4 Savvy Ways to Increase Your Conversion Rates
Even though many businesses differ on what conversion rates are for them, the overall consensus is that these are some of the most important metrics in the ecommerce environment. Great conversion rates are not created overnight, instead you have to continuously optimize your messaging, site and marketing to achieve consistently growing conversion rates.
So, we thought we would delve into the ways that you can effectively boost those rates, especially now, in the season of COVID-19. Whether you consider a conversion to be a sale that has been made, a sign-up to your newsletter, social media shares, products added to the cart, or a form being filled out, there are a few essential tricks you need to know to boost those conversions, and get your sales up.
What is Actually Happening on Your Site?
One of the easiest ways to increase your conversion rate is to know how the visitor is behaving on your site. Where are your entry points for visitors? What has brought a visitor to your online store? Have they come from a paid ad, from social media, or are they organic visitors? How do they then proceed? Using Google Analytics every day will allow you to track exactly how people behave on your site. You can track where they come in from, how long they stay on a page and which pages they move to from that landing page or whether they churn.
Watch which page gets higher bounce rates and spend more time optimizing those pages. Go in as a customer and see what the problem is. It could be something as simple as the page taking too long to load. A customer will only wait an average of four seconds before leaving the site, and this could be massively impacting your bounce rate. You can also monitor which part of the page is getting the most attention. Using a tool like Hotjar, you can see how far visitors scroll and what CTA’s and buttons get the most attention. This will help you optimize these pages.
Optimize the Landing Pages
Let’s get a little more into the detail about the landing page and how you can optimally design it. Using a tool like Hotjar is really helpful to see what your visitors are prioritizing on your site. You can see how far they go down the page, and where you should focus your attention. Maintain the hierarchical structure of the page, with the most popular elements being placed toward the top of the page.
Watch the movement on the page carefully. Many state that having a CTA below the first fold of the page actually increases conversions by up to 20%. This doesn’t mean that you should leave your CTAs to wallow at the bottom of the page, rather, allow your customer to scroll at least once and place your CTA there.
Lastly, check your loading speed of the page and the size of your images. If the images are too big, it will take longer to load and your bounce rate will increase. This will also have a huge impact on your SEO ratings, so ensuring that your loading speed is good is critical for your site.
Improve Your Call to Actions
CTAs are the reason why people convert. They are the buttons that the visitor will click on saying “Yes, sign me up!” or “Yes, I want you to add this to my cart”. These buttons need a lot of attention. Do not ever allow a CTA to fade into the background with the rest of the text on the site. It should have a defined shape, an eye-catching colour and some snappy text on it. Keep it short and simple!
Keep your pages as simple with as few CTA’s on it as possible. The minute you start adding multiple CTA’s is when you start really confusing the visitor about what they should be clicking on. You want to achieve one goal per page. Whether it be signing up a new subscriber, or getting someone to add the product to their cart, keep it simple.
A/B Test and Measure EVERYTHING
The rule of thumb on any site, and when rolling out any change is to test the change. A/B testing is a great way to see what is more impactful on your site. You can monitor new changes in split testing by rolling out changes at the same time and seeing which yields higher results. These tests that are run concurrently and exposed to a similar audience will allow you to determine what draws more attention from your audience.
You can A/B test your CTAs, navigation and menus, images, content and text as well as headlines and categories. You can run each test over a matter of time, one by one to see what works best for your site until you have fully optimized pages. Examine your tools like Hotjar and Google Analytics carefully to see what differed during the period which converted more sales. Rather make one change at a time and test that to have concrete evidence that the changed element made a difference.
Wrapping Up
There are hundreds of ways that you can increase your conversion rate on your site. Make a checklist of ideas that you can add to and tick off as you go along. One of the most useful pointers in converting visitors to happy customers though, is by actually knowing who your customer is and personalizing messaging for them. By creating a marketing strategy that appeals directly to them, enticing them to your site with a great offer and products, you have already won half of the battle. By having this advantage, you can then move on to the technical aspects of the site and start working on that.
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