No matter what kind of business you run, from eCommerce stores to B2B services, optimizing your website’s conversion rate is absolutely essential to your long-term growth and success. After all, if no one is buying your product or service, you’re in real trouble!
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is similar to SEO in the fact that it’s less a science than an art. It requires practice, patience, and constant care to produce real results, but there are a number of things you can do right now to achieve quick CRO wins. We asked our community of experts to provide their favorite tactics for increasing conversion rates fast, and they delivered!
Read on to learn how you can start improving your website’s conversion rate today.
I’ve been doing CRO for about 5 years now, 3 years in my own agency. The first A/B test I run for any new client is one I know will work 100% of the time: convert landing pages to AMP.
We see an average of 30% uplift in conversion rates from this alone. Research from Akamai says that 53% of mobile users leave a site that takes longer than three seconds to load and that a two-second delay in web page load time increases bounce rates by 103 percent.
From our experience, this definitely holds true.
– Mitchell Kelly, Director, Pathfinder Alliance
I would suggest using more visual content on your website. Visual content attracts the attention of visitors much more than text alone. Try descriptive videos and infographics; test different versions of the product image on the product page; change the size of the product photo or its location on the page.
Written content is undoubtedly useful but, today, visual materials such as infographics or videos are the stand-out stars. Because the human processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text, it is far simple for people to remember visual information than the same information in a written form. That is why marketing videos and especially infographics are all the rage now for increasing traffic to your website.
– Chans Weber, Founder and CEO, Leap Clixx
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to conversion rate optimization. It usually consists of implementing different A/B tests to continually improve your conversion rate. These tests can consist of font choice, call-to-action placement/color/content, hero images used, and even a change to the navigation bar on your website.
Starting an A/B test with some backing data is always handy. Using a tool like HotJar or CrazyEgg can help you analyze what your website visitors are doing when they land on your website and where they’re navigating too. You can use this data to inform your A/B testing. With all that said, on average a website only converts about 2% of the traffic, and with those A/B tests in place, you may be able to increase it by a few percent, at best.
– Rorie Devine, Founder and CEO, GRO.TEAM
I believe that page load speed is often an overlooked but highly valuable component of conversion rate optimization.
Various tests have proved the benefits of site speed. For instance, back in 2007 Amazon released a study that showed that they lost 1% of sales for every 100 ms of additional site latency. Think about ways in which you can reduce the payload of images/CSS/JavaScript/etc. (especially on critical webpages) to reduce load times, or figure out ways to chunk the loading of different components of the page to make sure critical components load before non-critical components.
– Anthony Mixides, Managing Director, London Vape
My clients are always asking me how to increase their conversion rates. The industrial average is 2% but most websites don’t even have that.
The first tip I usually give is to introduce a testimonial/review page on your website. Companies like Yelp and TripAdvisor have been successful because actual people leave reviews about their experience regarding hotels and restaurants and other services. This helps a potential buyer make an informed decision (after all, no one likes to throw their money away at things they’re not sure about).
My second tip is to introduce a live chat feature. So many times potential customers do not convert because they simply have no place to gather additional information. A live chat feature gives the potential customer an opportunity to voice their concerns and helps you gain more information about your market.
Finally, I suggest introducing a money-back guarantee. This works because it shows the customer that you’re really confident about your product and also gives them a sense of security that in case the product doesn’t work to their needs, they can get their hard-earned money back.
– Perrin Carrell, Co-Founder, RANQ
Never underestimate the effects of seemingly minuscule tweaks to your checkout pages.
While working on a project for a large eCommerce dancewear supplier, I oversaw a conversion rate increase of 0.6 percentage points simply by modifying checkout page colors and decreasing form field widths by a matter of pixels. The effort required to make these changes was tiny, involving updates to around 10 lines of CSS; however, the bottom-line benefit over the course of a year was substantial.
– Paul Franklin, Owner, SideGains
More imagery and video will help to show your product or service and its use. Customers want to see products in action to see how it will benefit them after making the purchase. Creating helpful imagery and video will not only help with your website SEO but also attract customers through different channels, especially if embedded through YouTube. Don’t forget to make it look professional, homemade reviews should be used by customers who have purchased your product. You want to sell it to the best of your ability.
Bottom line: more images equals more conversions.
– Michael Lowe, CEO, carpassionate.com
Increase your conversion rates by holding sales. It may seem like a no brainer; however the “Hurry, Offer Ends Soon” signs really do work. People are always out to find the best deals on items they want, holding occasional sales on the products or services you offer can help you increase that conversion rate. Clothing stores are usually the ones that benefit from online sales the most as out of season clothing gets wasted if not sold. So why can’t you apply the same initiative to your site? Advertise it on your social media channels, and if the offer is attractive enough, enjoy the conversion rates you were hoping for.
– Andrew Roderick, CEO, Credit Repair Companies
For growing companies, an important factor in helping your conversion rate can be an easily identifiable testimonial or review added on the actual purchase page. It can often be at this moment that a consumer will get cold feet, especially if you are a new company to them. This is usually because of experiences or stories of being “burnt” (or receiving bad quality products) from companies that they or someone they know have put their trust in despite not knowing much about the company. As well as including testimonials on your website, try to secure Google reviews, as this will likely be where they will go to search for more information on you if they are nervous about clicking purchase.
– Jase Rodley, Founder, jaserodley.com
Live chat can be a great tool to help you improve your conversion rate.
Including live chat on your website allows potential consumers or clients to ask you questions they can’t find on your website and find out information that is important to them about your products or services. Giving this accessibility to website visitors can have a massive impact if well used because you can easily and quickly be removing any concerns that the person might have and leading them towards making the final decision of purchasing your product happily.
– Daniel Foley, Director, Assertive Media
Introduce TL;DR boxes.
The concept is simple. No matter what product, service, or CTA you’re pushing, it should be front and center within the first few lines of your page. The chances are, a large portion of people who have landed on your page have probably already made up their mind and are just looking for social confirmation.
By providing a small snippet and link to your offer within the first few sentences, you capture the large number of people that fall into this category and the beauty of all this? It requires almost no effort. Simply roundup your post into a sound bite style quote, link to the offer and you’re done! It’s that simple!
– Mark Webster, Co-Founder, Authority Hacker
The first step to increasing your conversion rate is committing to learning CRO basics. Start by reading this e-Book.
Then, armed with a basic understanding of CRO concepts, commit to working on experiments frequently. We run approximately 4 per month. After decades of tinkering with websites, I’m confident in saying that when it comes to tried and true axioms for CRO, nobody knows nothing. Rather, the best way to make improvements is to simply TRY things nonstop and stumble into the winner. Yes, there are occasional aha ideas that lead to breakthroughs, but more often than not, it’s an iterative process that requires a lot of trial and error. You just need a semi-scientific method that allows you to run A/B experiments, measure results, and objectively decide on winners.
This survival of the fittest approach will allow you to iterate toward winning ideas, inch by inch.
As relates to easy ways, here are the things that can always use some improving:
Navigation: Can a user find what they want?
Ad Copy: Keep it clear and concise and explain what problem you solve for the potential customer.
Design: The best design is hardly noticeable. It just WORKS. Bad design is offensive on the eyes and can erode trust.
Bugs and Errors: We monitor our website health like a hawk, looking for errors, 404s, slow pages, and anything else that might be annoying to users and negatively impact CRO. If there’s one easy thing to do, it’s making sure your website WORKS.
Call to Action (CTA): OK, I’m interested…what am I supposed to DO next? Do I sign up, fill out a form, make a call? Leading users down your funnel is its own art, but you’ve got to compel them to make the first step.
– Casey Halloran, Co-Founder and CEO, Costa Rican Vacations
CRO, or conversion rate optimization, is more of a science than art, but there are some things you can do right away for quick wins.
First, add customer testimonials to your core product or service pages. For example, if you’re an eCommerce store, you’ll want customer ratings, written reviews, and (if possible) video testimonials discussing the product. This makes prospects feel comfortable buying your product.
A second tactic you can use is the money-back guarantee. When buyers feel security knowing they can return at no charge, they’re more likely to buy.
Third, show how many customers or clients have bought, or how long you’ve been in business, to drum up credibility. No one wants to buy from a startup with a messy house. They want to buy when the experience will be wonderful from start to finish. Essentially, they’re looking for a credible seller, so make that you.
Lastly, give away valuable content on your website and social media to drive more brand goodwill. Doing so, in the short and long term, will increase conversions. The idea is, if this company’s free content is this good, then their paid products or services must be elite.
– Brian Robben, CEO, Robben Media
To optimize your business’s conversion rate, you have to have qualified traffic in the first place. When we talk about digital marketing, conversion rate optimization is always a hot topic, but it’s easy to forget that if you don’t have qualified traffic coming to your digital platforms in the first place, you either: won’t have enough people on your site to drive conversions, or you’ll get a lot of unqualified conversions from visitors that aren’t a fit for your product or service. So, it’s important to remember that before you can optimize for conversions, you first have to optimize your digital platform to draw in more of the right traffic.
Once you’ve got that going, content offers are a great, low-investment way to convert qualified leads. The key is just making sure you’re offering up something that your audience actually wants. Talk to your sales and marketing teams about what materials, brochures, pricing sheets, and content they use to convert leads they’re already talking to. If there is a particular piece of content that stands out, like a pricing sheet that does a great job of qualifying and converting leads, then go ahead and gate that on your website. By simply asking for a person’s email address and name in exchange for that piece of content they really want, you’ll have gained a valuable, qualified conversion.
– Mackenzie Deater, Content Strategist, Evenbound
The easiest way to increase conversion rates is to run A/B tests. This might sound simplistic but its this discipline that can easily increase conversions by 100%+.
You need to make sure you only change one thing at a time so you can clearly attribute any increase or decrease to the thing you changed. Using software like Optimizely can make it easy to make changes and monitor the test results to ensure they are statistically significant.
There is no magic bullet in terms of what to change because it will differ by industry and market. The low hanging fruits though are testing headlines, call action buttons, credibility symbols, page layout, and images. Come up with some hypothesis, test them one at a time, and pretty soon you are going to end up doubling your conversion rate.
– Steve Keighery, Founder, Home Buyer Louisiana
My number one tip for beginners just getting started with CRO is that the most impactful and predictable way to improve website conversion rate is to optimize the bottom of the conversion funnel.
It’s best to start your CRO efforts on the part of your website that will result in the highest impact. For almost all websites, this is the bottom of the funnel or the last steps a user must take to complete the desired action.
– Bruce Hogan, Co-Founder and CEO, SoftwarePundit
One great trick to improve conversion rate optimization is to leverage loss aversion.
Loss aversion is the idea that it’s more painful to lose something than it is to gain something. For example, you would be more upset to lose $20 than you would be happy to find $20. Another good example is gym memberships. You don’t use it, yet the idea of canceling it is painful. You just need to determine what your audience is afraid of losing and why.
You can see loss aversion used most frequently in things like limited time offers, or coupons/discounts that have to be redeemed by a certain date. If loss aversion is used properly, you can easily trigger more impulse buys and increase conversions. Even doing something as simple as reframing your language on your landing page and ad copy can help tap into loss aversion.
People are more likely to click on the top 5 financial mistakes you are currently making over the top 5 financial wins you are currently making. By using these types of negative terms within our Google ads, we were able to increase our click-through-rate by 17%, and our conversion rate by 5%.
– Tonya Davis, Marketing Manager, ThoughtLab
The easiest way to increase conversion rates is to place your call to action button above the fold of your landing page.
Look at heat maps to determine where your visitors’ eyes will land when they open your webpage. It’ll usually be in the upper left portion of your page. That’s where you’ll want your call to action button to be placed. Unbounce.com A/B tested placing the same call to action above and below the fold and found the one above the fold received 41% more clickthroughs.
Our main get a quote form at the top of our website converts over 1000X better than any other quote request form or button on our website. I sometimes look at our competitors who place their call to action button below the fold and think, “What are you guys doing!?”
– James Major, Founder, Insurance Panda
We use TrustPilot on our website to display reviews and ratings from our other customers, which is important to our visitors. We did this because our average sale is over $1,000 and we needed to show extra trust when visitors are looking to purchase. We wanted something that was well known, was from a 3rd party, budget-friendly, and easy to implement on our website.
After implementing this type of social proof on our product pages, we saw a small jump in conversion rates, from 1.2% to 1.8%, and far fewer questions to our team asking about who we were and if they could trust us.
TrustPilot is free for a company our size and has shown to be valuable for increasing conversion rates and revenue.
– Jeff Moriarty, Marketing Manager, Moriarty’s Gem Art
One quick and easy win to improve your conversion rate optimization is to get more creative with your CTAs. If you say something like “buy now” or “sign up now”, it often feels like a big commitment. Instead of using those types of buzz words, try reminding your target audience of what they have to gain by converting.
A good example of this in action is Noom. It’s a subscription-based service, but instead of saying “subscribe” they say “lose weight for good” as their CTA. By doing this, the action of signing up no longer feels like a heavy commitment. You gave them a direct benefit of why they should sign up, so it makes the action itself feel easier.
Determine what benefits you can highlight in your CTA’s and get creative with them. In my experience, this has helped to improve client conversion rates by 3%. It’s a simple, yet powerful tactic.
– Tonya Van Ry, Marketing Director, Utah SEO Companies
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