7 Tips To Increase Your Conversion Rates Instantly
When you are working on your conversion rate optimization, having a good conversion rate is what you aim for. Here I am enlisting 9 different ways that you can adopt in your CRO campaign to gain higher conversion rates. So, let's just hop in and check out these tips.
1. Leverage the power of A/B testing It’s the foremost tip in my list. Not because we provide A/B testing tool and want you to use it. It's here because, conversion optimization it's all about testing, testing, and testing. Ask any CRO expert for a list, A/B testing would always be there. In this era where convenience and user experience has become so important, you cannot afford to take a risk and do the modifications without getting assured how users will react to it on the ground zero. A/B testing is the only tool that can tell about your users' reaction and help you to decide whether you are doing it right or killing or your conversions instead. So, test, test, and test Testing is important, but knowing what you actually need to test is more important. To make an easy decision on what to test, consider the scope of revenue each test may bring to your business, and prioritize the tests accordingly. Do not go for testing them all at once, it's crucial to test one hypothesis at a time- or you will keep on wondering which hypothesis made the difference.
Some important areas and elements that you should test first can include:
The headline- A headline can have a great impact on the reader. For whomever you make the headline, make sure it is a strong, convincing, and believable headline.
Page layout and navigation- The page layout plays and important role in deciding the priorities of different elements embedded to it. The position and size of the elements automatically give a sense of how important they are. While navigation defines the ease of user movement on the pages or across the site. Test the navigation to find out if the movement is smooth and is occurring in the way you have hoped. You should also test if a navigation link is acting as a distraction in the conversion of some other more important elements. For example, you can test if there is any link on the checkout page which is acting as an exit point without letting customers complete the process.
CTA buttons- You can test the text on the CTA button, size, and color of the button. For example, for downloadable or software products the primary CTA text should often be “Check Demo”, not “Buy Now”. Sometimes enlarging the primary buttons is also a good option.
Media content- Test adding a product video or related videos to enhance the product descriptions. You can also test if adding images in the supportive content for product description is working for you.
Macro changes- Sometimes you want to completely rebuild a page and test a totally different version.
What to use for testing? Many website owners spend fortunes on buying expensive testing tools before they can actually learn how to use a testing tool for conversion optimization. You don’t need to spend much in the beginning. ●
Google Analytics experiments- Google provides this free tool that can be really helpful in understanding the basics of using a testing tool. With Google content experiments, you can run some simple experiments and gain an experience before going to paid and advanced tools. Though it has some downsides like- lack of multivariate testing, lack of multiple testing, no visual editor, but still it's the best option to start with A/B testing.
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MockingFish says, use our free one year trial and get to learn everything about A/B testing in the meantime before you feel ready to switch to paid subscription after a whole year.
2. Develop a clear and constrain value proposition Conversion rate optimization has a lot to do with the value you propose to your customers. In fact, it’s the most important factor here.
What exactly is the value proposition? It’s the highlighted USP of your business that answers why customers should buy from you when they already have so many options to buy from We often tend to improve our conversion rates by changing the page elements like font colors, font size, button shape, button color, images, and so on. We forget the most basic element that we should improve first- strengthening the value propositions. If your homepage just shows the name of your company and list of products with a simple message ‘Welcome to XYZ’ you have no value proposition. There is a huge difference between showcasing your value proposition and products. You must address both to keep a balance. Value proposition for ‘why one should buy from you’, products for ‘you can buy from here’. A good value proposition must differentiate you from your rivals and should tell why your website is a better choice. When you write a value proposition to match up on every dimension of your competitor, you must include that one key factor that proves you better. Value is defining what’s unique about your company and products and services that your competitor can’t offer.
3. Don’t be in hurry for a sale, set up a path and proceed slowlyOften times marketers do a mistake by rushing out and directly asking for a macro conversion very quickly. They tend to ignore the fact that they might be "just browsing", or still researching and psychologically not ready to make purchase instantly. If you have the insight, you will hardly find a customer who purchases the product on the first visit itself. And, if he/she does that, trust me it’s not the first visit. He/she has already done enough research off-the-site.
Here, you need to just slow down and proceed step by step to establish a sales funnel. This is how a typical sales funnel would look.
Image source: conversionXL
Step 1: Awareness- First create awareness about your product. Offer valuable information regarding the product via blogs, videos, case studies, infographics. It will help you to become their trusted source of information, and words would start to matter for them.
Step 2: Interest- Create an interest in your product by giving compelling reasons for how it would solve their problem. You can share video contents teaching how to use the product to solve their problem.
Step 3: Sale- After you become the trusted advisor, and the customer is well informed about the product and solution it provides, it will surely put an interest about the product in the customer. This is the right time when you send your sales copy and ask for a sale.
4. Remove the jargonA clear copy is what that persuades. Clarity also means the simplicity. Trying to woo your customers with poetic and complicated business language would be
your greatest mistake. It's people who are going to see and read your copy. So, write for people, not the company because it's them you are targeting for a conversion. For anything you write on your site, don't be Shakespeare with it. Clarity is what that makes it easy to understand, and if you try to puzzle your customers with fancy language, trust me ‘you know nothing, John Snow'. The best way to communicate your value or any other content on your site is to going for a regular language that you would use with your friend while taking about your product- simple and understandable.
5. Clarify queries and objectionsIt's not true that people blindly fall on the offers and discounts. When they see anything like this on your site, they develop some conscious and sub-conscious queries in their mind. These queries develop into hesitation about availing the offer. The best way to tackle with this hesitation of customers is whenever you roll out an offer, make a list of all the possible queries that you think would come to the customers’ mind. Next, add the information in your sales copy addressing and eliminating all those possible hesitations. Say, your list could be something like this: ●
Does this product actually solve my problem? - Explain all the problems your product solves for the customers.
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Why should I trust this product? - Show your companies credentials, and experience in developing such solutions. Show off if you have won any Award.
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What if it fails to work for me?
- Showcase your previous customers’ testimonials and how they have benefited from your product. etc.
6. Build a trust Last evening I was walking down the street when some random guy rushed to me with a weird look. Suddenly he put his hand inside his bag and took out
something. “Hey, wanna buy this brand new iPhone 7? Just for $60” he said. I knew it's a great deal, and who would not want to have the iPhone 7, but I said "NO". Why? Because I didn't trust the guy. The condition is not so different with your online store. You may have great deals and great products by your side, but people won’t purchase unless they trust you. Here are some tips to make your website look trustworthy: ●
Put verifiable information on your site. Include the source link for any significant information you put on.
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Show your physical address on the site so that people in the real world can reach you.
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Highlight experts in your team in the contents you put on your site. Give their credentials.
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Post real photos of your real team members to show honest and trustworthy people work for you.
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Make is easy to contact you from any channel- physical address, phone number, email address, fax number etc.
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Keep updating your site’s content regularly to show you are not out of business.
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Avoid silly mistakes like grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, typos on your site’s contents.
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Showcase honest product reviews- even if some are negative. Obviously, if most of them are negative, you must reconsider selling it.
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Showcase customer testimonials to let others know what users have to say about the product.
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Showcase if your business or contents have been featured in top publications like Forbes, New York Times, Huffington Post, etc.
7. Make your checkout process easy Checkout is something that remains as the final page where you want your customers to land and generate a sale for you. Unfortunately, just getting them to checkout page would not be enough to assure a conversion. In fact, most of
the abandonments occur from the checkout page itself. Why? Because of hundreds of reasons. Some may include: ●
Asking too many information from the customer.
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Asking for necessary account creation before checkout is complete.
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Not providing guest checkout or an alternate option to account registration.
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Having too many distractions on the checkout page which act as an exit point.
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Not showing the actual order total until customer reaches the payment page.
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Having hidden costs in form of taxes, and so on.
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Having higher shipping costs.
How to optimize your checkout? There is a lot you can do. From above points it would be simple to do the opposite: ●
Ask only the important information
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Provide guest checkout, social login etc as an alternate option to account creation.
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Remove all the distractions from the checkout page, and landed on the checkout page disable all the navigation and keep only the checkout process controls (like continue to pay, place order etc) active.
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Show the actual order total with all costs included in the first or second step of the checkout.
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Do not charge any hidden cost. If there is a tax, mention it in the order total.
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Provide free shipping of possible. You may adjust the cost in the product price because free shipping is what many customers automatically feel attracted to despite you sell the product for a bit higher cost.
There is a lot you can do to optimize your checkout process. These reference article would be helpful for you in this regard: 8 Awesome eCommerce checkout examples
How to make your checkout page more user-friendly? 6 mistakes in website form design you should never make 5 things you probably didn’t know about eCommerce checkout
To conclude Conversion optimization is not something that you can master overnight- there are various other myths about CRO that you need to avoid. It is the experience and learning from your mistakes that help you become a good CRO expert. Never hesitate in trying new things, but also keep in mind that you refer to the statistics and analytics before trying. Here, if you succeed, you gain conversions, if you fail, you gain more clear insight to gain conversions. So, listen what experts have to say, learn from your experience, and ultimately do what your customers would like.