8 Practical Tips to Increase Your Website Conversion Rate

The hope of every digital marketer is to have tons of traffic to your website. However, if the traffic doesn't inspire the user to complete a transaction, such as a purchase, signing up for your newsletter, or downloading an e-book, then all that traffic is wasted.

If you want your business to be successful, you need a website with a good conversion rate. Since your site represents your brand, you need to strengthen its backbone with CRO. This is especially important today to support your digital marketing efforts. Today, business thrives on a strong brand communication strategy. Whereas the consistent presentation of a brand can increase its revenue by 23%. Thus, it is essential for a business to have a website that builds and builds brand credibility.

As a result of these factors, CRO has quickly become one of the most popular marketing tactics this year. A typical website conversion rate is 2.35%. However, the top 10% of brands this year have 3-5x higher conversions than average. This leads us to wonder how this higher conversion rate is achieved.

We'll take a look at eight actionable steps businesses can take to improve and maintain their site's conversion rate.

1. Improve your website loading speed

The page loading speed of your website is the most important factor affecting your website's conversion rate. So much so that a delay of even a second can lead to a 7% decrease in conversions. Today's instant gratification culture and economy shows that customers are no longer patient. Their expectations for technology and user experience continue to rise to new heights. To prevent users from leaving your site, it is very important to constantly monitor the download speed.

Several factors can affect download speed. In a study of over 18,639 pages, large images were found to be the most likely to break load speeds. Although images are valuable, sites need to pay attention to their size. The same study also showed that pages without large images saw an average conversion rate increase of 11.4%. As opposed to a 9.8% conversion rate for sites containing them.

Just as slow download speeds can frustrate your leads, faster download speeds can improve them, as Mozilla found out. The software company improved page load times for its flagship Firefox browser by 2.2 seconds and downloads were up 15.4% year-over-year. Another success story: Walmart has shown a 2% increase in conversions for every 1 second of page load time improvement.

2. Focus on one call to action (CTA)

Every landing page serves a purpose—to get something of value from your audience. Whether it's their email or contact information to generate leads or build an email subscriber list, you want to promote your target in a way that makes them feel obligated. This is most often done with a short phrase known as a CTA (call to action).

By using a CTA, you create a sense of urgency about your product or service. CTAs inspire your customers to act in a certain way. So it is obvious that the correct use of strategic CTAs (calls to action) will determine how well you convert.

While CTAs (calls to action) are an important factor in determining the success of your conversion rate, many sites do the dumb thing by using different CTAs to promote the same product. From the user's point of view, competing CTAs (calls to action) create confusion in their minds. This tells them that the site itself is not aware of its offers and, naturally, shy away from them. There should be only one CTA per landing page that tells visitors their next course of action. This practice is clear to the client and results in an average conversion rate of 13.5%.

3. Provide credible proof of value

Many clients are still digitally hesitant and unenthusiastic when it comes to trusting sites, especially those with sensitive information. This is where signals of trust come into play. They help you establish rapport and trust with the client. A time-tested way to increase conversions and is carried out by displaying proven seals and images of payment systems.

In addition to helping you improve your website's conversion rate, trust signals also aid your SEO efforts. For example, Google only wants to show sites it trusts, so adding trust signals will help you in many ways. Also, make sure you also create your blog and keep it up to date. A well-maintained blog is itself a signal of trust and shows the visitor that your site is active.

If you are an e-commerce website, consider displaying trust badges such as Symantec and VeriSign SSL certificates. You can position them strategically with CTAs. These changes can increase conversions simply because people see them and feel more secure. Real life example: Blue Fountain Media used the VeriSign stamp on their checkout page and achieved a 42% increase in sales.

4. Add a chatbot

With a chatbot, your company now has an assistant available 24/7 to help customers with any questions at any time of the day. With these bots, you can improve your customer service by automating simple service requests. Chatbots are very useful and can answer 80% of regular queries.

Chatbots are much more than that. These bots can also help you figure out why your site or landing page isn't converting. When site visitors leave the cart, chatbots can appear in a pop-up window and ask them the reason for the abandonment.

This information may be used to modify your offerings and marketing efforts. By soliciting user opinions at important touchpoints, you can gain insight into their level of satisfaction and their requirements. This will help you modify your offerings to meet customer expectations. It will also give you the opportunity to increase sales by offering a different service or product.

5. Create a compelling and clear value proposition

The true potential of your site is determined by your unique value proposition. So, if done right, it can greatly increase website conversions and improve the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.

Your unique value proposition is your path to a great first impression. Impressions convey the value of your product or site to your customers. To create a unique value proposition, you need to think deeply about the important characteristics of your services and products. Once it's created, you should move on to refining it and disseminating it effectively for optimal results.

After that, you'll want to test it out to see how effective it is and how potential customers resonate with it. UVP optimization is an ongoing process that includes recognition, expression, and A/B testing.

6. Get rid of jargon

In website text, simplicity is always best. The reason for this is that no matter what your target audience may be, your product can appeal to a large user base. However, in most cases, these users abandon the product because the web copy is full of industry jargon.

Web copywriters would do well to remember the words of Paul Graham: "Write as you speak." This is because clarity always wins over persuasion. Trying to woo people with fancy chatter will never do you too much good. Remember that it is people who will use your product and buy it. Write for them, not for the companies that own them.

7. Use Closed and Unstructured Content Carefully

For most marketers, not knowing how and when to use private and public content often helps or hinders their CRO efforts. With the wealth of information available today, customers are more aware than ever before. They usually go through more than five pieces of content before making a decision.

Creating closed content by understanding what your audience is interested in. In addition, it will help you improve your offerings and use the requested information from customers to provide them with more valuable content. Closed content such as e-books, newsletters, case studies, etc. will provide your customers with valuable information and give you the opportunity to engage them in the future. Remember that the number of form fields should be kept to a minimum in order for clients to actually complete the process of accessing your private content.

On the other hand, unprotected content is something that clients do not need to provide information to access. Thus, it is downloaded 20-50 times more often than closed content. The trick here is to balance between the two. Provide enough but not enough value for your content without restraint to drive users to the signup form. You need to make sure that the number of fields is kept to a minimum so that people can register on it.

8. A/B testing

In conversion rate optimization, it all comes down to testing. Testing is the best way to find loopholes in UX and mitigate risks. All this also gives your creative teams more inspiration and ideas to improve things. In fact, testing is so profitable that sites that averaged 50% more tests saw an increase in their conversion rate in the previous year.

Your CRO depends on every little thing on your site, because they all affect the user experience in one way or another. That's why it's so important to A/B test your landing pages as often as possible. Companies that pay attention to this and use multiple (nine or more) optimization techniques are more likely to see higher conversion rates.

Conclusion

There are many steps you can take to improve your website's conversion rates and positively impact your landing pages. Along with the tips mentioned above and making a few changes to your SEO efforts, you can boost your CRO significantly and lead to more revenue and sales.