Most of us want and need website traffic, but the amount of conversions is the metric that should be most important to us on a smart website. You can have all the traffic on earth, but if you have a low conversion rate you won’t get the results that you are anticipating. One of the best things you can do to your site to impact your bottom line is to improve your conversion rates.
1) Fantastic Copywriting
The first and possibly the most crucial factor influencing conversion is having great copywriting. It doesn’t matter how amazing and beautiful your landing page looks if your content itself is not compelling and helps your user fall asleep. Your content should be dynamic and engaging and should also inspire the reader to click buy (or whatever the action is that you’d like them to partake in).
2) Mobile Friendly
It should be common now but in case you missed it, these days it’s absolutely essential that your landing page is responsive and can be easily browsed on mobile devices. Over 50% of world-wide web traffic comes from mobile. It goes without saying but your landing page should look and work great on mobile devices. It should be easy to navigate, load quickly and be easily clickable. If you want need help making your landing page mobile friendly, we’d love to help.
Find more statistics at Statista
3) Use Strong Action Verbs
Using powerful action verbs like “grab yours today” or “save your spot now” are effective ways to encourage your customers to take action and make a purchase or click on something. It’s quite surprising but people are easily influenced and using action verbs can impact an individual subconsciously and entice them to click a button.
4) Add Testimonials
People want to know that others have gone before them and purchased the product or service and are pleased with their decision. This type of social proofing lowers the risk we take when making a purchase. Using legitimate testimonials from previous customers, and including a photo if possible, is a great way to ensure that your customers are comfortable working with you or buying from you and will help them feel ready to get out their credit cards.
Reviews are also a great tool for this and we can help you solicit great reviews for your business.
5) Eliminate Distractions
Don’t be a distraction for your users. Remove sidebars or floating headers. Users should be able to focus on the copy on the website and the product or service itself without distraction. Your page should simply focus on promoting your product to the customer, don’t bother them with things that won’t help you achieve this objective.
6) Reduce the Amount of Fields
Many marketers make the mistake of attempting to collect as much information from their users as possible. Obviously, this data can be great for you and your needs but can seem self-serving and can really turn people off. Think of yourself, do you like to fill out massive amounts of form fields when you are browsing a website? You can likely get the information you truly need over time, but you need to earn it. A decrease in form fields will very likely lead to an increase in your conversion rate.
7) Mind Your Call-to-Action Button
Your call-to-action (CTA) button should be strategically placed where the user can’t miss it. If it’s on the bottom of your page, you may consider moving it up. You may want to test different variations of your button (see A/B testing below) to see if it performs better if it’s in a different location or is a different size or color. Arguably, this is the most important item on your page so you want to be sure that people can see it and that they click on it.
8) Use Trust Signals
Trust signals are a nice tool that should be used on your landing page to help indicate to your visitors that your brand or product is trustworthy. Trust signals can be a variety of things such as testimonials, “Like” counters and trust badges. For example, logos of well-known brands that you’ve worked with in the past or certain recognitions you’ve received or even industry groups that you belong to. Trust signals work as endorsements of your skill and trustworthiness and can help lead to more business.
Hey, that’s me! See, super trustworthy.
9) Include an Image of Yourself
Speaking of trust, there is something powerful about a landing page that includes a picture of you or your staff. People today want to know that there is a real human being behind the product or service they are signing up for or purchasing. If something goes wrong they want to know that they are not dealing with a faceless company and that someone real is working for them.
10) Use a Singular Focus
If you’ve done your job with marketing your company or product and are driving traffic to your site then you’ll likely get traffic from a variety of sources. It’s important to customize your landing pages to be specific to these different audiences. Users that arrive to your page from social media accounts like Facebook or Twitter are different than a user that reaches the landing page from a PPC ad campaign link or your monthly email newsletter. If you offer your product or service to distinct niches, you’ll want to be sure you are speaking their language on the landing page. Landing pages give you the luxury of talking to everybody but you should be doing it one at a time using a singular focus so that your message is succinct.
How to Test Your Conversion Rates
If you are not conducting tests and making ongoing adjustments to your site, you cannot expect to improve your conversion rate. You need to be willing to make adjustments and realize that your site is a living, organic thing and should not remain static. The best way to examine anything is to utilize a scientific method. To do this, you must first come up with a hypothesis, develop a test, monitor the outcomes and come to a conclusion. Doing this sort of analysis without the scientific method makes it impossible to know whether the changes you made were negative or positive.
One of the simplest ways to run tests is to utilize an A/B split test method. The overview of this idea is that you have two pages running concurrently. Page A will be slightly different than page B, and visitors to the pages will be divided evenly between them. This split testing helps you to observe the result of site visitors from one source on two distinct pages. You now have the ability to track the differences and optimize the web page to work best for your needs. For example, you could simply change the color of a call-to-action button on a single page. After that, you can observe how the color change affects the conversion rates.
Tracking your results
It’s possible to run tests all day, every day, but without appropriate tracking you won’t have the required information with which to make informed decisions. At a minimum, you should use Google Analytics to do split testing of your pages most efficiently. This is a powerful tool that lets you track data and it can be used to set up goals and monitor user activity.
In a similar way, click tracking software and heat map tracking can be used to see how visitors interact with your site on a page level. For instance, you could determine through these tools that a large amount of users click an image on your page that doesn’t have a link. This could lead you to insert a hyperlink on the image to help increase click through, and decrease user frustration likely leading to increased revenue.
