Driving traffic to our website is often a challenging, time-consuming, and expensive process. Therefore, Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) should play a major role in our marketing strategy.
When analysing conversion rate, it is also important to understand that the customer journey varies from industry to industry. Ecommerce websites have different conversion points when compared with other business models, such as the automotive, where the main goal is to drive leads in earlier stages of the marketing funnel.
Although, and after analysing hundreds of websites, there are some common denominators that can be broadly applied, and help you improve your website conversion rate.
1. Improve website navigation experience
Although you may have a great offer, a poor user experience (UX) can completely make any marketing campaign inefficient. Below follows two of the most important aspects to take into consideration when optimizing UX:
1.1. Improve Website Speed
Data from Google shows that for any page that takes over 3 seconds to load, the bounce rate increases significantly.
Ensure that you website loads fast on both desktop and mobile devices.
1.2. Responsive and Mobile Friendly Website
With traffic volumes heavily migrating from desktop to mobile devices, Marketers need to ensure that website mobile versions also provide a unique and engaging experience.
For some businesses, website traffic from mobile devices can make up to 90% of the total traffic. For these specific businesses, google recommends “think mobile first”. This means that the website should primarily be built and designed based on the mobile version, and the desktop version is then built based on the later, and not the other way around, as it is often the case.
2. Include your Unique Selling Points (USPs)
Highlight the points that make your offer unique, innovative and differentiating.
Ask yourself: “why should my clients buy my product/service, instead of my competitors’?“.
Some of these examples are: “lifetime warranty”, “same day delivery”, “100% organic”, “from sustainable sources”, etc.
3. Communicate your Value Proposition
Describe clearly how your products/services help your prospects solve their problems. What value are you delivering to your them?
Include this information in any page where you expect users to convert.
4. Add a relevant Call To Action (CTA)
Use a CTA that clearly shows what is the action that you want users to take on your landing page. These CTA’s often come under the form of a button, a banner, under a web form, etc. Use time limited offers as a way to urge users to take action.
5. Include Web Forms
Keep these short and simple and adapt them to your business/industry. Longer format forms frequently have higher abandon rate. This highlights the importance of using only the strictly necessary form fields.
6. Make your contact number visible and clickable
If one of your goals is to get people to call you, make sure you make the phone number visible and easily accessible on your website. Generally speaking, the contact number is frequently displayed on the top right of every page.
Additionally, when you make this number clickable, resulting in a direct phone call, you’re making the whole process much easier, especially for mobile users.
7. Use a Chat Widget
Over the last couple of years, the use of these widgets has gradually increased, allowing our visitors to get a quick response and a personalized experience. Although, in some cases these widgets can represent an obstacle to navigation, as on the mobile version these widgets often take most of the screen space, not allowing the user to find the other information they are after. If you decide to use them, make sure they are visible but in a subtle way that ensures a smooth navigation.
8. Keep your message consistent across all platforms
According to the campaign you’re promoting, it´s vitally important to keep the message consistent across all platforms. Anytime a user clicks on an Ad and lands on a specific page, he will expect to see the same message that made him click, clearly displayed on the landing page. When this is not the case, the bounce rate tends to increase significantly.
This is especially relevant if you are investing on PPC campaigns and want to maximize ROI. Google gives better Quality Scores to landing pages that are more relevant and user friendly. Higher quality scores are also associated with lower CPC.
9. Include Testimonials and Reviews
Data from Wordstream shows that in 2020, 85% of users read reviews online before they make a purchase. Encourage your clients to leave you a review, by highlighting the fact of how important their opinion is to help other prospects to feel more confident in choosing us.
10. Test all elements and formats
It is fundamental to understand which formats provide a better user experience and get better conversion rates. Test one element at a time so you can measure the impact of a single change and figure out what exactly works and what doesn’t.
Test all the elements such as the headers, call to action, web forms, page design, buttons and colour scheme.
Conclusion
The strategies described above represent a set of ideas that must be applied according to the type of business you have, the industry you are in, and the goals you are trying to achieve with your website and marketing campaigns.
Pick the ones that better align your business strategy, apply those principles and improve your website conversion rate.
Article adapted and originaly written for “Baze Marketing e Comunicação” (PT version)