A company may have millions of visitors to its website. But at the end of the day, if it fails to convert into paying customers then the traffic is nothing more than a vanity metric.
When it comes to business, conversion matters a lot. That’s the entire basis of its existence. The companies that fail to convert even a tiny fraction of their website visitors are doomed to lose to competition and go out of business.
At PeddleWeb, we know what it takes to convert a decent number of visitors into customers and we have helped many businesses achieve above-average conversion rates. In this blog post, we will discuss conversion, conversion rate, and how to optimize the conversion rate i.e. conversion rate optimization. Read on to know more.
What are conversion, conversion rate, and conversion rate optimization?
Conversion is the process when a lead (or a website visitor) performs the desired action and the conversion rate is the total number of conversions out of the total leads or website visitors.
And conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the technique of enhancing the conversion rate by improving the content, design, user experience or user interface, or any other features of a website.
Why invest in conversion rate optimization?
The prime objective of every CRO tactic is to enhance conversion. But apart from that, it offers many other benefits to a company. Here are some of them.
- CRO can help you to better understand your customers and their preferences. It will also help in making tweaks to the website and enhancing the entire user experience.
- When done right, CRO complements SEO strategies and results in a higher website ranking. When the website gets prominent visibility on search results, it enjoys better traffic.
- Applying CRO strategies does not entail huge costs to businesses. Some free CRO tools such as Google Analytics Content Experiment, MobileMonkey, and Hotjar, among others provide excellent results.
- The return on investment in CRO is extremely high. As per a VentureBeat survey, the average return on investment in CRO tools is 223 percent. The top ten CRO tools including Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, and Hotjar provide even higher ROI, the study found.
- After getting to know the website visitors and potential customers, you are better equipped to create effective strategies to convert and retain them. Some CRO tools have been found as effective as customer loyalty programs and have played an important role in enhancing customer retention.
- Apart from enhancing customer retention, CRO also helps in reducing the cost of acquiring new customers. One research found that the usage of CRO tools can cut down customer acquisition costs by between 20 and 25 percent.
- By ensuring that the website provides an excellent user experience and value to visitors, CRO can very well enhance brand perception.
- By enhancing customer retention, CRO enhances customer lifetime value i.e. the total value a customer adds to a business during the entire course of their relationship.
Optimization: CRO vs. SEO
Often it happens that your articles or weblinks rank on the first page of google. The target to receive website traffic is also achieved. However, the ratio of visitors and leads does not match. Sometimes you find massive numbers of visitors but they rarely get converted.
Is it because your page is missing the elements of an engagement or does it lack in design, user experience, or content? Let’s try to find out the gap.
The process of increasing the visitors to websites has been a famous practice till now which is referred to as SEO. Intending to increase revenue, today’s businesses largely invest in SEO, and therefore they achieve success in generating exponential traffic to their website.
However, what they are missing is giving equal attention to CRO practices. With CRO they can convert the visitors into customers.
Modern digital marketers understand this and along with SEO efforts they provide consultation over CRO too. Alone SEO or CRO may not take your business to the desired results. So while optimizing your website it is important to consider both the marketing strategy for effective customer acquisition.
Conversion rate optimization steps
The right strategies for conversion rate optimization will save a lot of hassle and will give positive results. Here are some proven tactics to ramp up your business’s conversion rate.
Step 1: Identify potential customers
The first step in enhancing CRO is to identify potential customers and research more about them. Creating buyer personas will help in understanding what they need from the website and what CTAs are more likely to convert them.
Step 2: Analyze the website
After identifying potential customers and creating a buyer persona, analyze the website using popular CRO tools. Run usability tests and A/B test the content, graphics, user interface, user experience, and other aspects. After finding out all the issues and problems, fix them as soon as you can.
Step 3: Add social proofs to the website
Social proofs and positive reviews encourage more people to buy. As per the latest stats, nearly 80 percent of people trust online reviews as they would trust recommendations from their family and friends. They are more likely to purchase after reading a review or watching a testimonial video. Online reviews have been found to influence about 70 percent of buying decisions. So leverage the power of social proof and add reviews and testimonials to the website.
Step 4: Craft crisp and powerful CTAs
The key to having higher conversions is to craft effective calls to action (CTAs). CTAs, after all, encourage leads and website visitors to perform specific actions. But it is crucial to know what CTAs to use. As per HubSpot, anchor text in a call to action enhanced conversion rates by 121 percent. It also found that personalized CTAs are 202 percent more effective than regular ones. Also, use searched keywords in CTAs to improve conversion rates. CTAs that contain searched keywords have 87 percent higher conversion rates. Another study by SaaS firm Quick Sprout revealed that a red CTA button enhanced conversion rates by 21 percent.
Step 5: Optimize lead generation form
The quality of leads is directly proportional to a website’s conversion rate. To generate highly qualified leads, it is crucial to optimize the lead capture form. Some websites have unnecessary form fields in their capture forms that do more harm than good. Avoid having too many form fields in the first place. If you already have too many of them in the existing form, make sure to remove the unnecessary ones. It’s best to have shorter and compact forms that look pleasant and welcoming to website visitors.
Step 6: Enhance load speed and make the site mobile-friendly
Did you know that more than half of people trying to visit a website will leave if it takes more than three seconds to load? Not only does slow load speed increase the bounce rate but it also affects the conversion rate. For every extra second a website loads, the website conversion rate decreases by 4.42 percent. To improve load speed and decrease load time focus on using the right image format and compress the size. Ensure to optimize the website for mobile devices.
Conversion rate optimization best practices
CRO best practices are guidelines that are essential for the optimal performance of strategies. Keeping the best practices in mind and applying them will enhance the conversion results.
- Make informed decisions: When it comes to increasing conversions, guesswork and assumptions won’t work. It is crucial to make informed decisions by studying data and knowing the potential customers. Creating a buyer’s person will provide insights into their needs and wants, likes and dislikes, as well as motivations and aspirations. It is also important to know the website’s performance and make necessary changes.
- Build trust: Trust is the most valuable currency for a business. Before making a purchase decision, more than 90 percent of customers look for trust signals. They won’t proceed if they find something amiss. Trust is a must to achieve a higher conversion rate and retain customers for a long time.
- Always test: Whether it’s the text copy, the CTA button, or the website design, creating multiple versions of them and performing A/B tests is the sure-shot way to enhance conversion rate. The more choices you have, the better you can choose.
- Invest in SEO: Between SEO and CRO, you should always select the former first. That’s because enough traffic is necessary to optimize the website for conversion rate. Take the help of professional SEO service providers or hire a digital marketing agency to optimize your website for search engines.
- Embrace originality: A majority of customers value originality and prefer doing business with those that have a unique voice and brand identity. Therefore, every business must embrace its uniqueness and avoid blindly imitating competitors.
To conclude,
The average conversion rate for websites is 2.35 percent. That means if an average website receives ten thousand visitors only 235 of them convert into paying customers. It’s important for a majority of businesses to increase their conversion rate. At PeddleWeb, we have helped many businesses with personalized CRO strategies. If you are looking to leverage CRO, contact the PeddleWeb team to know how we can help you achieve a higher conversion rate.
