Do you offer outstanding products or services through a great website that generates good traffic? So, why isn’t your website generating as many conversions as it should? It may be time you re-evaluate your Conversion Rate Optimization practices.
As an entrepreneur or a business owner, you must know that high traffic numbers and a good website are just two pieces of the sales puzzle. You also need to Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO. CRO aims to increase the number of sales/conversions and other desired actions from a website visitor. Research shows that 79% of customers made a purchase decision through their phones within the last six months.
While mobile optimization is a great way to increase your CRO rate, there are plenty of other strategies you can employ as well. In fact, in this article, we’ve listed some of the best conversion rate optimization practices you should be leveraging in 2021.
1. Increase Site Speed:
Once considered a luxury, fast-loading mobile experiences are now a requirement, and your website visitors take them for granted. Research shows that 53% of site visitors leave if the site takes longer than three seconds. Similarly, if the page load time is between 1 to 3 seconds, the bounce rate increases by 32%. Further, if it is between 1 to 10 seconds, then bounce rates reach 123%. Thus, anything that reduces your page load time will increase bounce rates, resulting in low conversion rates.
If your images take longer to load or your video content is not optimized then your customers will either wait for a few seconds or go elsewhere to find the information they’re looking for. Additionally, mobile devices are not equipped with the same processing power as desktops, so your website should be optimized for smartphones.
You can use Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix to access your site’s page speed. Some of the best ways to improve your site speed include:
- minimizing site code
- optimizing images
- leveraging server caching
- reducing re-directs
- using content distribution networks.
2. Accentuate Your Website’s UX:
Does your website offer a positive experience to visitors throughout their customer journey? This could make or break your conversion rates. Last year, Google added key web vitals in its site ranking factors to monitor user experience. Creating a seamless user experience is one of the essential conversion rate optimization best practices. There are a number of ways you can improve your site’s UX starting with something as simple as eliminating pop-ups.
Further, you can declutter your site by reducing the number of design elements such as CTA buttons. Next, take a minimalist approach whenever possible. You can also incorporate white space, attractive CTAs, and use bullet points to segment key information.
Research shows that white space around titles and text can increase user attention by almost 20%. Thus, you should integrate it on your site to make your website modern and fresh. Moreover, you should be responsive, design your images as opposed to stock photos, and should aim to keep your headlines bold and your webpages consistent.
3. Personalize Your Site:
Site personalization should be your priority if you want to increase your conversion rates. Studies show that 80% of customers are fascinated by brands that offer a personalized experience. For instance, Netflix is successful since it ensures that every user has a personalized journey. You should pay attention to what your market wants. Instead of steamrolling over them with what you want, you should find solutions to their problems.
Firms that are tone-deaf to who their target market is, suffer from low conversion rates. However, the question is how to actually personalize your site? You may start by segmenting your audience by demographics such as location, age. Furthermore, optimize your images and CTAs to target various customer demographics. You can also send personalized emails to your subscribed clients concerning their current stage in the sale funnel. Segmentation will make it easier to convert customers.
4. Mobile Optimization:
Your site rankings will suffer if you do not focus on mobile conversion optimization. Since mobile-friendliness is a necessity, it should be your top priority. Your clients should be able to view your content on their smartphones without there being any inconveniences in their experience. Hence, your users should be able to scroll and swipe effortlessly while also finding relevant information and CTA buttons with ease.
An often overlooked but highly relevant way of enhancing mobile conversion rates in 2021 is by embracing simplicity. As stated above, using white space can be beneficial. Moreover, consumers do not want unnecessary information on their small phone screens so reduce excessive design elements.
In addition, you can simplify mobile payments by ensuring your website supports various payment methods seamlessly. This is because an unreliable checkout process can result in high cart abandonment rates. Next, you should check your website on different smartphones to ensure a consistent experience. Note how responsive your site is on multiple screens and orientations.
5. Focus on Trust and Transparency:
Source credibility is key to winning your visitor’s trust. It can be established by being ethical and acting in their interest; one of the main factors for mobile conversion optimization. Customers will only buy from your brand if they trust you and find you credible.
Phishing scams increased by 350% in 2020 amid the global pandemic. Further, data breaches have also become a formidable threat. Thus, customers are very selective about who they trust with their data. In order to gain conversions from such a skeptical and cautious client base, you should incorporate cybersecurity measures in your business. Every other conversion rate optimization practice will be useless until you get your clients to trust your brand.
Bear in mind that your brand’s security is as strong as its weakest link. For improving trust levels, you can work with secure vendors, review current data usage policies and disclose your data usage information as you don’t want to infuriate visitors when they learn that your site is tracking their data without consent.
You should review your data policies and provide opt-in options to your customers. Lastly, it is important that you alert and inform visitors whenever you change your site’s privacy guidelines.
6. Determine a Conversion Roadmap:
Your conversion goals go hand in hand with relevant hypotheses and testing. It is an utter waste of effort, time, and investment to launch haphazard tests without any plan or goals and expect positive results on your conversion rates. Your goals must be distinct, so there is no confusion about what is to be measured.
In addition, they should be linked directly to the experiment. So if you were optimizing a landing page with a form, your goal must be to increase the total number of form submissions.
Many firms conduct testing in random order. For instance, they may test the home page one month, and product pages the next. Such companies ignore the fact that success lies in investing time to understand the target visitors you aim to convert.
Prioritize various pages of your site to come up with a conversion rate optimization roadmap. Most good conversion roadmaps take over six months and span from 8 to 15 distinct tests on a website.
7. Track Your Goals:
You should confirm your experiment tracking methodology prior to launching. Tracking is the measurement of goals such as button clicks, form submissions, link clicks, pages visited, and so on.
In many cases, testing tools can be integrated directly with your analytics tools so you can select your pre-defined goals. Tools such as HubSpot, Unbounce, Google Pagespeed, and Google Analytics can be useful.
Final Thoughts:
These tips will help you optimize your website for better conversions. However, if you are overwhelmed with the whole CRO process and do not want to take any chances, you should consider outsourcing to experts. AdRush is an expert digital marketing firm that not only offers CRO but also services such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, Content Marketing, and Performance Marketing.
If you need help designing a CRO strategy for your business, schedule a FREE Consultation with AdRush today.