Turn More Traffic Into Paying Customers With Conversion Rate Optimisation.
We recently published a post on web design essentials for a profitable website, where we touched on the topic of conversions. We also promised we’d be back again soon, with more on the subject, and today we’re looking at how to increase the conversion rate of your website.
Conversions are the profitable actions any user takes and these determine the return on your entire digital marketing investment. These can include direct sales, newsletter sign ups, email enquiries or anything else that takes a visitor one step closer to buying into your services. The point is every visitor who leaves without taking one of these steps is another lead lost – and you want to minimise this number.
Conversion Rate Optimisation
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is a structured approach to increasing the profitability of your website. Ideally, you want to maximise the number of visitors who become paying customers, but there are a number of secondary goals to implement in CRO. First of all you want to reduce the number of visitors who leave without looking at a second page on your site – something we call bounce rate.
While another key objective is to keep users involved with your brand in some way. Not every visitor is ready to do business right here and now, but that doesn’t mean you simply let them walk out the door. You keep them involved in your brand, encourage them to come back and do everything you can to guide them along the buying process.
Key Approaches To CRO
Conversion rate optimisation is a complex practice and we’ll be coming back to this subject regularly in future blog posts. But to get us off to a good start, let’s take a look at three key areas you’ll need to focus on with your CRO efforts.
Web Design
The first thing you need to assess is the design of your website – not only to reduce bounce rate, but also improve the performance of key conversion points. Calls to action, online forms and layout are just three examples of design elements that can make or break your conversion rate. In fact, just about every design choice can have a direct influence on conversions and we’ll be looking at specific elements like contact forms in future posts as well.
Content
Content is your biggest asset when it comes to closing leads and good web content goes way beyond simple words. From the text on your landing page to product descriptions and the words on your call to action buttons, you can’t afford to underestimate the impact of content on your conversion rate.
User Experience
User experience(UX) is a mammoth subject in itself – one that overlaps just about every element of a website – and a key player in conversion rate optimisation. From the second a user lands on your page the moment they buy a product, a top notch user experience makes you a pleasure to do business with. This brings us back to web design, but it also includes the functionality of your website and the journey you create from one step of the buying process to another.
More To Come Shortly
We’ve barely scratched the surface on topics like CRO and user experience (UX), but we’ll be back in the coming weeks to look at UX in more detail and something called A/B split testing – your best approach to increasing conversion rates and the profitability of your website.