Conversion Rates Optimisation: A Guide

Much as it is an organization’s delight to gather a remarkable amount of traffic to its website, the ultimate goal however is not just to generate these leads, The aim of a business can only be said to have been met when leads take certain desired actions strategically planned by the business to be taken by them upon visiting their websites, to achieve this, businesses have to optimize their websites to earn the much-desired conversion. Optimizing conversion on a website usually involves certain processes, as businesses have to take some strategic steps to earn their desired conversion rate.

Keep reading to find out what conversion rate optimization is, the steps involved, its types, and how businesses can fully harness their websites or mobile apps to earn the desired conversion rate.

Conversion rate optimization is the process where businesses increase the rate at which leads carry out certain desired action(s) on their website. Actions that can be referred to as conversion is dependent on the industry, for instance in the E-commerce sector adding a product to a cart and paying for it is what counts as conversion, while merely visiting a website or clicking on a link on the site or signing up to its newsletter is all the action required to count as conversion in the world of media or blogging.

One undeniable feature of CRO is the act of constantly identifying the problems with a website and fixing them to improve users’ experience on the site which in turn helps to result in an increased conversion rate for businesses. This could be through reducing the loading time of the website, improving the content on the site, using shorter texts on the site, improving the picture quality, providing a chatbot, etc.

A low conversion rate is sometimes a result of a variety of factors related to either website performance or design.

To optimize a website for the most conversion, the following are the elements businesses pay attention to:

Conversion research

This involves a study of how to attract visitors to a website and how conversions are made in a given sector.

User experience or usability testing

Here, businesses observe how the website works when accessed by visitors either via their mobile devices or desktop, it is a study of how long it takes the website to load, how fast the images load, the quality of pictures, how quickly the forms on the site gets submitted or the chatbot responds, etc.

Website persuasion

This is the art of constantly updating the website to meet up with trends in the industry and adding up features that can easily get the customers to carry out the call to action such as offering free products upon purchase or offering free subscriptions to services.

Data analysis

It is the process of understanding how a website is performing through the use of qualitative and quantitative data generated from the site and introducing new ideas to help improve the website’s performance.

A/B testing

This is the process of coming up with different ideas for the optimization of a website and testing the various ideas to see which idea generates the best result in terms of conversion.

To calculate the rate of conversion on a website, it’s the number of conversions made, divided by the number of visitors to a website times a hundred

For example, if a clothing store had 48 sales from 500 visits to the website, the conversion rate would be:

48/500 x 100 = 9.6%

The conversion rate optimization process can be broken down into any number of steps that suits the business owner, however, no matter how many steps businesses decide to break this process into the common steps that run through the process are:

Research

This is usually the first point where businesses set conversion goals and come up with plans for optimizing their website’s conversion based on metrics obtained from the website’s analytics and market research.

Implementing and testing

With the research data at hand and the CRO strategy mapped out, businesses then go into the phase of putting their CRO plans into action by first testing them to see how their customers react to them.

Analyzing

This step involves the process of learning, evaluating, and reviewing the result of the CRO strategy or strategies implemented and deciding whether it suits the business or not.

There is no single formula for optimizing the conversion rate on a website as what works for one business may not work for another. Regardless of the various approaches businesses intend to take, these basic principles come in handy for further adaptation or modification to suit individual businesses depending on their peculiar needs.

Work on your headlines

The headline is the cover of a website. It is key to determining whether leads will proceed to the site or use the back button. To this end, it is important to write clear, concise, and catchy headlines.

Write strong call to actions (CTA)

The CTA of a website should be clear catchy, bold, and most importantly properly positioned, to this end it is highly recommended that the CTAs should not only be found on the sales page but should be on every page to make it easily accessible, most importantly the CTAs should be improved from time to time to keep up with dynamic consumer behaviors.

Improve your page loading speed.

Whether your website is being accessed from a computer or a mobile phone, it is important to program your site to load without delay to avoid potential customers abandoning your website even before viewing what your business has to offer.

Make your sites responsive

To further optimize your site, it is advisable to make your site work perfectly on any platform be it mobile devices, iPad, or desktop computers.

Add a functional live chat or chatbot

Even with the growth of the E-commerce space, people are still skeptical about making purchases, especially from smaller businesses, a highly responsive live chats feature will provide a little more confidence and even further help to personalize a users experience on the site, leading to an increased chance of conversion for a business.

Provide social proof

Social proofs such as reviews or testimonials from past customers are a great way to not just advertise a business but boost the confidence of potential customers in the business, this can then lead to an increased conversion rate.

Do an SEO audit of your site

It is very important to ensure that your site it ranking high on google, as all effort put into optimizing a website would be wasted if the site is not visible and ranking well on google, for this reason, it is advisable to regularly update the SEO ranking of your website to earn more leads to help bring in the desired rate of conversion.

Localize your website

When your website is found in more than one country or in different locations, it is very important to make sure that the prices of your products or services are shown in the local currency of each country, and the content on your website is also written in their local languages, sometimes it is even a great idea to provide a contact address and telephone number within their vicinity, this makes it easier for an even larger amount of leads to interact with your business.

Use fewer texts

In this day and age, the attention span of internet users keeps declining, it is therefore advisable to use shorter forms for potential customers and keep the write-ups on the websites very short and straight to the point, to avoid losing potential conversions.

Create abandonment campaigns.

Making a concerted effort to retarget abandoned carts with emails or messages on discounts on the products they carted and did not check out on, or informing them of special offers will help increase the possibility of making a conversion.

Conduct A/B testing.

This is simply trying out different versions of an idea to see which idea has the best result. Businesses should try out different conversion optimization strategies on their website to decipher which works best and leads to the best conversion rates.

Money back guarantee

Promising to return people’s money if the products or services do not meet their expectations will easily allay their fears, boost their confidence in the brand and greatly increase the chances of making conversions.

Avoid creating an account to shop

Due to the limited attention span online and the high level of competition, it is advisable to avoid necessitating leads to create an account to carry out any call to action on your website, a less cumbersome way of doing this might be to direct leads to sign up using a third party website like Facebook, Google, etc

As good and promising as best practices on CRO look they do not always guarantee the envisioned result, this is because CRO is hardly a one size fits all arrangement, therefore, there is a need for each business to distinctly study and understand their target audience and tailor their optimization efforts to meet their peculiar needs as it is the satisfactory user experience of the leads that brings about the much-desired conversion.