5 Conversion Rate Optimization Best Practices that Sell

A decade ago, the discussion on getting good conversion rates through the website was not as serious as it is today. In fact, thanks to the less competition, the major players in the industry got their desired results faster than nowadays. Little did we know, that the need for conversion rate optimization would soon become a necessity, and a major part in online business growth.

Website owners must always strongly believe in the idea of optimization. To analyze the conversion process and identify issues which hurt your sales graph requires a lot of expertise, tons of data and results through various tests and experiments.

Therefore here are 5 easy and essential conversion rate optimization best practices:

1. Analyze your conversion rate

Many online businesses start and then shut down in a few years just because of one simple reason. They repeat their mistakes over and over again expecting things to change in their favor. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that you should always come up with something innovative. Just think about website layouts for example. What seems to be a decent design now, might end up being obsolete in a couple of years from now. So, bringing something new to a competitive market is important. Keeping up with ever-changing user preferences is important. This is the main reason why traditional brick-and-mortar style stores shuffle their products and refresh the interior design.

The good news is that you can track and measure each and every step of your customers as soon as they land on your website, up until they finish a session. Creating custom events and displaying them on a conversion funnel is a must.

A conversion funnel tells you where you start losing significant traffic. Once you have identified the source of the problem, you can start investigating with the help of click heatmaps, scroll heatmaps, or session replays. There are no two identical websites, therefore the reason why people leave your shopping cart can vary. The only way you can find out what’s causing you a headache is to measure, measure and measure.

2. Set realistic conversion goals

When it comes to conversion rate optimization, you need to identify your main goals for your online business.

What is your goal? To earn money fast, or to build up a consistent stream of income? There’s no single right answer since it is highly situation dependent, therefore you need to ask yourself the question every once in a while:

What do I expect from this business/campaign/design?

“To sell ten times more products than last year” sounds like a plan, however, you can do so much more with conversion rate optimization. For instance, you can build a loyal customer base, that would save your business from going bankrupt when you run out of resources due to a failed campaign.

Keep in mind, that knowing what you want is not equal to what your target audience needs. This should be self-explanatory, right? Not always.

Take a look at the number of new customers who bought your product or service in the past year. How much money did they bring in on average? How quickly is your customer base growing? What’s your best-case scenario? And worst? Even the greatest ideas fail if you don’t understand your visitor’s behavior. Your potential customer is the ultimate reason why you start doing business at all. Without you knowing much about your target audience, there would probably be no way of growing. In other words, you need to consider if your goals really reflect the needs that audience or not.

3. Define Strategic headlines and CTAs

If you start thinking like a customer, you’ll soon realize that they only consider you seriously when your offer is backed up by a strong desire. For example, taglines such as “Sign Up to Get 100% Opening Bonus” would likely get better results than “Open an Account with 123 Forex”. Whether it is an email marketing campaign to sell products or a landing page to get sign-ups, CTAs are always key conversion elements to get your consumers or visitors to perform a certain action. You need to use attractive colors and call to action text that works the best. Do some research, get in touch with experts and also make some use of A/B Testing method to get your desired results.

Netflix is one of the best examples of using headlines and CTAs to earn more subscribers and boost conversion rates.

They apply slight psychological pressure and immediately apply comfort. Creating a sense of scarcity and urgency works really well psychologically for online businesses since the customers are motivated towards purchasing items instantly by showing them a limited time stock or a discount code valid only for a few hours. Try that now before your competitors do!

4. Optimize your website for speed and responsivity

What many online entrepreneurs fail to understand is that having a page load speed time of fewer than 3-4 seconds is essential for ideal sales and revenue generation. The customer just won’t wait for your website to load since there are tens of similar websites offering similar products and services. Since 90% of consumers say they use multiple devices to complete everyday tasks, while 40% say they use their mobile device to conduct research prior to making a purchase.

Source: Pixelunion

At the moment 44.7% of the e-commerce traffic is being generated through mobile devices. Needless to say, your website needs to perform efficiently on mobile devices or else your sales are officially doomed. When it comes to performance, always aim for consistency. Keeping your brand on a good note in the minds of the consumers is a huge competitive advantage and can do wonders to your conversion rates in times of big sale events such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday, while one bad experience will lead them to have a bad impression of your brand.

5. Optimize the checkout process

Online customers run away when they face a complex checkout process. Make it easier for them to purchase from your store. Ask only mandatory details with a simpler-to-fill form. This way you’ll gain credibility which always helps when it comes to boosting conversion rates.

• Highlight the “Add to Cart” button – to focus attention. It’s even better if this button follows the user when he/she scrolls through the page. An Add-To-Cart that always appears ‘Above the Fold’ is a great feature to have since potential customers won’t have to scroll all the time if something catches their attention.
• Show similar products – if your customer is not sure about what to buy, this field will help him to make a decision. Consider the Adidas website. Once you scroll down you see the field “You may also like” and there is still the “Add to bag” button in case you want to buy not only these runners.

Wrapping up:

Having proper knowledge of channels and profit generating techniques is very important in this conversion game. Implementing a granular approach to conversion tracking makes you more advanced in understanding your success rate. Keep a strong check on the insights of your campaigns and the results to always optimize your marketing and advertising strategies. The whole idea is to find the loopholes in your conversion process that you often fail to recognize and perform an analysis to determine which landing pages, UI elements perform the best.

For example, a focused conversion rate analysis keeps an eye on everything making sure that you are not losing any potential leads. This also helps you find where your sales are coming from and which campaign is not running at its best and why.

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