WHAT IS CONVERSION RATE?
In an online marketing setting getting a sale won’t be a hassle, your online store will be a one-stop shop for interested people in your products. More website traffic will be more conversions. But we should know how to lure them by learning about their purchasing decision, enough data from the customers, customer concerns, and data analysis are tools for what we called internet marketing.
A conversion rate is a percentage of the target audience who complete the desired action by completing a web form, signing up for a service, or purchasing a product.
A high conversion rate means well-designed landing pages, formatted, effectively, and appealing to your target audience. A low conversion rate optimization could be a result of a variety of factors related to either website performance or low search engine results.
A “good” conversion rate depends on your industry, niche, goals, traffic channel, and audience demographics, among other factors. Making sure that we focused on customers’ concerns and understanding user behavior. The simplicity of the landing pages will also affect boost conversions.
How to calculate Conversion rate?
Conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the number of visitors and multiplying that number by 100 to get a percentage.
Let’s say you’re defining conversion as a newsletter opt-in, and you have an opt-in form on every single page of your website. In that case, you’d divide the total number of newsletter form submissions by the total number of website visitors and multiply it by 100. So if you had 100 submissions and 1000 visitors last quarter, then your conversion rate would be 10%.
You can repeat this process for every conversion goal on your site. Just make sure to only count the number of visitors on the web pages where the offer is listed. For example, if you want to calculate the conversion rate of your ebook offer, then you’d divide the total number of downloads by the number of people who visited web pages where the ebook offer is listed.
Alternatively, you can calculate your website’s overall conversion rate by dividing the total number of conversions for every conversion opportunity on your site by the total number of visitors on your site.
WHERE TO IMPLEMENT A CRO STRATEGY
4 areas on your website that potentially boost conversion rate optimization.
Homepage
Homepages are prime candidates for CRO. In addition to making a first impression on site visitors, the homepage is also an opportunity to retain those paying customers and guide them further into your website.
You can do this by emphasizing links to product information, offering a free signup button, or even incorporating a chatbot that solicits questions from visitors at any point during their browsing experience.
Pricing Page
A website’s pricing page can be the make-or-break point for many website visitors. CRO strategy can boost conversion rate turning website visitors into paying customers. by customizing the price, for example, the price per year and the price per month website visitors will be thinking about where can they save more, also by providing the features of a specific product, freebies, and reviews on it.
Hotjar, for example, added a simple email opt-in popup form on its pricing page and got over 400 new leads in just three weeks.
Blog
A blog is a massive conversion opportunity for a website. In addition to publishing thoughtful and helpful content about your industry, a blog can use CRO to convert readers into leads.
This process often includes adding calls to action (CTA) throughout an article or providing a link to readers where they can submit their email addresses to receive an ebook.
Landing Pages
Since landing pages are inherently designed for people to take an action, it makes sense that they have the highest average conversion rate of all signup forms at 23%. An event landing page, for example, can be optimized with a video of last year’s event to encourage visitors to register this year. A landing page that’s offering a free resource can be optimized with preview content from that resource to encourage visitors to download it.
Now that you know where you can optimize for conversions, you may be wondering how you know when your business is ready to start the process. Website visitors might always wanna see this every time since this will be the interface in an event or sometimes a page where we can subscribe to a newsletter.
Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies
Here are some applicable conversion rate optimization marketing strategies to test and implement at your company.
Create text-based CTAs within blog posts.
Creating a call to action in every blog post is a must to optimize conversion rates. There are also factors that often people missed for example banner blindness. Banner Blindness is a real deal when it comes to site visitors. Often people tend to just read half of your article but in some cases, they won’t be scrolling and reading it down until the bottom. That is why a Call to action or CTA text-based would have a great impact on every eCommerce site and the digital marketing space. Text-based CTA would be just a box with only one word but it would be attractive to the eyes.
Add lead flows on your blog.
Site visitors would love a website that has colors in it. A lead flow would be a great help in your website conversion rate. A lead flow is a highly designed pop-up to attract attention to your site. So don’t forget to include this in your blog articles.
You can either choose a slide-in-box, drop-down-banner, or a pop-up depending on your offer, and make sure to be creative.
Run tests on your landing pages.
Landing page is one of the most important pages in your website’s conversion rate, it’s a cro tool, integral to your conversion goal.
Landing pages are where your site visitors convert into sales. So make sure to test your pages first before publishing them. Based on google analytics A/B testing would be helpful with every landing page. The table below will show the impact of A/B testing.
Thanks to A/B testing, China Expat Health was able to increase its lead conversion rate by 79%. One of the most impactful changes was swapping out the headline “Health Insurance in China” for “Save Up to 32% on Your Health Insurance in China,” which immediately conveyed a value proposition to visitors. This proposition was then supported by customer testimonials.
Get everything you need to start effectively A/B Testing your website today.
Help leads to immediately become a marketing-qualified lead.
Common visitors practically will always gonna get down into business without any small talk, they just want to speak to a sales rep with any nurture.
There are specific actions you should encourage these high-intent visitors to complete so they can easily become marketing qualified leads (MQLs) — and they can take action through a combination of thoughtfully designed web pages, compelling and clear copy, and smart CTAs.
Based on Hubspot they discovered that the visitors who signed up for their demos have a high conversion rate compared to those signing up for their free trial. So to have a rate optimization they optimize their website and conversion path to visitors booking demos or meeting with a sales rep.
Build workflows to enable your team.
There will and would be a lot of work and tasks that sometimes you might be missed especially if that concern might help increase conversion for example expired carts on an e-commerce website. There will be a lot of free tools that we can choose from. Marketing automation would be a great use. Putting in visitors’ contact details on the site so that we can trace them also automatic email with workflow should be added to follow up or auto-response to the inquiries and general customer’s concerns from visitors that we can no longer cover right away.
From an e-commerce perspective, you can send an email to people who abandon their shopping cart as a reminder. According to research from Moosend, abandoned cart emails can be very effective. They have a high open-rate of 45%. Of the emails that are opened, 21% are clicked. Half of the people who clicked make a purchase.
Optimize high-performing blog posts.
The more blogs that will be published the more rate conversion but we also need to have optimization efforts and check on the topics, body, and impact on every blog published.
To start optimizing your blog content, identify the highest web traffic and low conversion rate optimization and check on what is the reason behind this because usually, the issue will be on the keywords which are related to SEO, the content that you are promoting, and also the CTA may not be that visible.
Also, don’t forget to check on your blogs that have high conversion rates making sure that this blog will still be driving visitors and consistently leads generated by optimizing the search engine results page ( SERP ) or updating it so that it would be updated and relevant.
Leverage retargeting to re-engage website visitors.
The hard truth is that higher web traffic with low conversion might be depressing but visitors who tend to have a 3-second glance at your webpage will always have a reason to come back. Retargetting visitors that visited your website might have a 2nd chance at conversion rate optimization. By leveraging retargeting on Facebook and other platforms, you can re-engage people who left your website.
Retargeting is a method where you trace visitors that visited and just left your webpage by creating ads and posting them as they visit similar websites on the web. This would be particularly impactful when you are retargeting people who visited your highest-converting web pages.
Take United’s retargeting campaign for example. Using insights from previous ad campaigns, United focused on reaching people who had viewed their ads and were already considering booking a vacation. To this select audience, they promoted a 15-second video ending in a call-to-action.
If viewers felt inspired enough to book their vacation, all they had to do was click on the CTA to be taken straight to the United website. This proved to be a huge success. In just one month, 52% of conversions attributed to YouTube were click-through conversions directly from the ad.
Now since we already know the strategies in where to implement it, now let’s talk about starting CRO.
How to Get Started with Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
I know right now you are asking yourself where should I start Conversion rate optimization (CRO)?
Before starting it you should list all the strategy outlines and make sure to rate it from 1 – 10 ( ( 1 being the lowest and 10 as the highest ) you can either use a conversion funnel or pie framework. Now after listing them and rating them ask these questions based on the conversion rate optimization funnel that you created.
- How much total improvement can this project offer?
- How valuable will this improvement be?
- How complicated or difficult will it be to implement this improvement?
Once you listed and rated all the important strategies, it is time to start the CRO, make sure to start with the project with the highest ranking first.
The conversion funnel isn’t perfect, but it’s easy to understand, systematic, and offers a starting point for CRO collaboration and communication among colleagues.
By now we know that you already got a lot of ideas on how to create and start a CRO. We still have a lot of topics to talk about so relax we will be giving the 8 tips on how you manage your website and more conversion rate optimization process for you. By the end of this article, you should be able to find out which popular conversion rate optimization tools you will be using.
8 Tips to Increase your website’s conversion rate
Anybody could build a website but not everybody has a website that produces a higher amount of sales and lead generation as much as possible.
Your website will be your best salesperson, it will work for you 24 hours, it won’t call in sick, and will still work on holidays. So check this qualitative data to boost your rate in your online stores.
Tip #1 2 1/2 Second Rule
Studies show that a person has a 2 1/2 second rule to get out from your website after checking in if they won’t find the thing that they’re looking for. So within the 2 1/2 seconds, you should let them know who you are, how to contact you, and what should be the next step.
So take this test to take a look at your webpage if ever you can pass the 1 1/2 second rule by yourself take this test to let your families take it and see if they can come up with that answer that quick.
Tip #2 Would You Pick You
Open your favorite browser and check all the competition that you are facing also check your website and honestly tell yourself if you should pick yourself before other competitors. Through this user research, we can determine what would we do to improve our website.
By checking competitors we should have the logic to identify and analyze what the competitors are missing on your website by comparing all of them including yours we should come up with an idea that we can implement on our website that both your competitors and your website don’t have before.
This method is the same method as the customers will be doing every time so act as a customer and don’t hesitate to provide feedback to yourself.
Tip #3 Less Is More
Was coined by the poet Robert Browning. Browning wrote ‘less is more in his poem ‘ Andrea del Sarto (Called The Faultless Painter)’, which was published in 1855. Since you don’t know now you know. Being efficient.
Just summarize all the information that is important to your service no need for more resources. Just take out all the wow lines and post it. Make sure to indicate what you do and why someone should go with you.
Tip #4 Have A Smooth Navigation
More than half of the people with different age brackets aren’t tech-savvy so what you need to do is make sure that your website is user-friendly it should be easy to locate and a clear thought of your conversion funnel.
Once a visitor lands on your website they should directly understand where they should go so that you won’t be losing them. Think out about that conversion funnel process so that you are strong all the way through and have a clear path to conversion.
Tip #5 High Trust
A high conversation rate website should have higher trust issues so make sure to indicate your official badges, how many years you are in business, and what you experienced and show them your awards and recognition.
For them not to feel light to go off of your site, make sure to show all the reviews you received from other customers. With all this information showing on your site, they will have the confidence that they need and you will be listed as one of the high-traffic sites.
Tip #6 Test Check on Mobile
Most of us tend to use the phone instead of the computers so make sure to check on your mobile phone and check on your website’s page if it is presentable and efficient to others.
Make sure that the home page will load immediately and they won’t be any lag on the site because if not you will be losing the 2 1/2 second rule then you will be losing conversions.
Tip #7 Multichannel Retargetting
We already talked about it before that all customers won’t be giving in to your website directly some of them might think that they found it on your website but still lacks something.
Social media platforms are the best source of retargeting your audience again. Locating the visitors who visited your highest-converting webpage but haven’t been converted by posting ads on different social media platforms and also updating your website’s information to accurately hit what they need.
Tip #8 Strong ad Copy
Most of us are happy clickers but most of them aren’t interested so getting this traffic might get a chance of getting a low conversion rate and that would be a bad outcome for your website.
Clear ad copies will help and get a more targeted audience to visit the website. Hitting target that wants what we provide, make sure to let the customer know what they should get by paid ads or organic listing.
CRO Experiments
Page optimization isn’t a one-time thing, it would be an ongoing process that you can learn every day.
The tactics won’t end instead it should be better every single day. We should also study every customer desired action to increase conversions. On ecommerce site, improvement and failures won’t end.
There are no rules in page optimization, one single method won’t be a solution for all web pages that you created. That is why we should do experiments on every single web page that we are creating.
Just make sure to list all the experiments that you tried so that you won’t ever forget in the future and explore more ideas to experiment with. These optimization efforts can cause the average conversion rate to increase.
Well here is some lists that you can test with your online store.
Homepage
Think of your homepage as your storefront, where there is a mascot like a fast-food chain. All the impacting offers and promotions should be on the wall outside where our customers can see them. Your storefront should be amusing and inviting.
Like in a physical store, we should be adding all the information that we think customers should bit and jive in. The interface should be entertaining to the eyes of the site’s visitors. Impacting information where the visitors should know what they one immediately by just seeing the homepage.
1. Simplify the experience
When designing your homepage make sure it is simple and attractive because it will only take .02 seconds for us to gain customers’ attention. So make the most out of it with that .02 seconds.
Look at the beauty of simplicity, Vans only put their logo and also the best-selling shoes on their homepage even though I should think about buying them.
The best main recipe for your homepage should be your best product or best service offers. With these top-selling products or services, we surely can gain the eyes of the customers.
2. Show off coupon codes, real-time purchases, and more
As soon as you’re getting the traffic there are a lot of things customers wanna know about it since we already include all the promotions from the coupon codes, real-time purchases, and many more, there are a lot of CRO tools for the Shopify store owners that can help drum up demand and incentivize purchasing.
For example, take a look at Atelier New Regime. They’ve used the Free Shipping Bar app to show off their free shipping threshold right on their homepage.
In just a span of seconds, visitors should already decide and also registered their emails to subscribe to their newsletter where offers should be emailed right back to them.
3. Add Testimonials to Build Trust
Being featured on a homepage will be awesome, this kind of method can build trust to customers providing they can see legit interaction with your products. So make sure to include testimonials, reviews, and especially badges on your home page.
If you want to create more opportunities to get testimonials for your products, take a look at our guide to hacking the press or try reaching out to bloggers directly for features.
Product discovery
Customers should already have the idea of what they’re looking for so once they hit your homepage they should be able to see what they want.
Simplicity and easy navigation throughout the homepage should be monetized, customers should find it easy to locate and go to the places on your homepage without a sweat.
4. Use intelligent search
If customers are looking for specific products on your website, there will be a great chance that they won’t be able to find them.
During its own CRO analyses, UK apparel retailer Topshop noticed that customers were having difficulty finding and using its internal search box—and that customers who managed to use the search box typically converted 10x higher than others. With extensive testing, Topshop was able to improve its search box design, leading to a 5.8% increase in conversions.
If you have a lot of products you should consider putting a search bar on your homepage immediately instead of customers digging in the categories. Be sure to highlight the best-selling product so that customers should have an option to compare by this it will help increase your conversion rate optimization.
With apps like Findify and Instant Search +, you can power up your search bar with predictive results that help your customers find what they’re looking for. Intelligent search bars suggest results and products as users are typing while taking into account things like spelling errors and alternate product names.
Sigler Music uses the Instant Search + app to help its customers find exactly what they’re looking for. Even after entering just a few letters, the search bar already starts suggesting categories, products, and related results (which is effective for upselling and cross-selling).
5. Organize your categories effectively
Navigating thru your website should be clicking and easy to make sure we increase our conversion rate. Don’t organize your product for their specific categories. You should be able to identify each category and should also be able which subcategories will be under that.
6. Take advantage of your 404 page
should you think all 404 pages should be a dead end? Think about making a strategy using the 404 pages that can still gather traffic. For instance we can put a link to the 404 pages where instead they can click on it as a substitute to that specific downed page, or we can have a link for them to route to a different webpage where they can still manage to see what they need.
7. Add a shoppable Instagram feed
we thought Instagram is just a website for entertainment and interest but this can also be a CRO tool that can increase conversions. Instagram has a feed where in they’re having an app where they can sell their products.
Shoppable Instagram feeds are perfect for displaying user-generated content which is starting to play a massive role in the purchasing behaviors of Millennials. Research indicates that 84% of Millennials report that user-generated content on websites has an influence on what they purchase.
If you own a Shopify store, you can embed your Instagram feed onto your online store using apps like Foursixty, and Like2Have.it, Springbot, SocialPhotos, and Showcase, just like the one above created by MVMT. With these embeddable Instagram feeds, you can promote your top products and link out directly to their product pages, giving your fans a visually engaging way to find new products.
Product pages
Each and every one of your product pages needs to be built around clearly communicating the value of your products to your customers. You need to build immersive experiences that cover every aspect of your products while removing any opportunity for doubt or frustration.
8. Use high-quality product images
High-quality product photos are the most important part of an effective product page. More than ⅔ of consumers say that high-quality product photos are a very important part of the purchasing process—more important, in fact than product details or reviews. Try to include images that show your products from every angle and accurately represent the look and feel of your products.
As a bonus, include a video that shows your product in action. For instance, if you’re selling t-shirts, add a video to your product page with a model walking around while wearing one of your t-shirts to give customers a better idea of what your shirts look like in motion. Customers are actually 85% more likely to make a purchase after watching a product video.
Bando has some great examples of well-executed product pages. Check out this page for a 17-month agenda, featuring a bunch of high-quality photos and a fun, quirky video that really lets the product shine.
9. Be upfront about price, delivery time, and out-of-stock products
Don’t be afraid to let them know the full extent of things like pricing, delivery time, and inventory. If you do an effective job of selling your products and communicating their value, your customers won’t mind paying a little extra for shipping or waiting a little longer for delivery. Make sure to be transparent with your customers on your webpage so that they also be knowledgeable on what is the updates of the product.
If you own a Shopify store, you can also use apps like Restocked Alerts to give your customers the option to be notified when out-of-stock products are added to your store.
10. Showcase your product reviews
In order for your webpage to be effective, most of the customers really dig deep if there is a review on every product sold. Star counts that will rate customer satisfaction over the product. Reviews by text or image will also help customers to determine the company’s service and the product overall.
Positive responses from customers should be highlighted since this will help increase the conversion rate of the product. Also indicate the negative responses as well but make sure to turn things right you will be responding to negative responses so that customers will think that the company really cares about the other customers.
Product reviews can be especially helpful for businesses in the beauty and skincare industry. Beardbrand, for instance, uses Yotpo to showcase reviews on every one of its product pages.
11. Add a curated Instagram feed
One of the elements of the social post is a curated Instagram feed, by this it should allow viewers on Instagram to be amazed by an organized and professionalized Instagram post.
Product page Instagram feeds are especially useful for beauty and apparel companies since they can show your customers how to style your products and give them a better idea of how they look and feel in real life.
To embed Instagram feeds on your product pages, try apps like Foursixty and Like2Have.it.
Checkout experience
The checkout experience is one of the final steps of every customer’s purchasing process, so it needs to be as frictionless and flawless as possible to avoid having frustrated customers abandon their carts at the last moment.
At this point in their journey, your customers display clear intent to make a purchase. You need to make that purchase happen quickly and conveniently without any stress or confusion.
12. Pre-fill your customer’s information
You can make it even easier for your current customers to make repeat purchases by prefilling their shipping and billing information with customer accounts. The fewer information customers need to enter, the better. One study from last year even reports that conversions increase 200% when businesses allow customers to autofill information on social media.
In your Shopify admin, head to ‘Settings’ and then ‘Checkout’.
Under ‘Customer Accounts’, select ‘Accounts are optional. With optional accounts, your customers will still be able to checkout as guests, but it also gives them the chance to save their information for next time after filling out their personal details.
If you want to invite your current customers to make accounts, you can use the Bulk Account Invite Sender app.
13. Send abandoned cart emails
Unfortunately, customers sometimes fill up their carts with products and then leave your store with no intention of returning. With abandoned cart emails, you can remind those customers of the items that they’ve already expressed interest in and give them a little nudge to return to your store to complete the purchase.
14. Optimize your thank you/order confirmation emails
In the same ‘Notifications’ section of your Shopify admin, you can also customize your Order Confirmation emails.
After a customer placed their order it isn’t the end of them, we can include them in our conversion funnel so that they will be getting a notification to register and subscribe to our newsletter. Also, we offer discounts and promotions which customers can still go back and stay with us.
Shipping and returns
Even if customers who already checkout your product always keep in mind that the transaction won’t completely finish as soon as the product arrived in their hands and is mostly reviewed on it. As a customer getting your packages can be anxious since we do expect a lot of it and we did the effort on clicking the site. Well, that will be a conversion rate already but as soon as they received the package and it isn’t what was expected.
Always put yourself in every customer’s shoes on what they would feel like. Be more empathetic since it would be 1 out of a 100 that we encounter this. The shipping and returns should be more easy to access and make sure it’s enjoyable so customers will still come back to us.
15. Offer free shipping
Some customers would directly look into the shipping options and some of them leave the site since shipping is really expensive. It should be a conversion rate but canceled. Offer free shipping to customers and offer the best deal so that customers should be able to not think about it.
16. Have a clear refund policy
It’s no surprise that some customers are hesitant about making purchases online. When it comes to orders like shoes, clothes or food make sure that there should be an option on the website that is visible telling about a clear refund policy. We just don’t want customer concerns to be hanging. We should make them feel special about us.
Use Shopify’s Refund Policy Generator to create a refund policy for your store.
Additional information
Although optimizing elements like your homepage, product discovery features, and product pages are crucial for pushing your customers through the conversion funnel, you also need to make sure that your website contains additional information like contact details and an about section.
17. Tell a story with your about page
Often customers will glance at your about page, then we should tell a brief summary of the company and make sure that the headings should be as attractive as the design. Create a story that could impact the needs and wants of the customer. You should include your product and your customer’s relationship with them. Telling about the product’s origin where it came from, Where did your idea come from, and what brought you into making it.
Try to build a story that your customers can relate to it. The story should go around the product and the customer. I would also suggest including a customer survey at the end telling if ever customers can also write a story so that we can feature it on your website.
Endy has a comprehensive About page that sells mattresses from a number of different angles. At the top, you’ll find a great hero image, a concise summary of their products and what sets them apart, and a link to some customer reviews.
As you scroll down, you’ll see details about their shipping and return policy as well as a charming story about the origin of their name.
18. Create a comprehensive contact page
Anyone customers having an interest in your page should always have the idea of contacting us, making chat boxes will be useful but putting our details would be great. Make sure all information is accurate and updated.
Here’s a quick checklist of everything that your contact page should include:
- An email address or contact form
- Your physical location, along with a map and directions
- Your retail store hours
- Links to your social media profiles
- Support-specific contact options, including a phone number or email
Website speed and performance
The performance of your website and the speed it are tied to the success of your business. Checking all angles in the site should be monetized make sure your IT buddy is proactive in getting issues done immediately. We won’t be taking this action to lower our conversion rate.
19. Make sure your site is mobile responsive
A lot of customers are now using their mobile phones since we know that it is more portable and handy, so we should make sure that our mobile view or application on the phones should be good and running.
If you want to check if your website is responsive, just drop your URL into Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.
20. Optimize your website’s loading times
Customers never want any delay in their purchase, they should receive the quality of what they’re paying so they paid an effort to click on your website, and make sure everything’s working well.
The easiest way to check how long your online store takes to load is by using Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool. Pagespeed Insights will give you a detailed report of how fast your website loads, along with any issues that you can resolve to improve your load times. Alternatively, you can also use load-time evaluation tools like WebPageTest and Pingdom.
Page optimization could be a tedious and complicated process, make sure that your images should be an average size for your page to load immediately. ImageOptim strips away all of the unnecessary data in every image file, resulting in a much smaller file size with no noticeable visual difference.
Please note that most of ecommerce business owners are uninstalling apps that are no longer used because even if these apps are disabled they can still trigger the flow of your loading page.
Start your first experiment
Now you are now fueled up with ideas, it’s now time to start your first conversion rate optimization journey. Start again with your best strategy and work on it every day.
Don’t forget to test every time you will be experimenting with it, don’t leave any shallow information, and make sure that information is concise.
Don’t stop learning and exploring every experiment that you have, always check your competitors’ skills and analyzed them.
Remember more traffic the more the conversion rate.