If you find out that a lot of your friends and family frequently ask you for advice, you should consider using your knowledge more profitably. A large number of people search online for relationship advice and websites that are based on these types of topics usually have a lot of traffic. You can improve your website conversion rates with online relationship advice.
The first thing to do when you want to start a relationship advice site is to choose the type of topic that you will focus on. Your will have better conversions if you focus on a particular niche. It will be easier for you if you choose a topic that you are interested in. There are different types of relationships and they have a variety of problems.
- How do You Increase Conversion Rate Optimization?
- How do You Increase Conversion Rate in 2022?
- What is a Good Online Conversion Rate?
- How Can Sales Conversion Rates be Improved?
- How do You Increase Conversion Rate on Google Ads?
- How do You Fix a Conversion Rate?
- How do I Optimize my Website For Conversion?
- How Important is Conversion Rate?
- How do You Increase Store Conversion?
- What is CRO Strategy?
- What is CRO Formula?
- What is The Best SEO Technique to Get Rank Faster?
- Roles of Social Media in Website Conversion Rates
How do You Increase Conversion Rate Optimization?
Website conversion rates average around 2 percent. For every 100 visitors, you can expect to only get 2 customers. And honestly, that’s a pretty good conversion rate.
Many sites only have a 0.1 to 0.2% conversion rate. That takes 1000 visitors to get 1 customer.
Read Also: Top 10 Sales Strategies to Boost Conversion Rates
How do we improve our conversions so we can get more customers with the traffic we already have?
Getting valuable material
It will be easy to provide quality advice if you have a lot of knowledge about your chosen area. You may not be able to write consistently about issues that you are not very knowledgeable about. This does not mean that you have to write every article on your website. You will need to invite guest writers from time to time to fill in for you. When your audience grows, you may not be able to do all the work by yourself.
Setting up your website
You can easily improve your website conversion rates with online relationship advice if you have a website that is properly set up. The easiest way to start is to put up a simple blog on the internet. Make sure that you purchase your own domain name as well as hosting. If you set up a free blog, your URL will not be unique and you can lose the blog if you violate any of the terms of the platform.
Setting up a website is not difficult even if you do not have any technical knowledge. WordPress is usually the most recommended blogging software. If you want to use WordPress, make sure that you choose a hosting company that provides cPanel. This will make it easy for you to set up your website with minimal instructions.
Customize your blog properly
The design of your blog should match the type of topics that you want to talk about. You will have to do some research in order to find out the type of colors that appeal to the people you want to reach. If you are reaching out to younger people, you should have a bright design that is catchy ad attractive. You should also invest in a theme that is customized to the type of image that you want to present.
Make good use of social media
Place “share” buttons on all your pages so that visitors can easily share your articles with their friends on social networks. You should also add a link to the RSS feed of your website so that interested individuals can subscribe to it. This is a good way to create a viral effect. If you have one viral article every couple of months, you will soon have an influx of traffic to your website.
How do You Increase Conversion Rate in 2022?
According to Forbes, we have to focus on cross-generational digital marketing to survive and flourish. There are many opportunities and dangers in social media. So, keeping that in mind.
Let’s see what the best conversion rate optimization trends in 2022 are:
1. Personalization
Most companies understand how important their website content is. It will be cost-effective, boost SEO ranks, provide value to customers, and yield excellent results when you do it correctly.
However, we’re not discussing combining text fields or including the buyer’s name in a bulk email. True personalization is identifying a customer’s interests, determining where they are in the purchase cycle, and sending a message that demonstrates that you understand their requirements.
But how to make these possible? There are many tools in the market to help you out. WatchThemLive analytics is one of the best and completely free ones out there. Our website analytics services, such as heat maps and session replay, are essential for your business success. They will provide you detailed information about your customers and website performance at the same time.
2. User Experience (UX)
It’s difficult to convert individuals if they don’t remain around. Therefore optimizing the user experience is crucial to increasing your conversion rate. Even Google agrees that UX factors affect your website’s rankings.
The user must be at the center of every online decision you make. Take, for example, pop-ups. They may collect many leads, but if they become too bothersome for your visitors, they will not result in conversions. You can keep visitors interested and prevent them from leaving frustrated by improving the UX of your website.
3. Speed, Speed, Speed
Users will leave before even assessing your offer if your sites take too long to load. Take a look at the following figures from a recent Akamai study:
“A 100-millisecond delay in website load time can hurt conversion rates by 7%. A two-second delay in web page load time increases bounce rates by 103%. 53% of mobile site visitors will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.”
Make calls, gather your managers, bring on more money, do anything you can to fix your website speed. It is worth your efforts.
4. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
Make sure to use machine learning to make your website more user-friendly. Voice search, chatbots, predictive analytics, and micro-interactions are some examples of AI usage.
Designers can now make better decisions based on detailed data thanks to machine learning. Using AI frees up your team and improves your productivity as well as your CRO. This is done by eliminating the need for individuals to review spreadsheets and find out your targets and what they need.
5. Mobile Optimization
In our era, almost everyone has a mobile device and can reach your website from anywhere. Therefore, it makes sense to prioritize mobile optimization as a conversion rate optimization trend.
It isn’t necessarily the media that puts so much emphasis on mobile experiences. However, the rate of innovation appears to be increasing every year. Today’s focus is on optimizing for many new mobile features, such as voice assistants and augmented reality (AR).
6. Make Trust with Transparency
Giving people power over the data they provide you will boost brand trust, resulting in higher conversion rates.
Conversions are influenced by trust. This is why in 2022, the public and institutional protest for “transparency in design” will continue to become louder. Here are some examples:
- Invest in secure systems
- Always have a clear pricing
- Make sure users know about what your app has access to
- Inform data usage
7. Use Chatboxes Effectively
Chatbots can be used to direct a customer’s journey through your website. You may tailor your messaging to encourage specific actions based on the page they’re on and the page/ad they came from.
Just like a landing page, you can customize your CTAs in these chatbots.
8. Social Proof with User-Generated Content (UGC)
Social proof is one of the important conversion rate optimization trends. You can use it in suitable places on your landing page to increase its effectiveness.
However, you may go beyond simply quoting evaluations on your offer when it comes to social proof. If you have a loyal consumer base, get them to help you develop content. User-generated content (UGC) is a terrific method to let your target audience tell you why they adore you. As digital marketing and marketing automation become increasingly humanized, user-generated content (UGC) helps you make your efforts more real and human.
9. Checkout Optimization
Optimizing your checkout process is primarily an eCommerce trend. Reducing checkout abandonment is nearly identical to reducing bounce rate, and both are equally significant. Watching a user browse your website and leaving without converting is not a good experience at all.
10. Optimize Your Videos
There is no need to emphasize the importance of video marketing and its role in conversion rate optimization. Although, there are some things that should be considered for making your customers’ video experience even better:
- Avoid autoplay
- Show the time
- Keep the CTA visible
- Use animation and graphics
What is a Good Online Conversion Rate?
Your conversion rate can be defined as the percentage of users or visitors that complete a specific action. The action can be anything – new signup, a new purchase, a download, etc.
The rate is displayed in percentage and can be very volatile. Plus, it may differ from page to page and product to product.
Let’s say you sell shoes and decide to run a marketing campaign on Facebook that attracts 1,000 visitors. According to the campaign, your conversion rate is 2 percent, which means about 20 of your visitors actually made a purchase.
The average rate depends on a number of factors including your niche, target device, etc.
Nonetheless, the average rate is between 1 percent and 3 percent only. This means a large majority of your visitors will never take your desired action. This is the norm because not everyone who lands on your site has the intention to purchase.
The number might sound low but it’s pretty good. Let’s say you have 100,000 visitors and your conversion rate is 3 percent. This means about 3,000 of your visitors are making a purchase.
Your aim should be to increase both – your conversion rate and the number of unique visitors. However, keep your expectations low.
You can’t have a 100 percent conversion rate. Even 50 percent is nearly impossible. However, there are ways to improve your conversion rate and hit double digits.
How Can Sales Conversion Rates be Improved?
We asked 26 experts about how they increase their sales conversion rates. They had some amazing insights that we’re going to share with you below.
From leveraging the power of video to creating automated follow-up campaigns, the experts shared some great tips.
1. Work with the right leads instead of a lot of leads
“It starts with the quality of the leads,” notes Fistbump Media’s Dan King. “So our Sales and Marketing functions work really closely together to ensure we’re getting the right kinds of leads who are going to be most likely to convert.
From a marketing perspective, we’re not interested in just driving lots of traffic and leads. We’ll consider fewer leads a success if they are the right leads. So marketing and sales work closely to identify the reasons people make their buying decision for various products/services, and then we create the marketing campaigns to specifically hit those points.”
2. Guarantee results
“If you are firm that your product or service will offer great value, you can guarantee results,” advises CocoSign’s Caroline Lee. “This is one tactic we implemented to help customers take quick action.
Wouldn’t you take action if someone guarantees you a certain outcome? Again, there’s a lot of risk factor involved in this, and implementing this strategy is based on the value you offer.”
Besides, Lee shares you can also “infuse ‘fear of missing out,’ this helps customers to spark action. Offer a limited time incentive to attract attention.”
3. Use video
The team at Care Lamps has recently tried to leverage videos in order to increase their sales conversion rate. Ian Turner explains, “We recently trialed adding a lifestyle video, showcasing one of our products in use. This has increased our conversion rate of this product by 0.5%.”
4. Inform that you are moving on
Dave Popple’s team at Psynet Group has noticed some interesting results as they told their inactive leads they were moving on. Popple writes, “the most effective thing that we did was to reach out and tell them that we are assuming they are not interested (after 2 months of no movement) and that we will move on.
This is not as much of a sales tactic as it is courtesy to stop calling and filling up their email box as well as a means to keep our sales team from wasting time. This simple message put 70% of our prospects back in play and half of those 70 have signed an SOW.
We calculate conversion as sales/first meeting with a consultant. We have a system in which the sales team generates interest and the consultant has the first meeting. This is probably closest to your sales/opportunities ratio.”
5. Tweak or change your call to action (CTA)
A couple of our expert respondents applaud the role that a clear and optimized call to action plays in boosting the sales conversion rate.
Jennifer Neylon from My Supplement Store shares, “We have found that adding more CTA or Call to Actions throughout our content has resulted in improved sales conversions rates.
For example, on our homepage banners, we have tested adding CTA buttons that link directly to products or pages, and have found that customers are more likely to click the button embedded in the banner than the banner alone. The same goes for adding CTA buttons in email marketing, etc.”
In the same vein, CarVertical’s Arnas Vasiliauskas comments, “Our key to boosting our sales conversion rates is to reinforce the value of our content by designing strong CTA headlines and forging a unique and relevant content body. We make sure that the audience’s attention is maintained by promoting engagement all throughout the whole content.”
Wicklewood’s Rosie Axford goes into the optimization details: “Test various uses of color on call to actions along the conversion funnel. Obviously, the most important place to look when you are increasing conversions is along the conversion funnel.”
“At all points on the conversion funnel, we have hundreds of different A/B tests running. Out of all the tests we ran, the most interesting test was on the cart page. The site had a progress bar that ran along the top of the cart page that told you how close you were to getting free delivery (when you spent £29), the default design (version A) had a grey progress bar and when you achieved free delivery it would turn green.
On the other hand, version B was green by default even if you hadn’t achieved the necessary spending. We found that Version B dramatically outperformed version A. In our initial test against a small segment of the site traffic, we saw an increased conversion rate of 8%,” continues Axford.
6. Work on your headlines
A click-worthy CTA with an equally engaging headline makes the best combination for improving your sales conversion rate opines Darren Litt from Hiya Health Products.
“Above all, you need to focus on two components — the headline and the call to action. Simplify what’s valuable or relevant about your product and state it succinctly. There may be other competing ads next to yours, so your headline should answer why your product is the solution.
Then add a clear call to action. What’s the next step you want your prospect to make? How can you present this call to action in an incentivizing way? What can you offer upfront to compel them to click and complete the call to action?”
7. Improve support with live chat
“When consumers want to learn about a product or service, live chat is one of the most effortless ways to go, it’s super beneficial,” points out Incrementors SEO Services’ Brack Nelson. “To add live chat to your site, you can use plugins like Chatra or Zopim.”
8. Set up a follow-up campaign
Shawn Breyer of The Hive Law appreciates following-up with leads. Breyer explains how they did it: “We created an automated follow-up campaign. We did this by setting up retargeting and emailing leads. We placed Google Ads and Facebook Pixels on our forms’ thank you pages.
We retarget them with Display Ads, YouTube Ads, and Facebook Ads. We also send them an automated email sequence. All these pieces of content include testimonials, education, and offers. Implementing this has increased our conversions by 37%.”
9. Use SMS alerts to increase your sales conversion rate
At Filter King, Rick Hoskins explains they use SMS alerts to increase their sales conversion rate.
“The customer chooses when they want to receive a reminder to replace their air and/or furnace filters. Filters need to be changed regularly and with life happening it is often that they are forgotten. SMS alerts go straight to someone’s cell to remind them. It is a free service we offer, which increases the number of subscribers.
Having an SMS alert is more advantageous than an email or app alert. Often notifications are turned off for apps, but never for SMS. Direct calls and SMS are still regarded as private lines. The conversation rate from these alerts is very satisfactory.”
10. Improve user experience
“Improving our sales conversion rate relies on our ongoing consumer research, website optimizations, and updates based on our website data in analytics,” Youtech’s Elizabeth Weatherby says.
“We can learn a lot when we look at our website analytics, click paths, heat maps, and more, to learn about where on our site we can make updates and optimizations to improve the online buying experience.
Our SEO efforts have allowed us to make necessary adjustments to our site design and set up to better assist users in converting. When we make updates to the way our services and vehicle offerings are presented, users gravitate towards certain styles and website booking formats than others. With these A/B tests and ongoing optimizations, we’re able to see our direct efforts when calculating sales from online bookings that came from organic users!”
11. Create content for all parts of your sales funnel
Next up is another useful tip for improving your sales conversion rate – this one’s from Jonathan Aufray of GrowthHackers who says, “to improve our sales conversion rate, we created content for each part of the funnel. Whether your lead is on the brand awareness, discovery, consideration, or interest phase, we’ve got content to share with them.
This content is in different formats (Blog posts, e-books, infographics, case studies, etc.) and we’re ready to answer most of their questions or concerns.”
How do You Increase Conversion Rate on Google Ads?
If you’re getting a good amount of traffic from your ads but not enough people actually buying or signing up for things (we call these actions “conversions”), you can take several steps to improve.
You can use the free Google Ads conversion tracking tool to measure how many people are actually buying or signing up for things after they land on your website. Then, there are a number of things you can do to improve your conversion rate, like adding more specific keywords and negative keywords.
Track your success with a conversion tracking
Before you start making any big changes to your account, it’s a good idea to see how much business your ads are currently generating. Google Ads shows you the number of impressions and clicks you get with your ads, but wouldn’t it be great if Google Ads could also show you the number of conversions you’re getting? Well, Google Ads can do that – with conversion tracking.
After setting up conversion tracking, you’ll be able to see how effective your campaigns are once you make adjustments to them. For example, If you make a change to a campaign and notice your conversion rate increases, that’s a good sign that your change is leading to better campaign performance.
Use specific keywords for better conversion rates
Once you’re able to track your conversions, you can then focus on improving your conversion rate. Specific keywords often tend to have a better conversion rate than general keywords. For example, consider the keywords below. Which one do you think leads to a higher conversion rate?
- Acme
- Acme printers
- Acme 710c
Generally, more specific keywords like “Acme 710c” tend to lead to a better conversion rate than general keywords like “Acme.” That’s because people searching for specific models or product numbers have typically already researched their product and want to make a purchase.
Keep in mind, however, that using more specific keywords can lead to fewer impressions. If your keywords are too specific, fewer people may end up searching for those terms. The trick is to find the right balance between being general enough to match what people are searching for, and specific enough to lead to conversions.
Use negative keywords to refine your traffic
Another way to try to improve your conversion rate is to use negative keywords. When you use negative keywords, your ad won’t show up when people search for those particular keywords. This is helpful when you’re trying to limit your ad so that it doesn’t show up for people who are just browsing around and aren’t ready to purchase anything yet.
For example, some advertisers use “free” as a negative keyword. Unless your site offers free products or trials, you might want to add this as a negative keyword to attract fewer people who are just looking for free products. People searching for free products are probably less likely to make purchases.
Use the search terms report to reach the right customers
Google Ads shows you how well your individual keywords are doing, but it can also show you the exact words that your customers searched for when your ad showed up. You can view this list of terms in the search terms report.
After reviewing this report, you can then decide to add or exclude certain keywords from your keyword list. Doing this can help you target the right customers by either expanding or refining who can see your ad.
Include prices in your ad to attract potential buyers
Another way to get more relevant traffic is to include prices in your ad text. If a customer sees the price of your product and still clicks your ad, you know he’s interested in potentially buying that product at that price. If he doesn’t like the price, he won’t click your ad, and you’ll save yourself the cost of that click.
As an experiment, you might want to consider adding prices in your ad text to see if that helps your ads lead to a better conversion rate. This can be especially effective when your prices are lower than your competitors’!
To test whether this will work for you, you can run an experiment by creating a new ad and rotating your ads. When using ad rotation, you can compare the clickthrough rates and conversion rates of the ad that includes the price versus the one that doesn’t.
How do You Fix a Conversion Rate?
The average conversion rate for the eCommerce industry dropped from 2.31% to 2.12% during April 2020 to April 2021 period.
This may be a result of the present market changes due to the pandemic. But your retail conversion rate can drop due to gaps on your eCommerce website.
It’s crucial to keep an eye on your online conversion rates. This is because they can directly affect your eCommerce store’s profitability as well as its ability to grow.
There are many variables that affect conversion rates. That’s why discussing what is a good eCommerce conversion rate isn’t always helpful.
Hence, eCommerce conversion rate benchmarks can be a good starting point. But eventually, you’ll need to start looking at internal data rather than external data.
Sometimes, these are obvious ones. Your conversion rate can drop if you made a recent change to the website, landing page, pricing, discounts, etc. So, it’s advisable to check the last few activities you did on the website. It can do the trick in some cases.
But in other cases, where the reasons are not as straightforward, you need to look into other factors that could be holding off your sales.
Below are 10 conversion rate optimization tips to help you start improving your objectives.
- Use Effective Headlines
- Strategic CTA’s
- Simplistic Navigation
- Page Load Speed
- Verified Payment Systems, Trust Seals, and Free Shipping
- Time Limit
- Limited Quantity
- Optimize for Mobile
- Display Testimonials and Referrals
- Complementary Colors
How do I Optimize my Website For Conversion?
If you are having a lot of traffic to your website, but not getting a lot of leads, then it means it’s time to get serious about conversion rate optimization. To uplift your conversion rate, all you need to do is just three simple words: Conversion Rate Optimization.
A website conversion rate is influenced by many factors. Sometimes just a small tweak can lead to significant enhancement in conversion rates. Acquire more customers, increase your revenue and grow your business by applying the below conversion optimization tips.
1. Define Your Targeted Audience
The first conversion optimization tip is to properly define the targeted audience.
One of the major mistakes many marketers make is trying to please everyone.
Do you think everyone will buy your product or service even the product or service is useful for everyone?
If you think so, you are wrong anyway!
Based on your product or service, your research and analytics data and of course your personal experience, you can determine who will actually need/want your product or service.
Your online marketing and website should be geared specifically to persons who are most likely to convert.
You should know who you are talking to and what will make them to purchase your product or service.
2. Competitive Analysis
Understanding your competitors is imperative to increase conversions.
If you can identify your top three competitors, then you can start to examine their online marketing efforts and websites to understand where you require some improvements.
If you evaluate yourself against competitors that are truly similar to you, the insights you gain will be much more valuable.
3. Create a Unique Value Proposition
A unique value proposition (UVP) is one of the most important conversion triggers. It delivers the clear benefits of your offer and tells the visitors why they need to purchase from you and not from your competitors.
Your unique value proposition is what sets you apart from your competitors. Use something as a unique value proposition that is difficult for your competitors to duplicate.
4. Design a Professional Looking Website to Increase Your Conversion
When you design your website, just remember the three words “jazz it up”. It means your website must be visually appealing, exciting, and engaging.
Your website should provoke emotion from your visitors. An unprofessional website design can turn off most of your visitors and that’s why designing a professional-looking website is considered as one of the effective conversion optimization tips.
If you cannot create a professional-looking website by yourself, consider hiring an expert web designer to give it a professional look.
5. Add a Short Video
Include a video on your website to demonstrate how your product or service to be operated. It works better if you offer something complicated.
StacksandStacks reported that people were 144% more likely to buy after viewing a product video.
Be sure that your video is no longer than 2-3 minutes because no one has the time to watch long videos. Keep it sweet and short.
Vidyard increased conversions by 100% by using video on their home page.
6. Use Relevant Images
Every image in a website should have a purpose like to push your audience toward the conversion goal.
If you are using the images to break monotony of the text, you are completely wrong.
Only use the high quality, meaningful and relevant images where possible in your website to grab the attention of your target audience.
Avoid using tacky stock images as they can send the wrong message to your audience.
7. Make Your Website Responsive
Your website must be responsive. Responsiveness allows websites to automatically change layouts according to the visitor’s screen resolution, whether on a desktop, smartphone, or tablet.
Adobe analyzed more than 1000 websites and discovered that around 15 % of visitors came from smartphones and tablets.
That means if your website is not responsive, then you are losing some potential customers.
8. Maintain Consistency
Keep the message and look of your landing pages consistent with your ads and main website.
If your visitors see the same message and design on your ads and landing page, they recognize your brand quickly and this assures your visitors that they have been redirected in the right place.
Make sure you deliver exactly the things on your landing page that you have promised on your ads. That will increase the visitors trust over you.
9. Improve Your Website Loading Speed
Your website loading time should be below tolerable attention thresholds—ideally less than 3 seconds. If your website takes too long to load, many potential customers won’t bother to wait.
There are several studies that recognize the loss of conversions and sales correlating directly with the website loading speed.
For example,
“A study at Amazon showed a 1% decrease in sales for every 0.1s decrease in response times” (Kohavi and Longbotham 2007)
“According to studies by the Aberdeen Research Group, the average impact of a 1-second delay meant a 7% reduction in conversions”
10. Write a Clear Headline
Headline is generally one of the most noticeable things on a web page, getting it right can increase your website conversions to a great extent.
Just take a look at the below example, how Movexa made the headline more clear just by adding one word, which boosted their conversion rates by 89.97%.
Your headline is what grab your visitor’s attention and intrigue them to read further.
How Important is Conversion Rate?
Conversion rates are an effective way of comparing and contrasting the performance of multiple advertising channels. As with the example above, conversion rates are particularly important when running mobile user acquisition because they can measure the success of each campaign. They can also be used to set ROI expectations when scaling a campaign.
Conversion rates don’t always have to refer to clicks – they can also refer to conversion events further down the funnel. For example, it is possible to calculate the percentage of users who went on to install an app or complete an in-app action.
This is important for advertisers and marketers alike because it helps them to identify valuable users. This information can then be fed back into the funnel to aid targeting and optimize campaign performance.
When used correctly, conversion rate analysis can reveal which channels are most effective for promoting a particular app, helping an advertiser to determine the effectiveness of their copy and use it to guide strategic decisions. If your data shows that a conversion rate is lower than expected, they can also be used to spot issues with an app’s UX (for example, when users are having problems signing in) and highlight other areas of improvement.
There isn’t a single conversion rate that can be used to define success across the mobile advertising industry, but research into industry benchmarks and vertical-specific conversion expectations can help. You can use this research to compare these figures with the performance of your in-house advertising campaigns across a selection of channels and advertisers.
How do You Increase Store Conversion?
The fact is, if you don’t track traffic in your stores, you can’t calculate conversion rate. If you can’t calculate conversion rate, well, you can’t improve it. So for the roughly 35% of retailers who actually track traffic and conversion rates, here are five ways you can improve conversion rates in your stores.
Understand why people don’t buy: one of the most important things a retailer can do to improve conversion rates is to understand why people don’t buy. Long till line ups, can’t find sales help, out-of-stocks, poor merchandising, the list goes on. There are reasons why people visit your store and don’t buy and you need to understand it.
Every store manager should spend some time observing visitors in his/her store. Resist the temptation to help; just observe the behaviors. Watch customers as they move through your store, and it won’t take long for you to identify some actions you can take to turn more visitors into buyers.
Align your staff to traffic not transactions: Sounds simple enough, but one many retailers overlook. Staff scheduling is tricky at the best of times, but aligning your staff resources to when prospects are in your store will help you maximize your chances of converting more of them into buyers.
Pay particular attention to lunch time, when store traffic can be way up, but staff lunch breaks can seriously drag down conversion rates. Associates need to eat, but customers need to be served. Matching staff schedules to traffic volume and timing in your store will help improve your chances of converting more.
Look for conversion leaks and plug the holes: Traffic volume and conversion rates tend to be inversely related. That is, when traffic is high, conversion tends to go down or sag. When traffic levels are low, conversion rates tend to go up. It’s not hard to understand why this happens. When the store is busy, till lines are longer and it’s harder to get help from an associate.
The opposite is true when the store isn’t as busy. So, if you want to improve conversion rates, look at the traffic and conversion patterns in your store by day of week and by hour to look for when conversion rates are sagging — these sags represent the times when sales are being lost.
Set conversion targets by store: having goals and targets are important if you want to improve results. If you don’t have a conversion target for your store, you need to set one. It’s important to remember that every store is unique and conversion targets should be set uniquely by store.
One store might be doing well with a 15% conversion rate while another may be under-performing even though it has a 30% conversion rate. The trick is to move your own conversion rate up relative to your store’s performance.
Make conversion a team sport: it takes the collective effort of all staff to help turn prospects into buyers. From the cashiers and sales associates to the merchandisers — everyone in the store plays a role. So don’t think of conversion as merely some business metric, but rather a simple measure of how well the whole store is doing at helping people buy.
A good way to help improve conversion is to ensure all your staff understands what conversion is and that each of them helps influence it. Ask your staff about why they think people don’t buy and what the store can do to improve conversion rate. Discuss targets, get them to buy-in and share results. Get them excited about moving the conversion needle and you will significantly improve your chances of actually doing it.
Everyday prospects visit your stores with the intent to buy, but leave without making a purchase. Getting your store to capture even a few more of these lost sales can have a significant impact on overall sales results. Improving your in-store conversion rate is not hard to do, but it does take focus and attention — the suggestions above will help you drive conversion in your stores.
What is CRO Strategy?
CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization is a technique used to improve the sales conversions of visitors to a website or app.
Sales conversion optimization aims to transform visitor traffic into business results, such as making a purchase, hiring a service for a trial period, or downloading a mobile app or PDF.
In this sense, CRO as a strategy is based on a number of actions designed to bring about improvements, focused on optimizing the user experience at any stages where difficulties may be encountered in learning about the product, browsing a web page or contacting the company.
Advantages of applying conversion techniques to a website
- Obviously, more revenue: Optimized content and platforms means higher sales conversion and therefore more profit. In addition, conversion techniques don’t usually require a large expenditure because you will be applying small actions and changes in order to study their results, and thus get more sales using the same resources.
- Better quality traffic: If you give the user what they are looking for, word will spread about the quality of your brand, products or service; you’ll have better reviews, more average time spent on each page and you’ll be able to reach more users similar to your buyer persona, instead of avalanches of visitors who are basically not interested in you.
- Better knowledge of your customer: Conversion techniques invite you to put yourself in your client’s shoes and think like they do. There’s no better strategy for understanding what you might be doing wrong and what you’ll need to improve, and in the end this information is useful for all departments in your company: design, copy, customer service, distribution policy, sales contact, and so on.
What is CRO Formula?
The first step toward checking the status of your level of conversion rate optimization is to have access to a lot of data about how your visitors and customers interact with your website or app.
Such information includes the most common means by which traffic arrives at your website, how users navigate it and what problems potential customers may be encountering.
Two pieces of information and a simple formula are enough for you to calculate the CRO that’ll serve for you to work on:
CR = Total conversions ÷ Number of visitors x 100
For example, if a product page for a certain mug receives 2,314 visits per month and there are 16 sales, your conversion would be 0.6%.
This is a very low rate, incidentally, which is crying out for an improvement in your CRO strategy.
What is The Best SEO Technique to Get Rank Faster?
Broadly, SEO is any activity that helps you improve your ranking on search engines such as Google, Bing, and others. With 3.9 billion internet users and over 3.3 billion searches being performed each day, securing a good rank isn’t easy. And that’s exactly why SEO techniques are so important for businesses.
1. Conduct Competitor Analysis
One of the most effective SEO tactics that can help your rankings is extensive competitor research and analysis. The first step is simply to identify your key competitors, either by industry, geography, keywords, or any other relevant factors.
A thorough analysis will help you discover areas where your competitor is succeeding and possibly unearth weaknesses you can benefit from.
Any competitor analysis you perform should include these primary activities:
- Keyword Analysis: As one of the most important factors of good SEO, analyzing your competitors’ keyword usage is absolutely critical. Using keyword suggestion tools such as – KeySearch, Moz Keyword Explorer, or Google Keyword Planner can help you find keywords that your competition is using as well as ones you can use yourself.
- Link-Building Analysis: Another key SEO factor, link-building is vitally important for improving a site’s SERP rankings. Look for their origin, numbers, and the anchor text they use to help determine how your competition is performing on this front. It may be worth contacting those sites to see if they can provide backlinks to your site as well.
- Content Analysis: Take a look at the content on your competitors’ sites. How often do they post new content? What is the length of their blog posts? How is their content structured? If your competitor is performing better in search rankings, it may be worth emulating the practices that appear most valuable.
I’d strongly recommend that you use specialized tools available to perform competitor analysis. Tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or SpyFu help with the tedious legwork required in optimizing your site for searches.
2. Analyze Your Backlinks
While backlinks are an invaluable part of a good SEO strategy, not all backlinks are created equally. Some will naturally tend to perform better than others, so it’s important to monitor their performance. This helps you zero in on the types of backlinks that are most valuable. Or understand which sites tend to drive the highest quality traffic.
You may want to remove certain links or unilaterally disavow them if they are adding no value or penalizing your search rankings. Tools like Majestic, Ahrefs, or Moz Open Site Explorer can help you conduct a thorough backlink analysis of your website.
3. Optimize for Mobile
The mobile search market has been growing rapidly, and we’ve always anticipated that mobile may become more influential than desktops eventually. In 2017 mobiles finally took the lead and now account for more than half of all web traffic globally.
There have been a number of standards for mobile development – from clunky (and now largely defunct) mobile sites to the far more contemporary, technically, and visually elegant “responsive design.”
However, it’s not enough to just look good. Sites also need to load fast or else your visitors will get frustrated and leave. With these performance goals in mind Google, along with a number of other tech companies, introduced AMP – an open-source project to deliver Accelerated Mobile Pages.
Using a stripped-down form of HTML, Google claims that AMP optimized pages load up to 85% faster. So, if you’ve not yet optimized your web pages for mobile, the time to act is now.
4. Use Secure HTTP
Making the move to Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) for encryption has a number of benefits:
- Security and Privacy: By securing communication between users and your servers, chances of interference or damage by third parties reduce greatly. This results in a greater level of trust from both your users and from web browsers – many of which now display warnings when users navigate to non-HTTPS sites.
- Improved Ranking: By virtue of your increased trustworthiness, most sites that make the change to HTTPS can expect to see a small boost in their search rankings. You can also expect to see a larger number of referrals and traffic over time as Google is more likely to recommend secure sites in search results.
As of mid-2017, around 31% of web domains have completed the transition to HTTPS. This number is only set to rise from here as secure communication protocols increasingly become the norm across the web.
Immediately after making the switch to HTTPS, you can expect to see a dip in your website rank and search results performance. This is because of the change you make to your base URL. However, this dip will be short-lived and you should see your rank recover or even improve in short order.
5. Optimize Page Speed
As internet speeds have increased, so have the expectations of website performance from mainstream users. According to a study by Adobe, almost 40% of users will leave a website if it takes too long to load.
Thankfully there’s a lot you can do to help boost that load time, most of which can be easily implemented. Use high compression for images to significantly reduce your load time. You can even use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to help global users access your content without having to ping your domestic server.
6. Optimize for Voice Search
As part of your efforts to optimize for mobile devices, integrating better voice search functionality is a good idea. The ultimate goal of focusing on voice search is to be considered a source for a “Featured Snippet” – as Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa will read out information from these sources and often cite the source as well.
7. Use Structured Data
Website crawlers have gotten far more advanced and capable over the years. However, sometimes what is obvious to a human user is completely obscure to a machine. The result is that, occasionally, site crawlers may make errors or omit data while indexing your site. The solution, of course, is to use structured data.
Using structured data is nothing more than formatting your website’s code into a uniform layout. When search engine crawlers index your site, they will be able to pick up a richer amount of data since it was laid out in an “expected” format.
To help webmasters optimize their data, search engines have established the open source Schema.org. It has all the code conventions and standards to help structure your site and make it more “crawler-friendly.”
Roles of Social Media in Website Conversion Rates
If you use an end-to-end sales and marketing funnel, social media and conversions couldn’t be further apart. Social media is a linchpin of online awareness or initial contact with a customer, and conversion happens when you close a sale or achieve your some other conversion goal. (If you are thinking “advocacy” right now, see point #5 below).
In that way, social media’s first role in increasing conversions and/or improving conversion rates is to:
1. Create Awareness: Almost 80% of digital marketing budgets are spent on attracting new customers. And awareness is where that begins. Online, awareness comes from being found on search engines, through paid advertising, earned media and social media.
Do you have an active YouTube channel? The fact that YouTube is the second largest search engine, and the second largest social media platform (some say it’s the largest) is the “invisible elephant” in the digital marketing room.
An “elephant” because of the implications of its high ranking as a search engine, combined with social interaction and the ever-increasing popularity of visual content. “Invisible” because relatively few recognize the marketing power of that combination.
YouTube aside, the best start you can give your company on social media, to create awareness and get more people to your landing pages (and presumably more conversions) is to use the social platforms that best suit your business, make sure you have optimized account descriptions and, perhaps most importantly, keep each account active – and interactive – with relevant content and pertinent conversations.
2. Choose the Best Channels: Yes. The number of conversions you ultimately get from social media, and the value of those conversions, rely heavily on the platforms you choose. Here’s a quick example:
- 1,200,000,000 – Number of registered users on Facebook
- 80,000,000 – Number of registered users on Pinterest
- Therefore, generally speaking, you’d reach the widest audience on Facebook
- But!
- 70% of those on Pinterest use the platform “to get inspiration on what to buy” versus only 17% on Facebook who use it for the same thing
- On average, Pinners outspend Facebook users $180 to $85
- Sites like Bottica, Time Inc.’s Real Simple and Hubspot report a higher number of sales/referrals from their Pinterest channel than than their Facebook Page
Do the research, choose the right channels and boost your conversions
3. Use Social Media to Instill Trust: There’s a reason you list your privacy policy, BBB accreditation and secure transaction logo near your “Add to Cart” and/or “Checkout” buttons. Your customers, especially first-timers, don’t trust you. The trust devices you display assure them that it is OK to buy from you.
Lack of trust is a potent conversion killer.
Now, pretend you want to find conversion optimization services for your business. You’re down to your final two picks and you decide to do a little more research. They are both neck and neck, but one has an active, engaging presence on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The other has none. Which are you more likely to choose? Yes, it’s an extreme example, but you get the point.
Social Proof – Let’s do some more pretending. This time you’re at a home show looking for ideas to update your house. The show’s in a massive convention center. To save time, you look down each aisle first to see if anything catches your eye. In one aisle there’s a large crowd around a booth. And suddenly you’re heading towards it.
That crowd is social proof. Whether or not we want to admit it, we are all interested in what captures the interest of others. Social media shows the interest people have in your business and that helps to attract new social followers. And you can use point number four to get them to your site.
4. Create & Distribute Your Own Content: When you take pictures, shoot video or write blog posts about your latest installation, new product launch or grand opening, you are developing content.
When you distribute that content on most social media, it’s accompanied by a link to your site or landing page.
Read Also: Email Marketing – How to do it Right For Effective Sales Conversion
When potential or existing customers find that content, they are one click away from you.
5. Encourage Advocacy: Close the Loop on Your Marketing Funnel – Ecommerce and online lead generation offer great opportunities for you to change your marketing and sales funnel from a one-way proposition into a never-ending loop. When you close a sale or confirm a lead, you generally have enough information to engage with them post-conversion. That not only helps you bring them back (and revenue per visit for returning eCommerce customers is two to five times higher than for first-time customers), but it helps you turn them into advocates for your business.
Sort of like of unpaid, non-commissioned salespeople.
When you encourage easy social media sharing on your site, either on the product page, on your blog or post-conversion, you encourage advocacy.
Want to make it easier for customers to spread your message on social? Pre-populate the message so they only need to click one button to post it.
Conclusion
CRO doesn’t mean your positioning is all wrong. Conversion rate optimization means focusing on your customers and constantly adapting, and with all the more reason in a current scenario that demands rapid change.
Boasting high online traffic figures is a vanity of the past: what it takes now (and leads to more conversions) is to be proud of a level of traffic that brings in real customers.
Approaching and revising your CRO strategy afresh will allow you to generate value in your channels and materials, improve the shopping experience, and reduce your abandonment rates.