Conversion optimization is one of the most important strategies to ensure your online presence is successful. A “conversion” is a meaningful action like purchasing a product or filling out a contact form and achieving more of these meaningful actions will lead to more revenue.
If you can tweak your website – in other words, “optimize” it – to ensure that more of these conversion actions happen, you’ll greatly increase your average revenue per visitor. As long as your rate of visitors remains consistent, or increases, you’ll continue to be profitable.
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The question is, how do you do it?
The Importance of Tracking
Before we dig into specific conversion optimization strategies, we need to stress the importance of tracking conversions. Before you make any tweaks to your website, you need to have some kind of tool or system in place to keep track of how many people are converting, where they’re converting, and how they’re converting.
This is important for a few different reasons:
· Determining strategy effectiveness. First, this is the only way to determine whether your overall conversion optimization strategy is working. Are your tactics making it possible to secure more conversions than ever before, or is your website still struggling?
· Objective results of experimentation. One of the most important techniques in the world of conversion optimization is experimentation. There’s no guarantee a specific tactic will work to increase conversions on your site, so you need to test it out and compare it to a baseline control group. The only way to determine its effectiveness clearly is with the help of objective data.
· ROI calculations. Measuring your conversion rate is also important for calculating your return on investment (ROI). In other words, how much are you making from your conversion optimization strategy compared to how much you’re spending on it? Once you know this figure, you can also calculate the ROI of your entire online marketing campaign.
How to Optimize for Conversions
What steps can you take to optimize your website for conversions?
· Include more conversion opportunities. You can easily increase conversions simply by including more conversion opportunities throughout the site. Include popups, written persuasive statements in your blogs, banners, and headers that all call people to action.
· Make your conversions obvious. You can also get more attention from visitors if you make your calls to action (CTAs) more obvious. If they’re tucked away in an inconspicuous corner of your website, nobody is going to notice them. If they take up the entire screen for a couple of seconds when a user arrives on your site, they’ll be unmissable.
· Make it short and easy to convert. Most people have short attention spans and limited patience. If it takes more than a few seconds to convert, they’re going to abandon the opportunity and move on. Make sure your form fields are as short and easy to fill out as possible and make your purchasing process smooth.
· Use colors and fonts to attract attention. Want to get more people paying attention to your conversions? Tinker with the colors and the fonts. Bright, contrasting colors tend to get more attention – especially when they’re used for CTA buttons. However, there’s no single color that works better than the others; experiment to find out which colors work best for your audience.
· Demonstrate social proof. Some people won’t move forward unless they feel like other people have already found success with this product or service. Demonstrate social proof to ease their concerns; you can include social media posts, reviews, and/or testimonials to achieve this.
· Include trust indicators. Are people still reluctant to convert on your website? Consider including more trust indicators. You could include badges of companies and organizations with whom you’re affiliated or explain your money-back guarantee. Give people more reasons to trust your brand.
· Imply urgency. Some people are interested in converting, but they never convert because they procrastinate. If you remove procrastination as an option, they may move forward. You can do this by implying urgency with a ticking timer or a limited-time offer.
· Experiment. Finally, as we mentioned before, it’s vital to experiment. It’s hard to tell exactly which tactics will work best for your audience, so you have to try them out in a live environment. Utilize AB testing to compare two competing ideas against each other and figure out which variants are best to include on your site.
Optimizing a website for conversions isn’t something that happens overnight. You can spend a single day improving your website significantly, but if you want to see the best possible results, you need to continue to nurture and tweak your website gradually over time. Only with an ongoing commitment to learn and grow will you eventually develop the best possible conversion rate for your site.
