Today’s online marketing aims to drive traffic towards websites so that they can get a chance to convert this traffic into qualified leads for sale. But that is only half done.
Making the most of traffic and leads can help you achieve sustainable growth. Enter conversion rate optimization or CRO. In this blog, we will understand the importance of CRO and how to get started with it.
But first of all, it is important to understand a little bit about the conversion rate.
SO WHAT IS THE CONVERSION RATE?
A conversion rate refers to the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action such as signing up for a service, completing a web form, or purchasing a product. Simply put, a conversion rate shows how many people take the action you want them to.
A high conversion rate means your website is well-designed and caters to the needs of your target audience. A low conversion rate is caused by slow load times, a broken form, or poor content that fails to deliver the value.
And What is a Good Conversion Rate?
According to the marketing expert, an ideal conversion rate remains between 2% to 3%.
Let’s say you sell cycles and choose to run a PPC marketing campaign that attracts 1000 visitors. 20 of those 1000 visitors actually made a purchase, meaning that your conversion rate is 2%.
While this is an ideal rate, you should always look to increase this rate. This is where conversion rate optimization can help.
However, its conversion rate varies based on your industry. For example, a good conversion rate for an eCommerce business is 6.25 while it should be 24.48% for a finance company.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO is all about improving your website and content to increase conversions.
The process of optimizing your conversions helps increase the number of leads, improve revenue and get great value from your existing leads.
Conversions can occur at any part of your website: it could be homepage, pricing page, landing page, blog, and more. That’s why you should optimize every part of your website to convert customers.
How to Calculate Conversion Rate?
Here is how Google explains the calculation for conversion rate:
“Conversion rates are calculated by simply taking the number of conversions and dividing that by the number of total ad interactions that can be tracked to a conversion during the same time period. For example, if you had 50 conversions from 1,000 interactions, your conversion rate would be 5%, since 50 ÷ 1,000 = 5%.”
How to Optimize Your Conversion Rate
Improve Your Call to Action:
is an important element of conversion rate optimization. It calls the customer to take action. Using CTAs like “Call Now to Get Appointment” might not bring results. Instead, you can use an appointment scheduling widget, letting potential customers schedule their own appointments easily while they are on your website.
Use a Good Headline:
Headlines are generally the first thing a visitor notices when landing on the page. A headline is a summary of your entire sales pitch into one bold sentence. It can evoke curiosity, answer a question, be instructional or solve a problem.
Poorly constructed headlines can cost you leads. The style and placement are also important.
Make Your Offers Personalized:
It has become important to gather data and offer customers exactly what they are looking for. And this data can be collected using cookies, forms, and other such techniques. Let’s say you have an online store where you sell all products such as furniture, balls, and shoes.
A user searches for “best jeans” and lands on your website but they see a large banner on top offering shoes at a discount. Even if the discount is attractive, the user is less likely to convert as the ad is not personalized.
This is because they are interested in jeans, not in shoes. Therefore, you should offer a discount on jeans. In addition to this, you can mention “Free Shipping” or early bird discount.
The point is here to understand your audience, their needs and come up with an offer they can accept.
Test Your Ads with Variations:
It can be challenging to figure out what can work and what cannot. The only way to determine this is to conduct A/B tests. For example, you can create two variations of the same ad and then see which can get more conversions. But keep in mind that this can take a month or two. Don’t jump to a conclusion right away.
Improve Customer Support:
High conversion rate websites generally have outstanding customer support. Make sure to have a FAQ on pages where required and cover all the important things a customer is likely to ask. A live chat feature can also be incorporated.
Keep Navigation Simple:
Navigation is an important aspect of conversions. If your website has complicated navigation, it can discourage visitors to explore further. Sometimes, navigation links can be provided on your landing pages.
Here are some more tips to improve your website’s navigation:
- Use inbounds link in your blogs
- Create a custom menu that contains easy-to-understand navigation terms.
- Include popular links to your sidebar or in-line anchor CTA’s that can send traffic to your important pages.
The Bottom Line:
Conversion rate determines the success of your websites. Well, there could be more ways to improve the conversion rate of your websites. But we have provided here some key tips so that you can easily get started without being overwhelmed by tons of strategies.
What do you think? Do you have other strategies for conversion rate optimization?
Let me know by commenting below!
Started working as a digital marketing expert, Varun Sharma is now also a well-known digital marketing speaker – a speaker on performance development, and a trusted mentor to businesses in the digital world. His keynote expositions are based on the digital marketing theories, which provide a fascinating insight into the secrets of high performance.