Your website conversion rate is an important metric of your website’s success. In a nutshell, your conversion rate speaks to the number of times visitors to your website complete a target action, whether that is filling out a contact form, signing up for a newsletter, or completing a purchase. Your conversion rate speaks to how usable, relevant, trustworthy, and searchable your website is, among many other factors. Ultimately, the core goal of your marketing strategy is to increase your website conversions, and you may feel a bit overwhelmed when trying to assess how to optimize that. Luckily, there are some tried and true strategies that can increase your conversion rate.
1. Establish your goals
This might seem like a no-brainer, but you want to make sure that you know what your markers of success or growth are before you begin making changes to improve your conversion rate. As we mentioned before, your conversion rate is a measure of how many times visitors to your site complete a target action. So what is this target action? It’s anything that generates value for your business in some way. You can have multiple goals; for example, while your primary goal might be for a visitor to make a purchase, another goal may be to have them sign up for a newsletter, which will hopefully lead to more purchases in the future. Other goals might be what links or elements visitors click on and how often, and even page visits, both unique and repeat.
2. Analyze the data
Whether you are accessing it or not, you already have access to a great deal of data about how visitors are interacting with your website, which can be analyzed and reviewed through your website management platform or through a third-party service. You should never make any adjustments to your conversion rate optimization strategy without data to support the change. There is no room for hunches here!
For example, your website metrics will tell you how many people visit your website and then leave without meeting any of your conversion targets, versus people who click through to more content. You will also be able to see if people abandon a form or other action without completing it, how many repeat visitors/customers you have, and what the average value of their transactions are.
3. Develop your user persona
From the data you’ve reviewed above, you will be able to generate a profile of users who access your website and become customers. This is often called your “user persona” and is similar to, but not the same as, your target customer. Compare the data you’ve gathered to your target customer: are you reaching who you are trying to reach? Who is actually adding value to your business? Changes to your website should appeal to your actual users and increase their engagement with your products.
4. Check out your competition
One of the reasons people like accessing services online is that it’s easy to do comparison shopping. You must assume that your target customers are also looking at your competitor’s websites to decide who will get their business. It’s essential that you regularly perform a competitor analysis and stay on top of improvements to your website that will lead customers to chose you.
5. Highlight your unique value proposition
A key aspect of your branding is your value proposition. This is your statement to users that tells them why they should engage with your services over those of your competitors. When you are designing your website, the copy, headlines, images, and other media you include should work together to promote and highlight your value proposition. You can also think of your value proposition as your unique selling point. Market research has shown that you should be able to summarize your value proposition or unique selling point in ten words or less.
6. Know what your conversion funnels are
When a visitor lands on your website, there is a pathway of prompts and actions that you have set up to guide the user to your conversion target. This pathway is called the conversion funnel. It’s important to understand how users are interacting with your website so that you can assess why they may fail to complete your target actions. At what point in the conversion journey are people dropping away? If your goals are clear, you should be able to review your website data and see where people are abandoning the process, effectively where your conversion funnel needs to be changed and strengthened. Your competitor analysis will be useful here, as you can review how their conversion funnel differs from yours. Pay attention to the drop-off points where users stop engaging with your conversion target. There will be several! If you know where these points are, you can assess what changes and updates will add the most value for you.
7. Optimize your critical pages
You might be thinking, isn’t this whole article about optimizing critical pages? And yes, we have been going through how to understand and optimize key points in the user journey. However, you may find that you need to do a radical revamp of your website in order to make a big improvement to your conversion rate. In this case, you will want to make sure that you are protecting pages and content that are already adding a great deal of value to your website, while also integrating them into your updates. It’s also important not to underestimate the value of applying sales copy best practices; for example, five times as many people will read a headline as will actually click through to read the article. Focusing on headline copy as part of your process is likely to improve your conversion rates.
8. Optimize site navigation and load times
When a visitor lands on your page, you want them to quickly and seamlessly be able to find your products and conversion targets. The more user-friendly your conversion funnel is, the higher your conversion rate will be! There are a few easy ways you can quickly improve user experience. One is to improve your page load time: your unique pages shouldn’t take any more than 4 seconds to load, and shorter is better. Long load times lead to user abandonment. Another effective update is to make sure your site has a search feature. This means that people who arrive at your site knowing what they want to purchase can the exact product they want quickly and easily, and they will be more likely to complete the purchase.
9. Test, test, test!
Before you launch your exciting changes, you want to make sure they will perform how you expect and hope they will perform. There are third-party services that can compare your updates to your original webpage to assess if the changes you’ve made will positively impact your conversion rate before you roll it out universally. And it should go without saying that as much as possible, bugs and broken pathways should be corrected before your updated website goes live. You want to be investing in changes that will actually improve your bottom line, not damage it.
Conclusion
Your conversion rate represents the bottom line of your website and your marketing strategy. By keeping a close eye on your conversion numbers, you can stay aware of how the resources you are investing in your website are being translated into value added. These strategies can help you get a handle on your conversion rate optimization strategy and, ultimately, increase your business’ bottom line.
