“I want to increase the conversion rate on my website.” This is the statement you will hear from most of the website owners. Conversion is any type of specific objective and goal you want to achieve on your website. Conversion doesn’t only mean sales on your website but also any action that leads to sales. These actions can be filling out a form on the website, subscribing to newsletters, subscribing, or downloading something. Conversion is a measurement of success for any business, as it helps you convert your visitors to customers. In this post, we will discuss effective ways to improve your conversion rate.
What is Conversion Rate and Why is it Important?
The percentage of visitors who take your desired action on your website is called the conversion rate. For instance, if you get 300 visitors on your website and 30 out of them made a purchase on your website then your conversion rate is 10%. In this case, you want them to make a purchase on your website, that’s your goal.
The effectiveness of all your SEO and other marketing efforts can be only measured through the conversion rate precisely. This gives you an opportunity to figure out the weak points in your marketing efforts and improve them to get better results i.e., better conversion rate.
Though there are quite a lot of arguments related to measuring the conversion rate for the brand awareness campaigns. But, you should know that every marketing effort is to generate sales and make the business profitable.
Brand awareness campaigns are the first effort in that direction. No customer will ever land on your website unless he knows that you exist. So, I guess you got my point here.
For any business, the ultimate goal is to make profits. Every action into a customer journey is from creating awareness to make him actually buy from your website is an effort that ultimately leads to sales and makes a profit.
Now the answer to the question – why is conversion rate so important for businesses, and especially e-commerce ones? The answer is obvious – the higher your conversion rate is, the higher is your profit.
What is the Relation of Sales Funnel with Conversion Rate?
Before making an actual purchase on a website the consumers go through various stages. These stages are represented with a consumer-oriented sales funnel.
The sales funnel is a unique marketing model that consists of various stages of conversion: awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation and the last and crucial one is a purchase. Some marketers call it a purchase funnel as well.
Your audience gets acquainted with your brand, see your products, make comparisons, evaluate and make a purchase. This funnel analyzes your customer acquisition process but also the conversion rates in each stage of their journey.
With the funnel, you can find out the weak points and try to improve your conversion rate. For instance, you may notice that the number of visitors on your website is very high but the number of those who are converted into leads or making purchases on your website is significantly low.
This funnel helps you find out the possible issues that are causing a low conversion. With the data you get from the sales funnel you can improve your conversion rate by optimizing your website and other related things.
Factors Influencing Conversion Rate
There is a reason which you can’t overlook that over 40% of client-side marketers consider conversion rate optimization as a top digital marketing priority.
The clients especially from the eCommerce businesses always expect the marketers and digital marketing agencies to help them improve their conversion rate to increase their sales and profits.
So, now coming to the factors that influence the conversion rate. There are numerous factors that influence conversion rate, we are going to discuss them one by one:
User Interface of Your Website
The user interface is the design of your website. This is what the visitors see on your website when they visit. Well-structured and well-built sites attract more visitors and reduce bounce rate significantly.
So, everything from the style, color, images, fonts, spacing, navigation, etc., is very important. Websites having a good user interface get more visitors and conversions than sites with having a poor user interface.
Load Time of Your Website
Your website should load fast on the browsers when people visit it. No one wants to wait for the sites to load completely so that they can make a purchase on them.
Make sure your website loads fast on all types of web browsers to retain your customers on it and actually let them make purchases on it. Load time also counts into the user experience, so you can’t let your visitors go away because of a slow loading website.
Responsiveness of the Website
Over 60% of searches globally are done on mobile phones, so you should make sure that your website is responsive to mobile viewing. If your website is not mobile responsive you might be losing 60% of your potential buyers.
Content
Content is always king. It is the most vital part of every website. Websites containing significant information and complete product detail are more likely to attract visitors and turn them into customers. Websites having poor content always struggle to improve their conversion and retain their customers. Investing in content is the most important thing you should consider.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Having everything else in place and not having SEO right your website might not get the traffic it deserves. Search Engine Optimization is the most important factor influencing your conversion rates.
Right keywords, meta-descriptions, links, right, and high-quality backlinks can make your website easily found by search engines and generate really good traffic to your website. So, SEO is the most important activity that influences your conversion rate.
How to Calculate Your Website’s Conversion Rate?
Isn’t it the goal of every business to increase conversion rate and churn out more profits? Now you must be wondering how can you measure your conversion rate. Of course, yes!
Calculating the conversion rate is pretty easy. Divide the number of conversions on your website by the total number of visitors and multiply it by 100.
For example, in one month 10,000 people visited your website and you got 1000 conversions.
So, 10,000/1000 × 100 = 10%
In this case, your conversion rate is 10%
Though, the sale is not the only conversion metric you should be thinking about. Lead generation, customer acquisition, repeated sales, newsletter subscription, etc., are other metrics that can also be considered in measuring your conversion depending on your business goals.
There are many tracking systems available that you can use to calculate your conversion rate. That way you will be able to quickly analyze your conversions and improve things to make it better.
If you are not sure what to do to improve your conversion rate you can contact us and we will help you improve that.
How to Improve Conversion Rate?
Conversion optimization opens up an endless world of great opportunities to improve your conversion rate. There are several ways that can help you improve your conversion rate. It not only helps you increase your profits but also beat your competitors by getting more paying customers. The steps discussed below are some of the considerations you should take to improve your conversion rate.
1. Do Thorough Research in Your Conversion Funnel
If you know where the problems lie you certainly will find a solution to them. You need to look at your conversion funnel and analyze the data at every step in order to determine if you need to make any improvements to improve your conversion rate.
For instance, if you look at your conversion funnel and find out that people are stuck in the desire stage or buying from the competition then you need to look at the price and quality of your product. Or maybe think of offering something extra to entice your prospective customers.
2. Break Down Your Conversion Process into Steps
It is always simpler to break down your conversion process into steps to analyze the data in each step. That way you can concentrate on each process separately and find out the weakest areas to make improvements. Certainly, doing this will help you improve your conversion rate.
3. Make Your Website More User Friendly and Search Engine Friendly
Nobody likes to buy from ugly looking or unprofessional websites. And that’s a fact. So, in order to improve your conversion rate, you need to take a look again at your website and fix the elements that are bad like the fonts, CTA buttons, spacing, images, icons, testimonials, badges, etc.
Technically, you need to everything possible to make your website user-friendly and attractive enough to attract and retain the customers and inspire them to make a purchase. Provide value to the customer rather than just selling some products or services. That way you will have better and more conversion than all your competitors.
Similarly, if you have everything right and your website is not to search engine friendly then it’s a sin. You need to make your website search engine friendly by fixing all the weak areas. You can take the help of the eCommerce Audit Checklist or hire an expert to do that for you.
4. Post Original and Informative Content
As you already know that content is the most important factor in ranking a website and attracting visitors. Hence, the content of your website should be unique, informative, and original. Include right and effective keywords and relevant links.
Write proper and complete descriptions for your products that inspire the visitors to buy your products. Incomplete and poorly written descriptions make your visitors leave your website in just a few seconds without buying. Good, original, and quality content will help your visitors buy from your website and also help improve your conversion rate.
5. Faster & Easier Checkout Process
Imagine yourself standing in a long queue and when it’s your turn to pay and exit you being asked a dozen questions in a supermarket. You won’t go back to that supermarket again after you have such an awful experience. But, if the process was simpler and the queue was shorter you certainly would love to go back to the same place to buy your stuff. The same thing happens on your website if the checkout process is not short and smooth.
A faster checkout process is one of the most important things you should take care of to improve your conversion rate. In the checkout process, you have to keep your customer engaged in buying not distracting or boring him by asking a lot of questions.
For that you need to have a simple distraction-free page design, clear buttons to show the price, discounts, offers, coupon codes, shipping costs, place order, checkout, credit card detail input fields, etc.
Keep only necessary fields to be filled in like the name, address, email address, phone number, and credit card detail not more than that. As having more fields to fill in your customer might feel bored and frustrated and leave your page without actually checking out.
6. Offer Good & Reliable Customer Service
Good and reliable customer service is what every customer seeks out. If you want to significantly improve your conversion rate, provide excellent customer service. That’s the key to a successful business.
Be ready to make yourself available 24×7 to answer your customer’s questions through emails, phone, live chat, and social media. The idea is to help your customers in every possible way and win their trust. Doing this will not only improve your conversion rate but also increase your loyal customers over time.
7. Try A/B Testing to Measure Results
To best compare your results from changing something you can use A/B Testing. A/B testing is the best and most effective way to test your methods and optimize your conversion rates. A/B testing is comparing the results from two identical things.
For instance, you can do A/B testing on your landing pages with different pictures, different call to action, different text, etc. And then you can measure the results on both pages. The page that gives you the better result you can try to attract all your visitors to that page. It is important that you set a time frame for you’re A/B tests.
All marketers use this method and try to improve things in a way that is more relevant for the visitors on the site. It’s an excellent testing method and a productive way to measure the results of the change on your website and improve your conversion rate.
Conclusion
To implement the right conversion strategy that helps you improve your conversion rate is to understand the needs of your customers. You can do that by analyzing your customer behavior, buying habits, decision-making process, frequency of their purchase, average ticket size, etc. Based on your findings you can implement strategies that help them in their buying and improve your conversion rate.
