subject: Increase Your Website Conversions With These 5 Methods [print this page] Websites are increasingly the number one driver of leads and sales for businesses today. While search marketing and optimisation is currently the most effective way to bring qualified traffic to your business website, Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is vitally important to increasing your websites profitability. This article will take you through a few methods that can help you improve conversions through your website.
What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?
CRO is the process of improving the rate of conversion of traffic to sales or leads on your website and is expressed as a percentage. For example, if your website gets 5000 visits per month, and 800 of those visits results in a completed goal such as a sale, newsletter signup, website membership or completed form, your conversion rate would be 16%.
A lot hinges on how successfully you convert your visitors to customers. A poor conversion rate subverts the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns and therefore increases the cost of acquisition of your customers. Increasing your advertising budget in this case is hard to justify because the increase in traffic does not necessarily translate to profit. In contrast, a good conversion rate will allow you to confidently increase your advertising budget, knowing that the larger volume of traffic will result in more profit for your business.
1. Create Powerful Headings
One of the first things that your visitors will see on your website is the heading. The headings you use on your website need to compel your visitors to read on. Your heading must get you potential customers attention and appeal to what they are looking for.
2. Create Trust with Your Visitors
The impact of a first impression can determine whether your visitors are likely to perform the action on your website that you want them to. Perhaps the most important question to ask is, Does my website look trustworthy? The fact is if your website looks like you got it made on the cheap, your visitors will wonder if you will look after them as a customer.
Aside from the quality of your website design, building trust involves clearly describing your products and services, publishing a privacy policy and securing your ecommerce and contact forms with SSL encryption. If you have SSL security on your website, let your visitors know this by displaying the security logo and details about the kind of security you are using to protect their personal details.
Most visitors are likely to appreciate images that compliment the messages you want to convey to your audience through text. Including images of your products is vitally important to give your visitors a better idea of what they are paying for.
3. Have A Clear Call to Action
Whatever action you want your visitors to take on your website, be it signing up to become a member, complete a form or buy a product or service with their credit card details, dont leave it up to them to work out what you want them to do. A lot of conversions are lost because no clear call to action is found on a websites landing pages.
How should you present your call to action? Clearly and prominently display your call to action on all of your landing pages. If visitors are landing on your website that are ready to buy, make sure they know how to take the next step.
This might be in the form of:
Displaying your phone number prominently in your websites header or other prominent location near the top of your web pages. This is especially important because some people who use the web still dont use the scrollbar of their web browser. Others still dont like completing forms or making purchases online.
An add to cart button that takes you through the ecommerce process.
A button linking to a contact form. Better yet, place the form on the landing page so that the visitor doesnt need to leave the page.
A click-to-call button. This is a clever conversion tool that prompts visitors to click a button that asks for your name and phone number. The web based device then initiates a call to the visitors elected phone number from your company. The visitor answers the call and is connected to your customer service representative. The phone call is free to the potential customer. A lot of websites are using click-to-call devices as a powerful conversion tool. Click here to find our more about click-to-call button service.
Install a live chat customer service feature with a button promoting it. Having a live customer service representative is a sure fire way to build trust because your visitors can get immediate help with their purchase. This is especially useful when selling products or services with ecommerce.
4. Give Something Away For FREE
Web surfers and online shoppers love freebies and this can be the difference between making the sale and losing them to your competitors. Giving something away can be your unique business proposition. If your conversion goals are to get signups or memberships, offer something for free in return for their form submission. If you are selling a service, offer a free quote. If you are selling a product, give away another product with every purchase.
5. Measure Everything and Dont Be Afraid to Make Changes
If you are serious about improving your conversion rate, youll need to measure your traffic and your visitor behaviour. Using website analytics software, you can measure and produce reports of your monthly traffic, where they are coming from or what keywords bring them to your site and then measure this against the conversions you are getting over the same period. Without this data, you are stumbling blind with your website marketing efforts. By measuring the results of your marketing campaigns, you can see what is working and what is not. You can even measure offline marketing campaigns with the use of coupon codes.
Dont be afraid to experiment with your landing pages in your efforts to optimise conversions. If you think that moving the call to action(s) to another position on the page might improve your leads or sales then give it a try. It also helps to get feedback from your visitors or from people that are not involved in your business about their experience. An after sales survey in an email to your customer gives your customers the opportunity to let you know if they had any problems or if there were any point in the process that they found confusing.
The more data you can collate about your websites visitor behaviour in relation to your conversion rate the better you are placed to improve. This data is also valuable when it comes time to sell your business and you can prove how effective your online money making machine really is!
Expert Conversion Analysis
I hope that these 5 basic strategies put your website on the road to increased conversions and bigger profits for your advertising budget. If you need help turning your online business into a profitable money making machine, AWDs Internet marketing services can take the guess work out of the process. Contact one of our Internet marketing experts for a free consultation today.
