Conversion Rate Optimization: Small Changes That Drive Big Sales

Your website is the fundamental arm of your online brand strategy, but to what end? Are you simply trying to expand your reach and appeal to more people, or are you trying to get more sales directly through the website? Your conversion rate is among the most critical indicators if it's the latter. If your site is not converting visitors to customers, it’s doing it wrong. Here, we’re going to look at a host of strategies to improve your conversion rate and ensure that the traffic you get is directly contributing to the success of your business.

Make Good Use Of Calls-To-Action

If you already have users on your website willing to spend time on it and engage with your content, you may have potential customers or clients who need that little extra push to commit and spend money. That is precisely what the call-to-action is for, and there are plenty of examples of good calls-to-action that you can implement or adapt to your website. Ensure that your CTAs are visible, apparent, and directly linked to or contain the information necessary for the reader to take the next step. The best CTAs tend to use action-oriented action to get people to act immediately rather than trying to suggest things more subtly.

Improve The Load Page Of Your Website

Please don’t underestimate how important it is that your page works well and loads quickly. Nowadays, people expect pages to load in seconds, if not immediately. You will likely lose their attention if yours takes a few seconds to load. This is especially true with mobile devices, where attention spans are shorter. Slow pages are a direct cause of high bounce rates and lost sales. You can improve the load speed of your website in various ways. Optimizing any media on the page, such as images, can significantly help. You should ensure that browser caching is enabled, as well, so that user devices can store temporary data, allowing them to load the site faster once they’ve already loaded one page.

Use Positive Social Proof

It can take time and work to build the trust of a visitor or a potential customer. People tend to approach businesses, especially those they don’t know, with a degree of skepticism that you have to work to get past. However, that barrier is naturally lowered when they see other people, just like them, who approve of and support the business. Aside from word-of-mouth happening naturally, you can gather and leverage this positive social proof actively for your website, as well. Ask your customers to leave customer testimonials and reviews that can offer a genuine and positive impression of their time spent with your business. Make sure that any social proof you build is displayed prominently on product pages as well as the front page of the website.

Keep Navigation Intuitive

When people visit your website, they should be able to find their way around and quickly find the content that they’re looking for. If your layout is confusing, with language that doesn’t clearly explain where visitors can see what, people are more likely to look elsewhere instead. Work with web design professionals to ensure your website has a well-structured layout, simple navigation, and good internal linking between pages so users can easily find their way around. Avoid interrupting the user experience by prioritizing specific topics or kinds of content. You’re more likely to lose them than to get them reading the content you want.

Add Live Chat Support

Even if your website is well laid out, and your content is written as clearly and engagingly as it needs to be to keep your customer’s interest, not everyone can continue their journey through the site without help. Some might be looking for something specific that they are not finding, and others might have questions that your content doesn’t quickly answer. A live chat widget on your website can save you from losing those customers entirely. These widgets provide instant assistance to encourage customers to stay on the website and can often lead to new sales. They’re also a vital part of your customer support process, which can help you gain further sales from existing customers.

Be Mindful Of Long Forms

Forms can be vital to getting your online visitors to take the next step, whether signing up for a newsletter email, going through checkout, or otherwise. A website form can be a good way to gather some data that allows you to build further insights into who your audience is. Still, if your forms are too long or ask too many questions of your customers, you will find more of them abandoning them halfway or simply deciding not to engage with them. Consider what information is vital to your form and which additional fields are most likely to provide value, always keeping in mind how much time you’re asking your visitors to give.

Make Effective Use Of High-Quality Images & Videos

Having a visual component to your site will make it much more engaging. The data backs this up across the board. So long as media doesn’t slow down your load speed too much, you should use it well. Images can help better evoke the topic of a given page, helping people recognize that they are where they’re supposed to be. Video marketing content can work even better, however. From explainer videos to product demos, people are a lot more likely to stick around on a page if they immediately have a video engaging them in the content for which the page is built.

Use Exit-Intent Popups

When you’re thinking of implementing popups of any type, you must be careful. They can significantly annoy your visitors when interrupting their journey through your website. However, when visitors plan to close the window or leave the site, no journey will be interrupted. In that case, sending out an exit popup can catch their attention before they go. These popups detect when a user is about to leave and can be used to get their attention with discounts, free resources, or other compelling offers that either keep them on the site for longer or capture them as a lead for future sales.

Personalize The User Experience

The better you can understand your user’s behavior and customize the website and content to that behavior, the more likely you are to keep them engaged. This can significantly improve conversion rates as they stay around for longer, giving your other conversion rate optimization efforts the time to work their magic. Users are also much more likely to become customers when they see offers and recommendations specific to their needs. For instance, if you run an e-commerce store, you can use customer data to recommend items they might like based on past purchases or products they have spent a long time looking at.

Ensure It’s Optimized For Mobile Users

You might still get most of your website traffic through PC and laptop users, but even so, a growing percentage of your visitors will be using mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Failing to consider their needs is likely to see you losing them before you have a good chance to win them in the first place. Your site has to be optimized for smaller screens. Some can get away with simply resizing the whole website to fit those screens. Still, others must be able to resize different aspects of the site to various degrees or have new layouts prioritizing the most critical content for mobile viewers. Work with your web design to determine which type of responsive design works best for your site.

A/B Test Everything

While implementing many of the tips above can help, and it’s easy to see the sense in them, you won’t have an excellent idea of how well something works until you have the data to prove it. This is what A/B testing is for. This is a method where you take the base version of the site (or version A) and test its performance against the site after you have made changes (version B) to see which one works better. You can A/B test everything, changes big and small, from different CTAs to new headlines to new layouts, and much more, to see which tends to perform best for your audience.

The success of your business website has to be measured directly by how well it helps you achieve your goals. A high conversion rate is vital for any business to increase online sales.

Discover insights and strategies for success with Breakfast Leadership — your go-to source for leadership articles, shows, and more. Subscribe today to stay informed and inspired!