that usability and common sense prevails when thinking of website changes for better conversion rates.

Focus on Activation, Acquisition, Conversion & Retention

You should focus on creating excellent landing pages & landing page optimization. Your first and foremost priority should be great customer experience (CX).

Landing Page Guideline – 3 sec litmus test (Video guide)

You should give answers to the following 3 questions on your landing page in a crisp way.

1. Who are you?
2. What do you do?
3. What benefit I can get from you?

Along with that, you should put a clear CTA – Call to action (Button or link) and put Trust factors on your landing pages.

Related reading: Landing page optimization

Top 3 Call-to-Action (CTA) Techniques that Work

Your web pages do not mean anything significant if the reader, or the online visitor to that page, does not take some action after reading it. The action can mean clicking on a web link provided as anchor text, or going on to read the next page in sequence or take the coveted option of making a purchase. However, if the online user does not take any action and simply reads over the page and leaves it, your content is not up to the mark and fails its purpose. You need to push in some call-to-action techniques so that the online visitor is seduced into clicking for more. Here are the top 3 call-to-action techniques that promise high rewards:

Something in Return: 

You have to give back to the online user something in return for clicking on a link or downloading a pdf document or any such action that you desire from your end. You have to offer them an additional discount or some freebies in the form of software or merchandise. The idea is to make the reader, or user, feel tempted about taking some action after reading through your page. No one likes to do something for nothing!

Address Issues: 

Online users often shy away from taking an action after reading a page because they are worried about consequences. Will the product be delivered safe and good? Will the cash-on-delivery option be available on your address? The best call-to-action technique in such cases would be to anticipate what the concerns might be and then address them directly. You can put up a widget promising money-back guarantee or allow users to check cash-on-delivery availability by typing in their pin/zip codes. You have to dispel forebodings of the users.

Cat in the Bag: 

Curiosity is the key to call-to-action. If the online users are not curious about your ad copy or widget, they will never click on it to find out more about it. You have to keep the cat sealed up in the bag for users to come look for it. Of course, you have to put in sufficient number of clues to tell them that there is actually a cat in the bag! No one clicks on links that does not give the impression of revealing a wealth of information. Bring about that mystifying quality in your ad and anchor text links.

Call to Action Tips for websites [Infographic]

Conversion strategy – Most effective ways to improve conversion rate

You can apply the following strategies to get more conversion from your landing pages.

1. Build Topical Cornerstone pages
2. Interlinks to relevant other pages
3. Value proposition, benefits & content related to target group
4. Highlight POD – Point of difference / your USP from your competitors
5. Work on POP – point of parity / similarities with competitors.
6. Create better CTA (Call to action)
7. Focus on quality content creation
8. Put great visual content (Infographic, audio, video, interactive content)
9. Send Push notification
10. Cart abandonment automation
11. Automated triggered emails
12. Use proof or social proof.
13. Urgency creator
14. Exit intent pop up
15. Chat / whatsapp option
16. Chatbot , AI, gamification
17. Prompter pop up or triggered pop up
18. Facebook auto reply / auto messaging feature.
19. Run time to time Ads (Google Ads, Facebook Ads) or Influencer Marketing.
20. Customer relationship through new offers, discounts, contest etc.
21. Check Web analytics (Google analytics, Heatmap Analysis), A/B Testing
22. Remarketing / Retargeting Ads
23. Mobile app & mobile marketing

Related reading: SEO with conversion optimization can give you the best results

Use of automation tools

You can implement marketing automation to focus your effort & time more into betterment of your products or services and customer support by automating the recurring tasks by tools.

• G suite
• Basecamp
• Trello
• Hubspot
• Asana
• Zoho
• Intercom
• sendgrid
• Mural
• Drift

Related reading: How to generate online leads?

Higher Online Conversion in Easier Steps

The nirvana of online marketing is having all your online visitors convert into possible leads, if not sales! Just like nirvana this is a theoretical state of existence that is near impossible to achieve! What you can do is go as close to that perfect state as possible. There are a ton of tricks and tips doing the rounds on how to convert your online visitors into leads. You must be knowing many of them yourself and we have covered many of these tricks in this blog itself. Here’s a rehash on what works best in the online conversion of visitors into potential leads.

Design of the website

The first trick in the book is the design of the website. There are tomes written on this topic, almost every single day! A website with a killer design and layout has a much higher chance of being rewarded with a lead than one that is bland and boring. The key to successful web designing in this regard is to ensure that your landing page is clutter free. Cramping too much into too little space is what you must never do. Leave some white spaces around to give breathing room for the visitors. That will also help to put the visual focus on where it matters most: your marketing message.

Faster website

The second trick from the experts is that your website has to be faster and quicker on all browsers, be it for computers or mobile devices. Websites that are slow in uploading or downloading data always, yes always, lose out on online visitors. Online visitors pay dearly for their internet connection and more often than not, extremely busy and impatient. They have no time for snail-like websites crawling to their devices. They want fast uploads and downloads. Use dynamic servers that ensure that the nearest server is the one serving the user with the required web page.

Better CTA

Finally, conversion into potential leads is all about hitting home with the marketing message and call to action (CTA). As a thumb rule, make sure that you have only one CTA message per web page. Following the first rule, don’t confuse the user with multiple CTAs in one web page. Revolve the content of the page on the CTA and put due emphasis on it. That will convince the online user that it is the right thing to do and get you what you want: a potential online lead.

Lead Magnet & Lead funnel creation

Light-weight Websites for Better Conversion Rates

Online visitors pay for internet bandwidth by the amount of data that they consume in the process. Moreover, they have time constraints to think of and have plenty of options on their computer screen. If your website is heavy or slow to upload on their computer, a user will take the easiest way out: shut down that browser tab and go through to your competing website. This drain will eventually cause a lot of hurt for your sales team because the number of conversions per 100 visitors drops significantly. There are some quick ways to fix this problem. Read on!

Make a lighter website

The simplest way to build a lighter website is to bring down the data size on photos. Your website will have a number of images. If you can convert all these images into JPEG versions, you will end up making your web page a lot lighter. For example, a PNG image of 1 megabyte will get converted into a JPEG image of just 140k. Building up a website that is light will also mean that the hosting service provider charges you less, not to mention the reduced bandwidth required from the end of the customers.

Lower the number of server requests

Bring down the number of requests that browsers have to make in order to upload your web page. This will have a quick and strong impact on the bandwidth consumed to upload the website. It will mean a website that shows up quicker on the user’s screen. A prime example of this trick hitting the sweet spot is the home page of Google. It is a no-frills page that comes up super-quick primarily because the browser requests put up to pull this page to your computer is at its minimal. A lean page of JavaScript files, lesser images and fewer buttons to analyze user visit data will achieve your purpose.

Use Content Delivery Network

Distance between the user and the hosting location is also integral to bringing down the time required for the web page to upload. You can use hosting facilities closer to your demographic green zone or try out Content Delivery Network (CDN). On a skeletal level, this breaks up your content so that the geographical location of the user will become crucial to decide from which point the web page will be pulled. The nearest location will ensure that your users get what they want in quicker time.

Related reading: How to increase page speed of your website

Unique Way of Converting Online Visits into Leads – The contact form

The purpose of SEO and online marketing does not end with getting a rich influx of online visitors. Bringing in customers into a shop does not pay the bills in any way! You need to sell things in order to justify and validate your business. Similarly, online visits do not count for much unless you also make these visitors enlist as possible leads. It is a tough task to do that in the online market scenario that we have today. There are so many options out there for an internet user. You really need to be ahead of the competition curve to turn a visit into a lead and then into a sale.

Keep a quick contact form accessible easily from any page

Here’s something you can do. Make the process of enlisting as a subscriber or getting an enquiry out of your website easier and clutter-free. On most websites you will find long and irrelevant subscriber forms waiting for those who want to ask questions about a particular product or service. Online visitors with limited time and bandwidth on their hands are quickly repelled by these forms and they shut down the browser tab and look at other options. What would you achieve if you get those unnecessary details? Instead of walking down the clichéd route, cut down on the frills!

Keep only important initial fields on forms. Ask details later.

Get the potential subscribers something easy and save their time. You can simply take an email id if they are looking for newsletters. After they have sampled your newsletter and liked it, you can always ask them for further details or their thoughts on your products and services. Earn their confidence first before asking them to contribute towards your brand building exercise. You cannot expect them to invest time and effort to write things on your page or answer questions when they are not sure if you are worth their time.

Simple & minimalist approach wins the race

The thought process backing this kind of online marketing is simple: the harder the process of initiation, the less motivated people will be to take part in it. If you ask a child to draw entire landscape scenery, the child will shy away from it. Encourage the child to draw just a tree or a house and you will find them willing. Then lead them from one to another and you have the landscape that you are looking for! Make the first step easier for your online visitors and watch the change in conversion.

Using Ads Better for Online Conversions

Advertising on the internet is a sure-fire way to grab eyeballs. However, the purpose is not over by just making the ad visible to a greater number of people. You have to ensure that the people who see the ads click on them, visit the landing page of your website and finally turn into potential leads. The whole cycle must be completed before you finally pat yourself on the back for creating a successful ad. Let us now look at this cycle closely and examine the minute features of each stage in this cycle.

Google Search & Display ads

First up is the display & search ad. There are two key points here: creating an ad copy and visual that will appeal to users who are used to looking at internet ads by the hundreds and placing the ad in a space that will break through the clutter and make itself visible to users. Both of these points have to be considered while developing and positioning the ad. The ad copy must make it clear to the users what they can expect to find on the landing page that this ad leads to. There must not be any differences between what you promise them on the ad and the landing page that receives them.

Make good & relevant landing pages

The landing page is the next hurdle. Landing pages fail to make an impression if they deviate from the display ad that we talked about. Landing pages must make good what the ad talked about. These pages have to visually appeal to the users and also make for a good read. Additionally, you have to be concerned about the SEO perspective as well. Landing pages must have the right keyword balance and back-end optimization for search engine algorithms to detect them easily. If you don’t find the conversion rate of your landing page satisfactory, look at them with fresh eyes.

Test , Test & Test

If your user leaves the landing page without making any clicks, you can make a last ditch attempt with another display ad. That apart, you have to look at your landing page and display ad in unison. It may be that the users are not getting what they are looking for or your landing page is packed with too much information. In that case, change the format of your landing page and test again. Keep testing till you hit a higher conversion rate.

10 CRO Techniques (Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies) to create blog posts that convert well [PDF download]