There are tons of tactics to increase your sales, profits & revenue, and boost your business. It is critical for you to optimize your conversion rate, reach out to more customers, drive traffic to your website, expand, and thrive!
To do that, you must first understand how to reach out to your target audience. Learn what motivates potential customers, and use that knowledge to develop a strategy that will drive new visitors to your site and make them convert.
Today, we’re going to learn about 5 effective ways to optimize your conversion rate in real-time.
Conversion Rate
When visitors complete a desired action after visiting a specific web page, like filling out a contact form, claiming a service, signing up for email newsletters, downloading a file, or purchasing a product, it means that the visitor converted to a conversion.
Conversion rate is the percentage of the visitors who take this desired action.
For example: If your conversion rate is 5%, 20 out of 100 who visited your website became customers.
Many factors contribute to the conversion rate. This includes quality content, a strong call to action (CTA), a website that loads quickly, and more.
A high conversion rate indicates that your website is well-designed, formatted effectively, and appeals to your target audience. A low conversion rate means that your website is slow, poorly designed, or it’s too distracting due to the many CTA buttons, etc.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
CRO enables businesses to better understand how customers interact with websites, mobile apps, and other digital channels. The goal of CRO is to increase conversions & sales through the optimization of landing pages and web pages following this process.
- Create specific pages, based on data collected from previous web pages about certain types of users based on their behavior, which usually comes from Google Analytics (includes identifying who the visitors are, what they want, where they came from, and what actions were taken during the visit).
- Once you collect this information, it becomes easier to build a personalized plan to create a compelling message that will encourage visitors to convert.
- And finally, measure the impact of those changes on conversions.
For example: If you find out that a certain color or design element has a high chance of turning off users, you might change that to something more compelling.
This allows your site to rank higher in search results.
Best Practices to Optimize Your Conversion Rate
Here are some of the best practices you should keep in mind as you optimize your conversion rate.
1. Put Your Best Foot Forward by Writing Strong Unique CTAs!
To make sure you’re getting conversions, you need to understand what makes someone convert. And for a successful conversion, your CTA should be relevant, persuasive, and trustworthy.
It should also be as clear as possible, short, direct, and specific, and encourage visitors to take action.
For example: “Start Here” isn’t a good CTA because it doesn’t provide context for the user, and the visitors will be asking themselves: start what?
While “Free eBook” is a good CTA because it’s short, direct, specific, and instantly communicates the idea (offer).
P.S. Include CTA buttons on every page or landing page of your site and make them visible and easily accessible.
2. Increase Your Website Speed
Nothing is more underwhelming than a slow web page that takes a million years to load. Most users can’t bear a slow page, and they immediately escape!
Page speed refers to the time it takes for your content to appear on the screen.
- 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
- 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
- A 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
This is huge, isn’t it?
So, keep an eye on your page speed. Especially when your website isn’t converting as you know it should. This will help keep it fast & convenient for users’ experience.
For example: optimize images, reduce redirects, enable caching, use lazy loading, etc.
3. Social Proof Your Website
Buyers are more likely to purchase from businesses with positive reviews. That’s why your business needs it.
Customers love hearing what others think about your services, products & company. Many of them said they would hesitate to purchase without first reviewing the product.
A website should incorporate a “review” section so users can leave comments. This helps humanize your business, giving potential buyers confidence in your brand.
These comments will help potential customers decide whether they should sign up for your service. Also, adding client testimonials is a great way to prove your credibility, don’t underestimate their power.
4. Keep Track of How People Interact with Your Website
Tracking how people interact with your website via website analysis tools will help you identify the most common problems in your web pages by observing visitors’ behavior as they move around your website. Understanding their patterns of behavior enables you to improve your website.
For example: you can watch users as they navigate your pages, fill out forms, where they’re getting stuck, why they bounce off pages, if they’re clicking through to another page without completing a purchase, and much more.
5. Remove Friction from The Customer Experience & Increase Trust
You can use several techniques to gain the trust of users: Avoid broken & spammy links as they damage your reputation.
Include multimedia on your landing page, offer money-back guarantees, regularly update your website, and make your site easier to use.
Conclusion
By now you should be well educated on how to successfully optimize your conversion rate.
Converting visitors into customers requires some real work, like making your site mobile-friendly, (as Google has added mobile-friendliness to search rankings), creating effective landing pages for each of your web pages as they influence conversion rates and much more.
And because the idea behind CRO is to squeeze the last drop of value from each visitor, and increase the likelihood of converting as many potential customers as possible to actual customers; NEVER hesitate to follow the pre-mentioned practices to expand & put more money in your pocket!
About the author
Ayman Albarbary is the founder & MD of Digital Orks Agency in Dubai for digital marketing.
A prominent trainer at key universities and institutes in the GCC who works on a contractual basis at the Chartered Institute of Marketing as a trainer and at PwC Academy as an adjunct trainer, to name a few.
