How to Increase Conversion Rate on Your Website
The website is nothing if it doesn’t attract visitors. But, if your visitors don’t turn into leads, subscribers, customers or buyers, you won’t get far. In other words, if there is no action, your business will stay stagnant and your sales won’t grow. Whether you want to start a multi-vendor marketplace or you already run an online store, studio or digital agency, your customers are the base of your business.
Luckily, many proven strategies that can help you increase the conversion rate on your website. With the proper conversion rate optimization, you can maximize the results and easily reach your goals. So, in case you need a few tips & tricks on how to inspire your prospects to take action, keep reading. We asked growth experts to share their best practices that anyone can use to increase conversion rate. Check it out.
Muhammad Farasat Khan, Growth Specialist at IsItWP
There is no single recipe for a good conversion rate. Every business has its set goals which are known as their conversion points. However, what I have been trying is to attain higher sales conversion rates for our business.
What has been driving amazing results for us is, using campaign triggers which only pops up to the right person at the right time. We are certain that a lot of people find popup messages to be annoying and intrusive. But intrusion is the best way to drive visitor’s attention, hence the timing is the key. We are using Timed Display Control by OptinMonster on our website.
These triggers are set up on our how-to pages, where the answer to those queries are the features provided by our product. The triggers are set up in a manner that every page with 5 minutes read time, shows up in after 3.5 minutes a user has spent reading the page. This is because if a user is interested in reading our solution, they would be willing to pay for it. We have seen an increase from 2.3% conversion rate to 4.2% which may not sound astounding. But businesses operating in the B2C niche with higher traffic will surely achieve a greater impact in conversion optimization.
David Grunwald, Managing Director at Global Translations
As any online business manager or owner knows, driving traffic to your website is challenging. But even success in driving traffic is only winning half the battle. Getting visitors to convert is the other and more important half of your success. GTS Translation has been selling professional translation services online for several years. And while traffic is robust due to our dedication to organic SEO and our lofty standing in the SERPs, conversion rates were low-less than 1% of all traffic. If we are a physical brick-and-mortar store, that would amount to less than one sale for every 100 customers.
One of the things that we did to increase conversions is a 2-step approach that we implemented about a year ago. The first step was to integrate coupon codes into our website. Using coupon codes, we can offer our customers flat-rate or percentage discounts. We developed the coupon code software internally. The second step was to implement a cart-abandonment popup window that is displayed upon signs of exit intent. We only implemented the popup window in our Price and Delivery window, which is displayed after the customer requests an online price quote. The popup window offers a 10% discount to the customer and displays the coupon code that should be used to redeem the discount. We found that this greatly decreases the bounce rate in this window and dramatically increases user engagement at this critical stage of the buying process. We also saw a sharp rise in conversions to about 2% of all traffic. This brings us close to the conversation rate of physical stores. Since our website is based on the WordPress CMS, we implemented the PopupMaker WP plugin. We are very happy with this plugin as it is very easy to configure and does the job well.
Daniela Andreevska, Marketing Director at Mashvisor
Our experience at Mashvisor, an online real estate data analytics platform, shows that the best way to enhance the conversion rate on your website is to create very high quality, very relevant content. More than 85% of the traffic to our website comes organically, and our blog is our main marketing tool as well as a lead generation tool. We achieve a high conversion rate by assuring that all content that gets published on our website attracts the right type of leads. We offer tools for real estate investors and agents in the US, so we make sure that our content is targeted at them. If we focus on a wider audience, we could bring more traffic to our website, but the conversation rate would drastically drop. These people would simply not be interested in the product which we offer and will have no value to our business.
Bob Buffone, CTO & Co-Founder at Yottaa
A retailer’s eCommerce site is often the first impression a shopper has of their brand, and if their website isn’t loading or it lacks the features shoppers have come to expect, they could end up driving customers straight to their competition. In fact, 57% of shoppers say they have left a slow eCommerce site and then bought from a competing retailer. Having a fast eCommerce site is critical to success today as shopper expectations for page load times have dropped to a mere 3 seconds. Working with an optimization solution can help retailers inventory and control all of the heavy digital content on their site, so shoppers are met with a seamless experience from their first click to checkout.
Kevin Rodrigues, the owner of Gardening Mentor
One tip you can try to improve conversion rate is to make your website mobile responsive. A lot of people ignore this and their websites fare poorly for mobile. I had this problem on my website as well but found this tip and applied it. I used a mobile responsive WordPress theme and page builders to improve this on my website.
Another tip that I used to improve my conversion rate is to improve the page load speeds. You can do this using page caching plugins on WordPress. Using a CDN to serve images also helps to improve the website speed. And switching to a fast hosting service also does a great improvement in speed.
Bruce Hogan, Co-founder & CEO of SoftwarePundit
Start With the Bottom of Your Funnel
It’s best to start your conversion rate optimization 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. For e-commerce sites, the bottom of the funnel is the checkout flow. A 10% performance improvement in the checkout flow will increase total sales by 10%. Compare this impact to a higher-funnel optimization – a 10% performance improvement on a product page that accounts for 20% of sales will only increase sales by 2%.
Remove Steps in User Workflows
One best practice that almost always increases conversion is reducing the number of steps that a user must take to complete a desired action. This is why features such as auto-login and buy now are so effective for Amazon and other large retailers. Whether it’s logging in, viewing a product, adding a product to cart, entering information, or checking out, reducing the number of steps that a user must complete is a surefire way to improve conversion. At one of my companies, we removed an unnecessary username field from the registration flow and saw new registrations increase by 5%.
Kenny Trinh, Managing Editor of Netbooknews
Give your potential customers the freedom to choose. By making some input fields optional, your customers wouldn’t be troubled filling out information which they could fill out later when buying your product.
Additionally, giving your customers multiple options for payment is a must. Not everyone can pay via credit card and it simply makes it easier for your customers to buy your product.
Last but not least, I advise that website owners should be direct and clear with their product. It’s common sense to make your product descriptions short and concise. After all, your customers aren’t here to read an essay! They’re here to buy your product.
Blake Sutton, Senior Electrical & Software Engineer at Electrical Knowledge
We saw a 330% increase in clicks on affiliate links with one simple change: we moved our recommended products higher up on the page. I’m yet to find an easier way to increase your conversion rate. Our data support the idea that some people just want to know what to pick and don’t care about all the details. There is no need to hide the answer they’re looking for in a wall of text. Give your users what they want, and they will reward you for it.
Another tip to increase the conversion rate is to leverage contrasting colors. People love to argue about whether your CTA buttons should be orange/red/maroon/apple green/barbie pink/etc. But the right decision can only be reached within the context of the rest of your website. You need your CTA button to stand out on your page. So if your website’s theme is orange, then having an orange CTA button is a terrible idea. In that case, you’d be much better off with a contrasting color like blue or purple. It depends. So look at the rest of your website, and think about what colors describe your overall theme. Then pick a contrasting color using a color wheel, and sit back and watch your conversions go through the roof.
Stefan Chekanov, co-founder and CEO of Brosix Instant Messenger
We’ve recently seen good results through more targeted marketing to certain customer profiles. This began with a research exercise to better understand our customers. During this exercise, we found that our current customer base comes mainly from 4 niche business sectors. With this information, we began to design specific solution pages for each of these niches where we describe problems specific to these sectors and how our product can solve them. We draw heavily on our current customers’ feedback and experience to provide real-life examples. We also have begun to create content focused on these 4 sectors as well, such as blog posts. In this way, potential customers from each of these 4 business niches can easily understand the added value that our product can bring to their businesses, which has led to an increase in our conversion rate.
Haley Anhut, Marketing Manager at Clean Origin
One simple way to increase the conversion rate on your site is to forget everything you know about the site. When you work for a company and constantly interact with the site, you start to know it like the back of your hand. Often times what happens is that you forget that your potential customers don’t have the same knowledge. You might understand how to get to the page with your biggest selling items, but if it’s not intuitive for your customer, your conversion rate will never reach its potential.
A personal example of this happened with our homepage header. We were hoping to increase the conversion rate of our newest collection of diamonds, called Hearts and Arrows. So, we added a CTA to our header in hopes it would direct more traffic to those diamonds.
What actually ended up happening is people started looking elsewhere to enter the depths of our site because they didn’t know what Hearts & Arrows was. Not to mention, when you land on our homepage on mobile, the header and CTA fill your entire screen, so users had to scroll or click to find a better path…not a good user experience whatsoever.
But why fix what isn’t broken? We went back to our old homepage CTA that lead users directly into a path to create their own engagement ring.
Conclusion
The good conversion rate is proof that you’re doing the right thing with your marketing strategy. Since it directly affects your sales and your business’ growth, you should pay special attention to every single tip that can lead to a better conversion rate. Even the tiniest detail can make a difference. We hope our tips will help you increase the conversion rate on your website and increase your sales with ease.
We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!
