Converting website visitors into customers requires foresight and effort. Massive traffic isn’t helpful if people just bounce away from your page after a few seconds. Minimally, you’ll meet industry standards for conversions. Ideally, you’ll go even higher than you ever dreamed. CRO tips help you improve your overall rates and achieve your goals.
The average landing page conversion comes in at about 2.35% across all types of businesses. However, the top 10% of websites convert around 11.45%.
At first, you might want to set your goal somewhere in the middle and work to improve it over time. Here are 16 CRO tips to get you started with increasing your sales.
1. Focus on the Customer Experience
Look at your website through the eyes of your customers. From the moment they land on your page to after the purchase, what do they experience? The majority of business owners feel customer retention is more critical than even new client acquisitions. Make sure your site is customer-friendly and keeps people happy.
2. Optimize for Mobile
When it comes to CRO tips, this might be the most crucial thing you do for your sales success. According to Statista, about 4 billion users access the internet from their mobile devices. About 48% of web views are from smartphones. If you want to up your sales, start by making your website mobile-friendly.
3. Add Live Chat
Many people prefer an immediate option to get questions answered. In addition to an excellent FAQ area, you should install live chat on your website. Staff it with trained representatives that can answer common questions. Give your techs the ability to offer customers creative solutions.
4. Refine Your Forms
Research is all over the place when it comes to the length of your forms. Some researchers think the shorter the form fields, the better. Others tell you to gather all the details you need and more. CRO tips aren’t one-size-fits-all. Your best bet is to collect the information you need to follow up with a lead. Then, conduct split testing and refine the form to improve your conversions.
5. Remarket Often
How many times does someone visit your site and then bounce away? Do your best to collect an email so you can remarket to these people. They are interested, or they wouldn’t have visited your site. Send them an invite to take advantage of a special offer.
6. Start a Ticking Clock
Have you ever visited a site and been offered a 25% discount if you order in the next eight hours? Starting a ticking clock adds a sense of urgency to the purchase. It may convince a person on the fence to give your product or service a try.
CRO tips experts will tell you to be cautious with timed offers, though. Once the time is up, the proposal should be gone. Otherwise, you’ll be seen as manipulative, and people know the sale is always there.
7. Speed up Your Site
Unbounced asked 200 marketers to test their websites with Google’s standards for speed. It found 85% of attendees’ sites took over five seconds to load. Many had double the loading speed Google recommended. One way to lose people is for the website to take longer than a second to load.
Do everything in your power to speed things up. Invest in faster hosting service, cut the clutter, optimize images and avoid scripts bogging down the site.
8. Improve Your Headline
Your headline is often the first thing a site visitor sees. It can appear in search engine results and drive traffic to your site. It sums up what your landing page is about in a few words. Out of the CRO tips listed, improving your headline is the best thing you can do to grab attention. The longer you keep someone engaged, the more likely they’ll convert.
9. Reposition Your CTA
Where you place your call to action (CTA) button can make a big difference in your conversion rate. CRO tips from Google point to above the fold as a great choice. It discovered the most viewable CTA position is just above the fold rather than at the top of the page. If you want eyes on your CTA, place it in the lower part of your upper fold.
10. Tweak Colors
Different hues initiate various responses in people. Red can create excitement, while navy blue has a traditional and dependable tone. Think through the colors you use on your landing pages, particularly for your CTA buttons. You may not be able to change your brand’s color palette on a whim, but you can play with button colors.
11. Simplify Your Navigation
Think about the goal of each page of your website and if the navigation helps visitors get where they want to go. If some of your navbar elements don’t line up with the purpose of your page, cut them. One of the best CRO tips for improving the flow of users through your site is revamping your nav hierarchy.
12. Include Trust Factors
When a potential buyer lands on your page, they have no reason to trust you. They may have never heard of you before. You have to give them reason to believe you’ll stand behind your product or service. Add elements such as a BBB rating and link. Include customer reviews to show others are happy with your product.
13. Make Contact Info Easy to Find
Put your contact information in an expected location. For most sites, it is within the navigation bar on the far right. It might appear again in the footer. Make sure people can find ways to contact you without trying too hard. It’s also important to offer several means of getting in touch, such as a phone number, email address and live chat.
14. Display Testimonials
Imagine you’re on the fence about buying from a new company. You see dozens of testimonials from top customers. These may be the missing element driving someone from a browser to a customer.
15. Upgrade Your Shopping Cart
The easier the ordering process, the better your chances of conversions. Spend some extra money on the best shopping cart software and programming you can afford. Sites such as Amazon provide a good example. You can buy with one-click options or add to cart and then immediately check out. The process is as short and simple as possible.
16. Write Quality Content
Do you want to be an expert in your field? Adding high-quality content visitors can’t find anywhere else makes you an authority. It can also drive traffic to your site in the first place and keep users on your pages. Your content should inform, and then you can add the closing hook to make the sale.
Know Your Purpose
Even if you follow all the CRO tips above, if you don’t know the purpose of your website, you’re just wasting your time. Know who your target audience is, what problems they’re facing and how you can solve their issues. With the right focus, testing and determination, your conversion rate will be higher than ever.
About The Author
Eleanor Hecks is the Editor-in-Chief of Designerly Magazine, an online publication dedicated to providing in-depth content from the design and marketing industries. When she's not designing or writing code, you can find her exploring the outdoors with her husband and dog in their RV, burning calories at a local Zumba class, or curled up with a good book with her cats Gem and Cali.
You can find more of Eleanor's work at www.eleanorhecks.com.
