CRO is a comprehensive process and requires several phases to accomplish. A successful conversion optimization campaign uses in-depth results analysis, multiple tests, high-quality and relevant content, and educated conclusions. A CRO campaign has several primary elements.
Landing Page Design
So you want people to visit your regular or even e-commerce website hoping for a conversion. But does your landing page offer the best user experience? Does it look aesthetically pleasing?
A landing page is a web page that enables you to capture a site visitor’s information via a lead-capture form (also referred to as a conversion form). With an optimized landing page, you can make your marketing and lead generation efforts more effective. A well-crafted landing page can yield benefits such as:
- Drastically improve your lead generation efforts
- Collect demographic information about your prospective customers
- Serves as a home for your marketing offers
- Gain insights into which of your prospects are more engaged
- Can fuel other marketing channels in your arsenal
- Provide a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of your marketing offers
Landing pages are inherently designed for visitors to perform an action that can lead to conversions.
Website Copy
Images and website designs don’t exactly sell, they attract. Although a usable and well-designed website can get the traffic flowing, it’s the words on the site (AKA website copy) that can hook your visitors and convert them into potential leads. If you publish relevant and engaging content that highlights your product or service’s persuasiveness, the chances that the visitors stay on your website and perform an action are increased.
Spending time on your website copy can provide your marketing campaign the following advantages:
– Attract qualified traffic to your website
– Keep your visitors engaged until you’ve presented them your sales message
– Enables you to communicate your offer in the most compelling way
– Encourage your visitors to perform an action
Poor website copy can kill your chances for conversion and visitor counts from SEO efforts. If you want people to call you, download an app, sign up for something, or fill out a form, good copywriting is something that you can’t overlook.
Call-to-Action (CTA) Buttons
In connection with website copy, a call-to-action is another important element of a successful CRO campaign. A CTA is a request or call for potential customers to perform the desired action. It can be an image, a button, or a line of text that takes the form of an instruction or directive. CTAs could be anything from signing up to an email list or making a purchase. The idea is to create a compelling and crispier CTA to generate more leads.
Some of the most common types of CTAs are:
– “Buy It Now/Buy Now” buttons
– “Add to Cart” buttons
– “Read More”
– “Try It Now”
– Social media share buttons and widgets
– Online help chat interfaces
There were some experiments back then where websites changed a few words in their CTA and met with wildly different results – and not for the better. That’s the power of CTAs for a website.
Site Structure and Navigation
According to a survey, 38% will stop engaging with a website if it has a poor layout or content. If your website is confusing to navigate, it’s a bad experience for the users. This is obviously not a good thing because 88% of online customers are less likely to return to a website after a poor experience.
This is why your website’s structure and navigation should be on-point.
The structure of your website should focus on providing good user experience, and that’s accomplished through the ease of navigation. Site structure refers to the graph depicting how your web pages interact with each other. Users typically start navigating the homepage then explore a series of categories and subcategories. Your focus is to make the flow of navigation as fluid as possible. Otherwise, visitors will ultimately abandon the site.
With a properly structure website, navigation becomes a breeze for visitors and will only result in more conversions but improve your brand reputation as well.
Page Load Speed
For many online businesses, a high bounce rate is practically a nightmare. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who land on your website but navigate away after only viewing one page and not performing any desired action.
One of the main culprits of higher bounce rates is slow page load speed.
Want to increase your conversion rate? Make your web pages load faster. Page speed is another primary component of any conversion rate optimization effort as it directly affects the experience of your site visitors. As your page loading speed increases, the higher the bounce rate.
For instance, the average user expects the website to load within 2 seconds and it has a pretty low bounce rate of 9.61%. One the other hand, if a page takes more than 6 seconds, the bounce rate becomes 32.3%. The same is true for mobile users. According to Google, more than 50% of mobile users will leave a site when it loads in more than 3 seconds.
Remember, if users leave a website due to poor experience (in this case, slow loading page), there’s a good chance that they will not come back.
Forms
Forms are very important for many companies, especially if they’re a component of their sales funnel. Forms are considered to be the customers’ touchpoints and you can improve conversions by optimizing them. There are numerous ways to develop forms for websites but not all of them may work for your business. In general, having comprehensive and optimized forms has worked for many businesses while minimal ones have worked with many others.
This becomes a balancing act for your CRO team, between lead volume and lead quality in order to get the best ROI. Below are some basic form optimization tips that will greatly enhance your forms:
- Fewer fields are recommended – It’s not always the case but in general, you want to have fewer fields in your web pages. This is especially true if your sales team wants to focus solely on the most serious leads. Otherwise, you can put additional fields in cases like when you want to acquire more demographic information.
- Make your forms simple but still good-looking – Like everything in your website, your forms should be aesthetically pleasing as well because it equates to better user experience. Good forms should be simple enough without extra design elements like flashing text, tooltips, etc. Forms should be also progressive in terms of importance which means that you should prioritize the most important fields first then followed by less important ones.
- Make password creation a breeze – As per industry data, password fields are the most time-consuming to fill. You can improve the password creation experience by providing a password strength validation UX for your sign-up pages.
- Consider one-click submission forms – Having a Google or Facebook SSO is another great way to improve your conversion process. More often than not, visitors are already logged on to these websites which makes it easier to convert them. This also streamlines the sign-up process since it skips the need for creating and remembering a password. However, SSO forms won’t work for everybody, especially for businesses that require email IDs.
A/B Testing
When it comes to conversion optimization, guesswork just won’t cut it – and that’s taken care of by conducting A/B testing. The deciding factor whether your website gets good traffic and if the visitors get converted is your conversion funnel. As an online business owner, you want users to take the desired action on your site which is why your funnel needs to be optimized.
One good way to optimize your site’s conversion funnel is through A/B testing. Also referred to as split testing, A/B testing is the process of showing two versions of the same web page simultaneously to different audience segments. In the end, you will compare which page version has driven more conversions. Almost always, you go with the variant with the higher conversions, so you can optimize accordingly for better results.
A/B testing enables you to determine which words, images, videos, phrases, and other elements that work best. Even a minor change can get users to click or the other way around. A/B tests can provide benefits such as reduced bounce rates, get better ROI from traffic, make low-risk adjustments, and more.
Conversion Rate Optimization Consulting
So you have a business but it’s just not taking off. When was the last time your business received a conversion? Are you receiving enough conversions to facilitate the growth of your business? Without conversions, your business will not grow.
If you believe in your business and think that there’s plenty of room for improvement, you should consider working with a conversion rate optimization (CRO) agency.
We know how easy it is to be discouraged when your business is not converting. When you work with a CRO agency like Frasca Digital Marketing, you’re not only increasing the potential of your website to convert but it will reinforce your confidence in your brand. If you think conversion optimization is right for your business, don’t hesitate to give us a call.
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