Convert Your Customers: 12 Steps to Increase Website Conversions
It takes a lot of work to get people to visit your website, but that’s just half the battle! The next thing you have to work on is getting those visitors to ‘convert’ – whether that means making a purchase, signing up to your email list or contacting you.
Without good website conversion rates, it doesn’t matter how many people visit your website. But what is ‘good’? The average conversion rate is around 2.5%, but there is so much variation across industries and every business is unique. The best approach is to check your current conversion rate in Google Analytics and use this as a baseline to improve upon!
Even small tweaks and continuous improvements can make a big impact!
Here are 12 steps you can take to help.
1) Perfect your landing pages
Use your Google Analytics account to find out what pages people are landing on when they visit your site and work on improving them first. Are they easy to skim read? Do they showcase your brand at its best? Do they have a clear and relevant call to action?
A well planned out landing page means that you’re more likely to grab your visitor’s attention and keep them browsing. It will reduce your bounce rate too, improving your SEO and helping you climb the search rankings. So, it’s a great place to start!
2) Fine-tune your layout, images and copy across your site
Many different elements come into play when creating a good web page. You might have amazing copy, but the layout could be confusing, or the paragraphs could be too long. Your images might take too long to load, and people will leave before they see what you’ve got to offer.
This is the basics of User Experience (UX) design; creating a website that is easy to use, useful and enjoyable to interact with. There’s a lot more to it, but you can leave that to the experts!
3) Make sure your website is responsive
More and more people shop on their phones, and mobile commerce (or m-commerce) is expected to grow by 68% by 2022. That equates to 50% of all e-commerce sales taking place on mobile! If your website content doesn’t adjust to mobile, you’ll miss out on conversions.
4) Have a clear call to action
People don’t want to have to think too hard when browsing online, so make things easy for them! Make sure that every page on your website has a clear and relevant CTA that’s logically placed and stands out.
Buttons work better than in-text links at grabbing attention; you can experiment with different colours and copy to see what works best.
5) Don’t have too many options
Decision paralysis is a real thing! Each web page should have a limited number of calls to action, otherwise, it can be confusing. Keeping each page streamlined and focused gets best results.
6) Add video
People would rather watch a video about a product than read about it.
Video is an incredible tool to showcase your products while also adding vibrancy and personality to your brand.
Just make sure they can be watched without sound and add captions so that more people can view them, whether they have a hearing impairment or are browsing while their kids are falling asleep!
7) Build trust by showing reviews and testimonials
Studies have shown that showing customer testimonials can increase revenue by 62% per customer, so it’s worth doing!
There are lots of different ways of doing this, from integrating a review site like Trustpilot to actively asking customers for testimonials.
Testimonials can take different forms, such as:
- Quotes
- Videos
- Case studies
- Images of happy customers using your products.
It’s all about giving people confidence that they’ll get what they expect.
8) Use social proof
For the same reasons as those listed above, social media is a brilliant way to build trust in your business by showing off your expertise and communicating your brand message. Showing your product in action through social media images, videos and campaign posts is a great way to engage with potential customers and offer incentives to encourage them to convert, you can even add options to shop directly from Facebook and Instagram.
9) Be contactable
Make sure that your phone number, email address and physical address are easy to find, showing customers that behind the website is a real-life business. Again, this promotes trust and is simply the basis for good customer service!
10) Live chat
Customers will nearly always have questions and concerns when making a purchase, especially from a website they haven’t used before. Adding ‘live chat’ allows you to answer their queries right away and make them more likely to purchase. Live chat is a growing trend in customer service and has been shown to increase conversions by around 20%.
11) Streamline your checkout process
You wouldn’t expect customers to fill in numerous forms at the till in a bricks and mortar shop, so why would you do so online?
Once a customer has added something to their basket, make it as easy as possible for them to check-out before something distracts them or they get frustrated! You can do this by reducing the amount of information you ask them to fill in and offering multiple payment options.
The option to checkout as a guest without signing-up is something the ‘big players’ do, and for good reason.
12) Test, test, test
You’ve only got seconds to grab potential customers attention before they click away, so the more you test things the more you will learn about what is and isn’t working. Split testing different designs and copy for key pages on your website is a great way to work out what performs best.
Ultimately, to see increased conversions you need to continually improve all areas of your website and have user experience at the centre of every decision; from changing fonts to thinking about how fast your images load, and much more in between.
Be strategic about how you approach things and test your results in Google Analytics to see what’s working.
And if you need some extra help, get in touch. It’s what we do!