So you’ve brought people to your webpage, now what? You can cross your fingers and hope that they like your product enough to buy it, or you can take matters into your own hands and utilize some conversion rate optimization techniques.
What is a conversion rate?
Your conversion rate represents how many visitors to your website do what you ultimately want them to do. This can be donating, signing up, or, most commonly, buying something. Your conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of successful transactions by the number of visitors. Conversion rate optimization can translate to a huge increase in revenue using the traffic you already have, and the best part is that you don’t have to increase your ad spending!
Here are a few basic ways you can improve your conversion rate:
Create a Compelling Website
First impressions are incredibly important, and when you’re trying to get someone’s attention online, you have a matter of seconds to make that impression. A poorly designed website will lose people’s interest before you can even make your pitch. Your homepage or landing page is especially important, and should be clear and enticing enough to make them want to stop and look around. Below are some tips to keep in mind when you are designing your page.
Guidelines to Follow:
- Keep it clean! Use clear images, eliminate clutter, and make sure your layout is intuitive and easy to navigate.
- Use simple explanations: remember that visitors to your page don’t have your level of knowledge.
- Don’t rely too much on banners to get across the important information, many people have trained themselves to ignore them. Integrating key points into the text can be much more effective!
- Design elements can direct attention: color, sizing and other differences that stand out can highlight areas that you want visitors to focus on.
- Optimize for mobile devices! Things like fast loading times, clear site organization, and browser compatibility can make or break a visitor’s experience!
Photo by Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash
Use A/B Testing to Find What Works
A/B testing is when visitors are split into two groups, and half of them see a slightly different version of a webpage than the others. You can then look at the conversion rate of each group, and use the data to figure out what works best for you. Your landing page is an excellent place to run an A/B test, and it’s a great opportunity to experiment with the different design elements mentioned above. It’s important to only change one element at a time, otherwise you can’t be sure what caused the improved rate!
Make Them a Deal They Can’t Refuse
Your pricing is a key way to seal the deal once you’ve gotten that far. You can use pricing strategies to hook people, like offering a discount for annual versus monthly subscriptions, or using a decoy price (a significantly inferior deal) to guide customers to the option you really want to highlight.
Now that you know how important conversion rate optimization is to your business, you can use these methods to start growing your bottom line!