Driving traffic to your website is merely just the start of the online customer journey – converting traffic is the end goal.
Online traffic is only of value when your visitor ends their session by carrying out a specific action that you want them to complete. For example, if you are an eCommerce store, your primary goal is to turn these visitors into customers who buy your products. Alternatively, you may have a web page with a form that you want people to fill in to gain their details. No matter what your business model or industry, every website should have a primary action for visitors to engage with.
Online marketers consider ‘conversions’ as the golden egg. Unless you’re selling advertising space, online traffic is a dead horse if it’s not converting. The skill for any website today is to maximise the number of visitors who are successfully turned into actionable customers. Although average conversion metrics are useful checkpoints, business owners should strive to convert as much traffic as possible. The imaginary online sky is the limit!
So, how can you improve your website’s conversion rate? Well, have a read of these five crazily easy conversion optimisation tips to find out.
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Use Persuasive Writing
Many digital marketing experts will say that the content on your page will have the biggest influence on your users. If your content is engaging and descriptive, then you stand a good chance of converting your traffic. The aim is to produce something that captivates and convinces users to carry out your desired action. Therefore, your body content should be persuasive without being over the top. Be careful; there’s a fine line between ‘persuading’ users and looking like you’re begging your visitors to convert.
The trick is to be smart, talk about how the action will benefit the user – highlight the wins. Use content that is personal and makes the user feel that your product or form is targeted only towards them, make them feel special. Remember, online visitors can be impatient, keep your content brief and to the point. Extra content can always be placed further down the web page for search engine robots to index (as long as it adds value to users, too).
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Perfect Your Call To Action
Creating a killer call to action within your converting web pages should be your top priority. It is important that the landing pages that generate search traffic are correctly optimised to prompt users to complete your desired action. Alongside a catchy call to action, landing pages play a significant role in the cycle of conversion optimisation, as it is within these pages that users are influenced and customer decisions made.
A call to action could be a buy button, form, read more or social sharing interaction that users click to fulfil your desired action. Accompanied by persuasive text, call to actions should be A/B tested to see what works for your website’s audience – every industry will act differently. The more interaction, the higher your conversions could reach.
If you are struggling to decide how best to present your call to actions, start by following these simple rules; make it big and bold to stand out on the page, make it colourful to attract attention and finally, make sure the link destination does not produce a (broken link) 404 server error!
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Use Visual Elements
We all know web visitors love images – have you seen the rise of the meme? It is important to remember that although you should focus on creating unique and engaging content for visitors and search ‘bots’, don’t forget about the use of visuals and imagery across your site.
Using high-quality images and visuals to break up elements on a landing page can make the text appear more digestible and easier to read. If you are an eCommerce store, make sure your product images are professional and offer visitors a full ‘virtual’ tour – you should have at least 3 pictures per product page. Go one-step further than your competition – why not create a quick product video?
Lead generation websites should focus on using imagery and visuals to create a clean and straightforward layout that steers visitors to the desired call to action point on the page. It is important to remember that user experience (UX) and conversion rates are closely linked. It is, therefore, vital to invest time in UX design to ensure your website is super user-friendly, as this could significantly boost your conversion rate.
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Add Credibility To Your Page
Trust makes the world wide web go round. Building credibility is perhaps the easiest way you can supercharge your conversion rates through making your website appear more credible to visitors. Credibility can be presented in a number of ways, for example; if you’re an eCommerce store, the most obvious task is to setup an SSL certificate and highlight that your checkout is secure through the use of industry icons i.e. Sagepay, Worldpay etc.
Other options could include; adding credibility stamps or badges across your website such as; high profile customer logos or industry awards. If your site or business is brand new, adding a simple but detailed ‘about us’ page, with a quick history, shows visitors you are a real company!
Building website credibility lays the foundation for users to feel more confident and comfortable when using your site. This is because they will interpret it to be safe and credible. As a result, they’re far more likely to complete your desired call to action.
Building credibility is perhaps the easiest way you can supercharge your conversion rates!
– Mike McManus (Digital Marketing Whizz | Marketing Labs) -
Provide An Incentive
Everybody likes an incentive, a deal or special offer. Providing an incentive makes customers/visitors feel like they are getting better value for money or something out the deal. Offering visitors an incentive such a free delivery or a free download can go down a storm in some industries.
However, remember to factor these costs or services into your margin or workload. Offering an incentive that costs you more money than it’s worth is not a good idea – it has to be a win-win for both parties. For example, offering free delivery above a certain order value, may increase your overall order value (AOV) and ensures you have more margin to take the cost of free delivery.
If you’re offering a free download in return for an email address, why not use these customer emails as part of your email marketing campaigns. Content-based or blogging websites should focus on highlighting the benefits of why users should click ‘read more’ – what could they learn or find out?
Once you’ve created your incentive, it is important to make sure these are clearly displayed on your landing pages and across your website. This will ensure these incentives can have the best possible influence at boosting your conversion rate.
There you have it, five free crazily easy conversion optimisation tips you can quickly implement across your website! Investing time and effort into conversion optimisation will ensure your site is setup to take advantage of visitor traffic.
If you are struggling to boost your conversion rates, why not contact our expert digital marketing team here at Marketing Labs to find out how we can help.
Enjoyed reading this post? You might also like our article on effective landing page design.